How are you supposed to Get Crystal in the Exiled Lands? None of my tools work in here?

I’ve tried every tool and i can’t for the love of me get any crystal?

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I can’t say I’ve ever had a problem gathering crystal. You can get it by hand or by hitting it with a pick. Maybe try a different cave?

I don’t remember which patch but,
gathering some things with tools was a “bug” in the eyes of FunCom
Chrystal was one of those items.
You can only gather by hand now.

Found it.

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By hand or with sorcery.

Making crystal hand gather rather than mined with a tool was a deliberate decision on the part of those who make decisions for this game.

This one also finds it both annoying and counter intuitive.
But we are playing a game where we drink sewage and bake bread in an iron smelting furnace.

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That’s… a decision. Wow… Just wow.

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Correct.

After 7 years, it was decided that gathering crystal with a pick or pickaxe was an exploit. Because, as we all know, whoever gathers the most crystal in the game, wins.

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Yeah, it’s an odd one. On the surface, it could appear that they were intending to slow down dragonpowder production (perhaps to try to shift balance in PVP). Except, Mass Cull got added to the game shortly before they changed the harvesting of crystal, so this doesn’t actually slow anything down… Hard to tell what they were going for…

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RE: Dragonpowder.

I get so much in drops any more, I no longer make it. Same with Alchemical Base.

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Yep. Dragon powder production needed regulated a bit more but with mass cull, this cat is out of the bag completely. When you can crash your local game with the amount of crystal you receive instantly from a spell, regulating manual harvesting seems like… lip service to the problem.

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Yup. Huge gripe of mine.

Farming to produce small amounts of DP is not even required. Get the drops or farm free raid materials at Al M-something.

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X4 for like 2 years AND multiple dupes.

I don’t know if the intention was to regulate DP; although it’s commonly thought of as that. But even so, why punish everyone for poor server settings and exploits missed in QA?

And ya, 1020 ping mass cull crystal runs XD

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For what it’s worth - that --IS-- the spot in the Exiled Lands for the best haul using Sorcery Mass Cull. I am still trying to find the best spot in the Siptah map. There are a lot of places with crystal in Isle of Siptah. But none seem to be the proverbial “money shot” like the place you have pictured in Exiled Lands.

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Let’s be honest, are we farming crystal or are we farming Dragonpowder?
There are a few routes on Siptah that are rubbish for crystal, but very good for Dragonpowder.

Crystal, in this fantasy world, is used for many many recipes.
In it’s raw form, it is used for Dragon Powder, Map Rooms, several placeables, magic wands, radium gems, ect…
But it can also be processed down to both Glass and Salt.
Glass is useful for bottles, but also furniture. Altho some things one might expect to be made from glass ste instead raw crystal (alchemical decor, including flasks and alembics)
Salt is good for extremely basic food with a decent stat buff.

So the question is, what are they trying to bottleneck?

This one also would note that, on Siptah, near the lay shrines, there are numerous crystals just sitting on the ground. Those should be hand gathered and it makes sense not to use a pick.
But the large crystals growing out of the walls, those should require tools to remove. That’s just personal mining/rock hounding experience.
But we also drink sewage happily, but start dying if steaks are blue or oysters are fresh, so meh?

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I can’t really say I’m shocked or surprised that they fixed the exploit. And others really shouldn’t be either. Honestly the way we picked crystal was pretty sketchy to begin with. Most crystal couldn’t even be picked unless you did this sort of crouch while swinging.

Most didn’t even know you could do that, unless they were in some random mod or server discord and asking about sources of crystal and someone was gracious enough to share that technique with them.

But as always, Cull Resources was the best method of getting 7-10k crystal in one shot.

I have never had an issue with mining crystal prior to the change. There was a period where you had to do a crouch swing to get mushrooms, but that was fixed.

If mining crystal is an exploit, so is mining anything.

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Are you going to stop mining? I bet you won’t.

If you’re on a PvE server on the exiled lands i recommend going to the salt flats/brimstone lake and doing a brimstone run. Several Rocknoses made of crystal spawn there, which has supplied me with more crystal than i know what to do with.

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LOL!

No, I won’t stop playing within the established ruleset.

Mining crystal was in the established ruleset for 7 years.

I guess I am missing the point you are tyring to make.

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That is a good solution.

Mine is to farm T2 bearers. They will drop, anywhere from 250 to 1K crystals, on RNG.

The point is, mining crystal with a pick was this weird glitchy thing that for some reason didn’t have an outcry to be ‘fixed’. When you mined crystal in that way, more often than not, the node wouldn’t disappear. It would if you picked it by hand. But if it was hit by a pick, it would be a phantom node. Meaning if you hit it with a pick, nothing would happen. If you used your hand (no tool) it would disappear. But no crystal or resources happened.

I suspect there wasn’t said outcry (for seven years) because most players didn’t even know you could do that. The first time many encounter crystal it is in a cave or part of a caver where the crystal is on the ground. A pick won’t natively pick that up. You have to do the pick-crouch moveset I mentioned. Seeing as the pick wasn’t connecting, they use their hand and move on.

Those of us a little more persistent will find that the crystal on the walls of a certain height can be picked. And those of us who are a bit more clever may attempt the crouch thing on some more of the crystal. Of course we also found this worked on branches with an axe, brimestone, gold on Siptah, and various other pieces the change affected.

Those of us in the know, and with a finesse that wasn’t intended had an interesting advantage over those who didn’t. For example, in the Savage Wilds map, you can double the amount of brimestone you pick up by this method by going to the volcanic spring in the middle of the map. Or rather you could.

Using a very weird looking and unintuitive way of mining. Before this change, you could mine at your feet by using a pick and while mid swing, crouching. I did quite a bit of testing on the subject and was able to forward the results of such as feedback. Not claiming credit (nor blame) for the change as that feedback was given some time before April. So who knows if it was listened to or not. The idea was for the nodes to work like regular nodes. Guess they decided they needed to be different for their own internal reasons. Oh well, its their game.

But at the end of the day we have Cull Resources. Which saves on pick repairs, and our wrists. I’ve been known to go in there for about 10-20k crystal in a go and not even for Dragonpowder. Gathering that much by pick or hand just ain’t worth the effort. So sorcery it is.

As for things working for 7 years and shouldn’t be changed. Well I’ve seen games change things after 20 years. So…