I am looking for a way to grind tedious resources like wood and stone faster, but I’m not sure if oil of bounty actually saves time or not. It costs 2 fragments of power in the good alchemy bench, and then fully destroys the tool after a timer.
If I were to apply it to starmetal tools the timer would be really short, hence I need a lot of fragments of power to keep applying it. If I were to use it on black blood tools, the tools would quickly break and I need to farm new black blood tools constantly.
What is your suggestion for maximizing the harvesting efficiency?
There’s a couple of routes you can take for maximum yield depending on how you want to do it and how much material you wish to spend.
The cheapest and easiest is obviously just use Star Metal with a tool kit and just carry a few star metal bars and shaped wood to repair on the fly. You’ll get around 17-18 per hit. This is probably the ‘slowest’ but also the most efficient over a long time since you are literally only capped by inventory space if using Beast of Burden. You’ll be able to stay out and gather until you literally cannot fit anymore wood or stone. Which will be over 200,000 of said material.
If absolute volume isn’t needed but pure speed. Then you can go with a more expensive route. I haven’t personally used an oil in a while, and they used to give a 50% yield on tool. According to wiki its +9. Instead of using Black Blood tools you can use star metal again for a bit more efficiency. You can even carry multiple oils and the star metal and shaped wood to repair (oil doesn’t destroy the tool just heavily damages it). This will give you 23-24 per hit. This will let you hit inventory cap a bit faster. But obviously you want to be swimming in fragments.
As far as using Black Blood tools, I do think oils make their use a bit more efficient. But you have to preplan the route and make sure the are you wish to mine or cut down is free from competition. You don’t want any delays. Given their dropped nature you do want the best bang for your buck. Last time I used an oil on something like that I was doing so for stuff a bit more valuable than stone or wood.
The nice thing about the oil of bounty is that the timer only ticks while you’re holding the tool. The way I use it is to have two tools, one with oil and one without. Equip both in your hotbar and use the tool without oil on single resource nodes, and switch to the one with the oil when you’re harvesting clustered resource nodes, i.e. in places where you can hit 3+ nodes at the same time.
One of the places where this gives you the best results is when mining stone in the abandoned silver mine.
EDIT: @erjoh made an excellent point about game modes and harvesting rates. My preferred mode is PVE-C, so take anything I say in that context
Oils for these materials are not the way to go anymore.
When black blood tools could be repaired then yes, but now no!
Don’t get me wrong but why a star metal pickaxe with advanced tool upgrade and efficient harvest with hardworking perks are not fast enough?
In a couple of hours you can fill your inventory with stones and the cost is some star metal bars and some shaped wood only. How much faster and cheaper do you want it to be?
For what is worth oil is good for demon blood or dragon bones or whatever else you don’t need hours to harvest or many hits.
Please note that type of play matters. Pvp vs PvE since the harvesting rates are different. I don’t see the real need for oil or bounty in pvp because of the harvesting rate and mat required adjustments. I can see it for PvE but that only because I’m a bit impatient with those 1x gather rates
Yet in pve there’s no way to loose your materials in a snap of fingers, so practically even without oils you’ll have tons of everything stored in chests doing just your life miserable.
In pvp servers however, especially some private over populated, that materials are always harvested oils can be crucial on star metal and brimstone.
But surely their use is less desirable to almost useless the last couple years.
Oil of bounty was pretty much end game required on PVP servers back when x1 was normal for sure.
I haven’t really used it since but that isn’t necessarily because of the x4 and x2 respectively. I can’t have a playthrough on PC Officials without cheaters ruining everything.
Not really sure for what official servers this applies to. PVP very probable, for PVE, unlikely.
After 2000h on EU based official PVE and PVE Conflict servers I have yet to encounter cheaters “interfering” with me playing. Lots of other problems, yes… cheaters, not so much. Especially none that conflicted with me playing.
The incident with that Blue Powerranger was the first I heard that swapped over to PVE.
It’s true that EU servers had never the issues that US and LATAM had generally. That’s because most of the times EU servers are under populated or not massive builded like the other 2 regions. Don’t forget that Conan exiles made most of the costumers from Germany and France, to the other EU countries was not so popular. The third most populated country must be Russia in Europe but that’s it, the rest are few, very few. I participated to multiple French pvp servers in the past, multiple, but mostly privates.
Cheats? Just a few but i am console player and the cheats was mostly frim Admins .
On pc however i do remember a German pvp legend getting banned, so Kiki must be right.
Honestly? I’ve never used it and got along just fine. I typically switch up my build and farm for an hour or so with star metal. Early on, the cost of the oils is a bit high. Two fragments and 10 oil was something I wasn’t willing to give up so easily as I burned through oil quite often and fragments were used in other stuff. However, since fragments have been removed from most recipes these days, I suppose it’s a bit more lucrative. That being said, I don’t consider many things to require the oils. Only things I’d suggest MIGHT be star metal or raw ash… though raw ash got removed from a lot of recipes as well… so maybe just star metal? Idk. I don’t use it. I think it’s a waste of time and effort, but can be good if you’re rolling in materials and consider it… but at that point? Who cares?
Why not obsidian tools instead of starmetal. According to the wiki obsidian tools have +2 harvesting power over starmetal (I think this wasn’t the case in the past though), and only slightly less durability. I just bring one of each obsidian tool with me and repair it with kits.
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