Counting resource nodes

Resources are important to crafting items used in LOTRO. The ease or difficulty of acquiring specific resources can have a significant effect on game play and the game economy.

Update 12 added a new tier to crafting and resources. Similar to lower tiers, there were three classes of resources: skarn, wood, and scholar. Because I do not have a level-cap scholar, I focused on skarn and wood. The skarn is called Eorlingas Skarn, and the wood is Walnut Branches.

I have captured data for almost 3,000 nodes so far. I turn on chat logging while gathering resources, then process the log file to get the results. The numbers can give you an idea how things work, but are approximate. Especially for rarer events, many more measurements would be needed to have confidence in the values. These measurements have been done on the T9 Westemnet resources. Although I would expect things to be similar on lower tiers, the specific amounts and probabilities may well be different, and I have not measured them.

A node provides some amount of the basic resource plus, with some probability, additional resources. The additional resources may have specific purposes, such as emeralds for jewelers or walnuts for scholars to make dyes, or may be used to improve the crit chances for recipes, such as high-grade skarn or sapwood branches.

Resource nodes spawn according to some plan by the developers. For example, there are six scholar node locations outside the entrance to Aldburg. At any time, two of those six will be active. The Fangorn resource instances generally have 20-25 nodes active.

On the landscape, as well as in the resource instances, about 10% of the nodes are rich or heavy. Those nodes provide more of the basic resource, and a higher chance for the additional resources. Eorlingas Skarn and Walnut Branches provide the same distribution for the basic resource. Normal nodes provide either 1, 2, or 3 chunks or logs, and the rich/heavy nodes provide either 4, 5, or 6. The distribution is such that the average normal node produces 1.9 and the average rich/heavy node produces 4.9, yielding an overall average of 2.25 of the basic resource per node.

The additional resources are independent. From a wood node, you may get a sapwood branch or a walnut or both or neither.

The situation is similar for skarn nodes.

The number that people have been most interested in (and my original motivation for collecting the data) is the rate of occurrence for Emerald Shards. Since an Emerald Shard is needed for high-level crafting, espectially for making Legendary Items, the demand for them was immediate and substantial when they were introduced in Update 12.  This table shows the approximate average number of nodes to find an emerald shard in skarn and wood nodes.

The low initial rate in Update 12 was increased by a factor of 4 in Update 12.1. This rate remained the same in Update 13, which added resource instances. At that time, both landscape and resource instances had the same rate. Perhaps because the resource instances provided easy access to a number of nodes, in Update 13.1, that rate was lowered both for landscape and resource instance nodes. The rate in resource instances was set to be about half that of landscape nodes.

Some other things that are suggested by the data I collected:

• The quality of the tools does not affect the results. Although Apprentice tools are much slower than Westemnet tools, they produced the same distribution of resources and the same rate for Emerald Shards.
• For skarn nodes, the rate seems to be the same whether normal or rich. About 10% of the shards from skarn nodes came from rich nodes.
• For wood nodes, the rate seems higher for heavy and lower for normal. Almost half the shards from wood nodes came from heavy nodes.

Because these things are determined by random number generators, it is possible to see very different results on any particular day. I recently went over 350 nodes (more than a week of doing both instances every day) between shards in the resource instances. When the rate was lower, I got another shard two nodes after finding one.

by Michaleo on 2014-06-02 04:01:48