What's your preferred element gathering strategy?

[St1ckyBandit]

So I finally made the jump to tek a few weeks ago and am going to start building the reppy and working on getting a suit.

I understand theres quite a few ways to get ele like bosses, OSDs, farming crystals or dust etc but from what I've read the only way you can transfer ele is in dust form.

If this is true, I figured I could go to the lunar biome on Gen and load up. Also read that the sanctuary in Ext is a good spot.

So I'd like to ask the people experienced in tek , what's your preferred method/tool for gathering dust and element in general ?

[heliantha]

I'm somewhat at the same stage as you - unlocked my first tek tier engrams "by accident" when someone on my island server hosted an alpha dragon raid & I joined. The first tek things I built were the transmitter & fabricator, as quality of life upgrades, and of course the tek storage boxes.

To get the required element, I farmed the sanctuary in extinction with at doedicurus & quetzal + platform saddle. I did this during an event, where the harvesting rates were doubled. The doedi has about 600% melee, and I got between 400 and 600 dust per lamppost. This method of farming is extremely boring, but also very, very safe (you never leave the platform saddle, and just fly away if something nasty comes your way). After a while, you'll know exactly how to place to doedi & from which angle to approach the lampposts, so that the doedi immediately auto-harvests. Then you just remove the "worthless" crystal & electronics from its inventory, and fly to the next lamppost. After I got into the right rhythm, I farmed enough dust for about 200 element in very little time. (The most annoying part was transferring the stuff back to the island map.)

The problem is, with no event currently going on, I've found this method painfully slow and cant really motivate myself to farm any more dust. It might work if you watch tv or something while doing it 😉.

People on my island server generally seem very fond of dust-producing gachas. In the last 2-3 months, several of these super ugly gacha tower constructs have popped up all over the map. I personally can't comment on this method, because I have not yet had any luck with taming one, and the price for buying an element producing gacha is - surprise - more element. 🤨

[Yggdrassil]

Depends on the map, extinction and gen its far easier to just farm red crystals in volcano or element veins (best maps to craft tek). I play CI so for me i run the element nodes (~20-30 ele) and stop at an obi to run alpha (220 ele) with 19 deinos and a yuty which keeps my base going for a long time. 

[Vit0Corleone]

I'm probably at a similar stage that you are.

For me, I opted to use Extinction for Element farming for now. Doing Veins is pretty efficient for this. I'm getting about 220 element per 25k Vein ( max difficulty I can handle for now ), plus shards and dust on top of that. This on Official.

But instead of bothering too much with the transfer problem, I built instead a outpost on Extinction with everything needed to build/maintain Tek stuff there. I transfer metal from Aberration ( metal on extinction seems to be the bottleneck - at least for me ), and other stuff as needed from my main base back at the Island.

If I need element at the island, like for running tek generators etc., I do either boss fights or transfer some dust over from aberration.

Granted, maybe this isn't the best example, since I don't need tens of thousands of element, so YMMV.

 

[St1ckyBandit]

Thanks for the replies dudes.

 

I'm a solo on official, so when running the bosses there's a very real chance someone can come along and ruin my day while I'm prepping the army.

I also try to stay small and hidden.

For these reasons I think the dust route is probably my best bet seeing as I dont need tons and tons of ele.

I used to run my souped up thylo to the lunar biome to kill tek animals for electronics and could come out with 1000s in mere minutes. Thinking I could possibly adapt that strategy for dust as I'm much more familiar with the lunar biome than the sanctuary. 

 

[Ganelon]

1 hour ago, Vit0Corleone said:

I'm probably at a similar stage that you are.

For me, I opted to use Extinction for Element farming for now. Doing Veins is pretty efficient for this. I'm getting about 220 element per 25k Vein ( max difficulty I can handle for now ), plus shards and dust on top of that. This on Official.

But instead of bothering too much with the transfer problem, I built instead a outpost on Extinction with everything needed to build/maintain Tek stuff there. I transfer metal from Aberration ( metal on extinction seems to be the bottleneck - at least for me ), and other stuff as needed from my main base back at the Island.

If I need element at the island, like for running tek generators etc., I do either boss fights or transfer some dust over from aberration.

Granted, maybe this isn't the best example, since I don't need tens of thousands of element, so YMMV.

 

That's similar to what we do in my tribe(PVE).

I currently base on:

Extinction - strong element gathering. This is a Tek crafting/breeding site.

CI: easy to keep generators going with shard gathering. This is my main metal gathering site. I have a replicator here, but that is just to convert shards to element for my armor... and the occasional low level Tek items, like containers, bridges. As I load up lots of metal, I use it to make Forges and other such inventory heavy crafts.

Valguero: I farm beta boss fight for strong element gathering. This is a Tek crafting site.

I just opened up a small base on Genesis and plan to open an Aberration base this weekend. I really don't need a Tek generator on either of those as the Transmitter doesn't require power to operate.

[Thyme]

Extinction is great. If you cant handle big nodes the benches and lamps will get you enough dust for basic tek stuff (way faster than farming tek dinos). A 50k element vein you can get like 1000 element. Element gachas will produce a lot, one can easily keep your generator stocked and a skiff fueled. If you wanna build something that really guzzles element like a cloning chamber, make it on extinction.

[St1ckyBandit]

1 hour ago, Thyme said:

Extinction is great. If you can handle big nodes the benches and lamps will get you enough dust for basic tek stuff (way faster than farming tek dinos). A 50k element vein you can get like 1000 element. Element gachas will produce a lot, one can easily keep your generator stocked and a skiff fueled. If you wanna build something that really guzzles element like a cloning chamber, make it on extinction.

Hmm I might have to look into gachas. That sounds really easy and convenient to farm once you have one set up.

[Keynote378]

Check this video out about how I farm ele

 

[yekrucifixion187]

Mantis, Pick on Veins. 

Depending in your Giga it's like 15 to 20 minutes to run a 50k vein. That gets you between 400 and 600 element, 2k shards, and around 18k dust. 

Then make your tek items on Extinction. 

Transfer dust really only makes sense for Ab. There's a time argument for Rag and Center I suppose (High artifact and tribute count) but the Island bosses pays well now, Val pays well, and CI has the boss plus 2 different ways to farm (Ab way and Gen way). 

If you'd still rather transfer dust and convert then run veins and just convert 5 to 1. Will still be faster than eating tek dino's on Gen or smashing tables and lamps on Ext.