Why Do I Feel Poor? A Guide To Logging Farming Data

Hi everyone!

Quick preface: this 'guide' is by no means revolutionary. A lot of players are probably already doing this, but plenty still seem to be struggling with misinformation about their farming.
Furthermore, I'm not saying you have to track your income to get rich. There are plenty of wealthy players who don't track their farming. I'm merely saying this is how people are getting those numbers you see going around everywhere.

I. Introduction

This thread was written for two main reasons. The first of which is that, while there has been an increasing number of people experimenting and finding their own maps to farm, there is still a vast majority that just asks "What's the highest ev map for my char?" and blindly farms that map. Secondly, I've seen or participated in a lot of discussions where someone felt like they were getting significantly lower income from farming a map than what others reported. Quite often, this discussion ended with "Oh, you guys track <whatever> as well?".
I think both these points either indicate or contribute to a difficult spot for new players to find their way around the game.

With this thread, I hope to teach newer players how to go about A) tracking their loot in a way that gives an accurate representation of income, and B) using this approach to find their own maps to farm. After all, there's a lot more than ulu2/viks/multimage, and the best strategy to make meso is one that's sustainable for you.

II. Tracking Your Income

First, I'll briefly dive into how exactly you could (not should, there's plenty of ways) track your loot. If you're not getting this done at least somewhat accurately, you're not going to have an accurate representation of your hourly income.

A. Recording important data

There are two main things to be on the lookout for when tracking your income from farming:
1. Time spent farming
This essentially speaks for itself. If you're not dividing your income by time spent getting it, you won't have an idea of the hourly income.
2. Meso and item drops
While this also seems like an open door, a lot of people tend to overlook certain items when farming. When you're farming ulu2, don't just track meso + 51/7 cravens. There's heaps more to profit from and the numbers really add up. I'll go over some more specific examples further down this thread.

B. Creating a simple income tracking system

Alright, so now we know what to look out for! How do we go about actually keeping track of these things? While there are various ways, I'll use Excel/Google Sheets as an example. Sheets can be very efficient when tracking income, since it can do most of the work for you. No more tedious subtracting, dividing, or multiplying. You just enter the numbers and the sheet does the work for you!

1. Before and after
First things first, you'll need to record your starting point. You can either do this by completely clearing your inventory of the items you'll be looting, or simply writing down how much of each item/meso you have before your grinding session.

Let's take Ulu2 as an example here. If we go to the library page, we see that Ulu2 has 2 mobs: Veetron and Slygie. Let's go over the drops for both:

Veetron:

Spoiler

- Equips
- White Pots & Mana Elixir
- Power Elixir
- Shield def 60, Pet Eq. Jump 60
- Veetron Horn
- Luk Crystal Ore
- The Summoning Rock
- Adamantium Ore
- Amethyst Ore

Slygie:

Spoiler

- Equips
- Power Elixir
- Overall Armor for Luk 60, Shoes for Avoid 60, 1h Sword att 10
- Slygie Tail
- Dex Crystal Ore
- The Summoning Rock
- Steel Ore
- Garnet Ore

That's a lot of drops! Recording all of those sounds like a huge chore. Thankfully, we can do some work beforehand to see whether we can eliminate some of these items.

For this example, I'll do the work for you by owling every item on the list. (Note: the more experienced you are, the more likely you are to have a grasp of whether items are worth recording. Clear examples here are the Garnet Ore, Amethyst Ore, and Adamantium Ore.

Price List:

Spoiler

- Power Elixir - 7k
- Shield def 60 - 10k on a good day
- Pet Eq. Jump 60 - 100k on a good day
- Luk Crystal Ore - 15k
- The Summoning Rock - 8k
- Overall Armor for Luk 60 - 250k
- Shoes for Avoid 60 - 50k on a good day
- 1h Sword att 10 - 10k on a good day
- Dex Crystal Ore - 15k
- Steel Ore - 10k

I've left out the aforementioned ores, white pots, mana elixirs, and etcs, as these go for little to no meso and will realistically be sold to an NPC. The pots can definitely be added to your sheet, but note them at the price you sell them to an NPC for. (Most) equips also fall in this category, so I don't list them individually.

Looking at the numbers, there are some more items we can eliminate. The scrolls (aside from oa luk 60) are barely going to contribute to our income, so we can leave them out. Yes, the ores/summ. rocks/power elixirs also sell for a low price each, but you'll get significantly more of those on an hourly basis, making them worth selling.

Finally, a notable chunk of your income is going to come from Red Cravens. If you're unfamiliar with the prices of the equips you'll be looting, I suggest owling each of the equips to see if any of them get sold for more than NPC price. I already happen to know which equips fetch good meso, so I'll add those to the list separately.
The resulting list:

Spoiler

- Red Pirate Top (2/6) - 1m
- Red Pirate Pants (2/4) - 2m
- 51/7 Red Craven - 18m
- 1-2 off perf Red Craven - 2-4m
- Power Elixir - 7k
- Luk Crystal Ore - 15k
- Overall Armor for Luk 60 - 250k
- Dex Crystal Ore - 15k
- Steel Ore - 10k

(If you disagree with these numbers, that's perfectly fine. Note them down at whatever value you think you'll realistically be selling them for.)

These are the items that I'll be writing down my current quantities of before I start farming.

2. Spreadsheet layouts
Below is a layout that I use for essentially all my farming and logging:

Spoiler

- Each row corresponds to a farming session. I note the date & time spent farming (I log it in minutes, feel free to use hours or whatever floats your boat)
- In each subsequent column, I'll note down the number of each corresponding item/meso I got during that farming session.
- To calculate the value for the 'Equips' column, I npc all equips (aside from Red Pirate Top/Bot and Red Craven) and note down the amount of meso I got from NPCing.
- The top row (Row 2) merely sums each column to give me an overview of how much I've farmed across all farming sessions summed.
- The row below that (Row 3) multiplies the quantity of obtained items by their respective prices. E.g. cell E3 contains a multiplication of E2 * (Price of Power Elixir), and so on. If there are any questions on how to create a sheet like this, I'll gladly make another thread going into the specifics. There are, however, multiple people in this community that far outdo me when it comes to Excel knowledge.
- Finally, log your gach. Or at least, be aware of the fact that a lot of other people definitely do log and value their gach. Given the fairly high estimated value per gachapon ticket, this can significantly impact the recorded hourly income.
Additionally, I used the cells shown below to track Cravens (I didn't track red pirate top/bot at the time. Oh, the irony of this thread.)


This is honestly all you need to get started!


III. Analyzing the Data

Now that we've got some data on our farming, it's time to have a look at what exactly we're dealing with. We'll continue to use Ulu2 for this example, as I had an old sheet laying around. (Note: That means this sheet relies on old prices, some numbers might not correspond to what I owled in the previous section)

Spoiler: Sheet after farming

A. The Real Important Math
Alright, so we've logged a couple of (admittedly very short) farming sessions. There's still a lot of numbers, though, how do we simplify this to a simple "x meso per hour"?

That's where we'll need to fill in a few extra cells with some math.
- Total Meso: This cell is a summation of the third row summations we went over earlier, added to the total value I made from Cravens.
- Hours Logged: This speaks for itself, it's (minutes logged/60).
- Meso/hr: (Total Meso / Hours Logged.)

Voila! Over the logged 10 hours, Ulu2 has yielded almost exactly 17.5m/hr.
The point of this little mental gymnastic wasn't to demonstrate my own amazing cool income, but more so the various factors that contribute to this final number. As you can see, I got 7m from just npcing the etcs. It's not necessarily a huge payout, but that does contribute 700k on an hourly basis. Gach also contributed 6m/hr. Someone who isn't tracking those items will find themselves 'only' earning 12m/hr from Ulu2.

B. Finding your own maps

Now that you've gone through this process for one map, you can repeat these steps for future maps to figure out what works best for you! But how do you go about figuring out what maps to try next?

1. Identifying high-yield items
Good maps are good for at least one of three reasons:
- High density (resulting in a high number of mobs killed per hour)
- High meso drops
- The mobs dropping valuable items

Figuring out which maps shine can be done through a combination of:
- Owling to discover which items are valuable
- Using the library to figure out which mobs drop said valuable items.
- Trying out the resulting maps to see whether the droprates result in good hourly results.

2. Knowing your infrastructure
Every class is different. Some are great at farming (mages, shadowers, sairs) while others are traditionally seen as worse for farming (bowmasters, arguably warriors). But it's not necessarily so clear-cut. Night Lords, for example, aren't great at farming tanky mobs because their mobbing skill is subpar, but they do excellent at weaker mobs because of their high mobility. Try out what works best for you.

IV. Comparing to Others

Hopefully you've worked out some numbers at this point. Now what do we do? Your logs are only as accurate as the amount of hours you've put in. Scaling this up to spending dozens of hours on multiple different maps isn't a realistic option for some of the players here (myself included).
How do we resolve this? Through the magic of crowdsourcing!

A. Talking to others
1. Don't be lazy
There's a lot to be gained from talking to other people to see where they're making their money. However, your mileage may vary if you just go around dming people for their trade secrets. A more sustainable approach would be exchanging data with a likeminded individual. I've personally shared my logs with various people, which led to them trusting me with some of their logs. In doing so, we've helped each other build up a larger knowledge base with regards to good maps to farm.

B. Critical thinking

1. How are they tracking/valuing their income?
It can be frustrating if your logged income turns out significantly lower than what others are reporting. However, be critical when looking at these numbers. There's multiple factors that could cause the discrepancy:
- How are they valuing their income?
Are they tracking gach or ignoring it? Are they valuing certain items notably higher than you are? Are they tracking certain items that you aren't?
- Are they simply getting more kills per hour?
A reliable way to track this is by looking at meso/hr. This is the least RNG-dependent factor. If they're looting significantly more raw meso per hour than you are, you might not have an optimal rotation. Perhaps they're just using a different class than you are!
- Are they just misinformed?
Perhaps they've only very briefly logged their farming on a certain map. Maybe they haven't actually logged anything and are they just regurgitating numbers they've heard 'from a friend'? (Trust me bro)

V. Conclusion

So, with that all said and done, let's review.
Getting an accurate representation of your hourly income doesn't have to be a tedious or difficult process. Logging your drops can be done very quickly and calculating the final totals can mostly be automated if you do some owling while designing your sheet.
Don't be scared to rely on others to gain an indication of how much a map can generate. However, don't expect to get free information left and right.
Finally, don't blindly believe the numbers someone else is telling you. Critical thinking goes a long way when comparing yourself to others (if you even want to do so).

Thanks for reading!!!

VI. Additional Resources

I've linked some threads below with great examples of people tracking their incomes in a variety of ways (and a thread of my own that wasn't necessarily all that brilliant, but does contain a lot of logging).

Moomins' Skele Leech Guide
kiwiz Leisure Journey of Refinements
Ainz Progresses a Poor Ranged Attacker
raysinz5 My Glove Journal
Shivering's Ulu1/Cornian Journal
akashsky Meso Journal
fartsy Postmodern Dark Knight Guide

 

You're just upset I forgot to link your thread (for which I apologize, fixing it now)

 

Also a good approach! I was going to raise the counterpoint that eph is reliant on hs/party composition, but I suppose meso is also reliant on party composition. Meso is easier to calculate, however, since you just multiply it by the number of party members. (e.g. if I'm farming in a total party of 5 and I've looted 1m on my farmer/sweeper, I've made 5m raw meso in total, or however many of the 5 chars were mine)