Is there any difference between a sentinal multitool and a staff

[mystikmind2005]

Hi
So i got a sentinal multitool from autophage camp, its pretty good, but i been trying forever to get one with 3 supercharged slots together, but it just never happens.

I did however manage to make a staff that has 3 supercharged slots together, but here is the thing.... i had an earlier staff with 2 and 2 supercharged slots together, i thought that was ideal, but in practice it was not that impressive at all and i scrapped it.

Because of that, i have not even bothered trying to set up this new staff... but is there an actual reason the staff is weak, or is it just that i did not set it up right and i have a wrong impression now?

[Chirico Cuvie]

I focused my staff on setting up neutron cannon. Offers significant damage and I can also use it to mine. Because it has radius damage, you can easily mine an area with resources like a patch of chrystal minerals with one shot instead of aiming a mining laser one at a time.

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by Damian1503:

As for the mining no matter how good a multi-tool is it will never outmine any exocraft with some S-class upgrades..

While that is true if all you are measuring is pure speed of destruction when mining, when you are mining things where you care about how much of the resource you get, then the multi-tool beats all exocraft. The optical drill, especially when supercharged, being the main reason for that. Exocraft have no corresponding technology.

Given that you generally won't be mining unless you are actually after the resources being mined, using exocraft is actually counter-productive. Sure, it will 'destroy' the items you are mining more quickly, but you'll need to mine substantially more things to get the same quantity of resources. So you haven't actually saved any time.

Additionally, if it's a limited availability resource, such as Curious mould, you would have to waste even more time moving away and back (or whatever reset method you want to use) in order to get the same amount of nanites using an exocraft to mine vs. a multi-tool.

Basically the only resource where using an exocraft is actually advantageous is when mining something like Floating Crystals, because they give only 1 resource per crystal no matter what.

The only other time an exocraft will truly be faster is if you don't care what you get and just want to mass gather resources by strafing the surface. At which point the exocraft again is not the best choice. Hopping in your starship and strafing the surface with it is.

[~T~D~]

My best staff has 48k dmg if i remember correctly.

[dreamrider]

Originally posted by mystikmind2005:

Originally posted by claytruck:

assuming you're talking about damage, yes, sentinal and staff are tied for highest damage

Cool... the other consideration is mining speed, specifically for runnaway mould.... however in my current game i do not really need to mine anymore, but for future reference?

I hope you realize that Curious Mould is NOT the fastest route to get nanites.

The most convenient nanite accumulators I have found are:
- Fight Sentinel space battle. When the Sentinel mothership comes in, disable Shields and turrets, but don't destroy it; let it continue to call in minor waves of Interceptors. Farm/kill Interceptors to collect Hyaline Brains.
Refine 1x Hyaline Brain => 260 nanites
- on Dissonant planet, disable Sentinels. Collect Atlanteum. Refine into Pugneum.
Refine 25x Pugneum => 1 nanite (but it is FAST.)
- Fight wave battles at buildings. I find Minor Settlements are best, but Archives can be pretty good, too. Most dead Sentinels / Glass yields at least some Pugneum; Healers and Summoners yield a lot of Pugneum.
Refine 25x Pugneum => 1 nanite.
Any Sentinel modules from Glass can be sold for nanites.
- Max your rep with one or more Guilds. Do a teleporter Grand Tour between Guild Envoys, collecting free/cheap A & S modules.
Sell modules at any vendor for nanites: hundreds of nanites if module is unused.
- Surprisingly enough, cooking up certain dishes and selling them to Cronos is less tedious, to me, than Mould Farming.
50x (stack) of, oh, Mystery Meat Stew is about 3000-3500+ nanites.

[Damian1503]

For most resources the range advantage the exocraft provides is more than enough to overcome optical drill bonus. And for things like radiant shards exocraft simply has no competition at all. Basically if you see it you can mine it from miles away and you don't even acknowledge existence of sentinels trying to defend their resources. You are mining elsewhere before they even know what's going on.

Optical drill might be the exception to be more effective for the runaway mould, but farming nanites this way is still pretty early game stuff or during expeditions, because once you get your race standings to 100 and have a 50% discount on the upgrades, buying out one station worth of tech and selling them back is like free 5k nanites in less than a minute including a teleport to the next station. No need to build a refiner cluster in your freighter or wait 20 mins for the mould to process. And the mining time adds too even if you do it the most optimized way. Most other resources late game you already have in thousands or at least multiple stacks if survival/perma and the mk2 refiner provides whatever you temporarily need very quickly too.

I still don't see a need to spend a lot of time to find and upgrade a dedicated multi-tool for mining, at least for myself. That of course depends on the way you like to play, mining can be satisfying just for the sake of doing it.

[mystikmind2005]

nothings easier than runnaway mould for nanites in my view. The simple reason being, that i got my bases set up next to them, so when i am passing by doing other things, i always just spend a few seconds to grab it..... but, i will concede 1 point, refiners are a bit time consuming, and always having 4 mould left over that i then have to waste time moving, yeah, its a bit annoying.,...

Oh yeah, i got to put that on my annoying list.... i am making a list of all the annoying by design things in the game (not bugs), and refiners having 4 mould left over is definitely annoying.

[Shadow Strider]

Originally posted by mystikmind2005:

nothings easier than runnaway mould for nanites in my view. The simple reason being, that i got my bases set up next to them, so when i am passing by doing other things, i always just spend a few seconds to grab it..... but, i will concede 1 point, refiners are a bit time consuming, and always having 4 mould left over that i then have to waste time moving, yeah, its a bit annoying.,...

Oh yeah, i got to put that on my annoying list.... i am making a list of all the annoying by design things in the game (not bugs), and refiners having 4 mould left over is definitely annoying.

Have you tried using pirate systems for buying suspicious packets (arms and tech) and selling the tech upgrades they contain?
They are easier and faster to gather than mould, and require no refining at all...

[Dragonfly42]

Originally posted by maestro:

A staff can have anywhere between 25% and 50% bonus to damage.

That's why one staff might seem weaker than another staff, and to be honest, such a huge RNG spread is kind of ridiculous.

I loathe the thought of putting in all the work to get a staff, then finally get an S-rank staff, only to find out it's got 25-30% bonus instead of 50.

The numbers should just be set in stone for S rank, because it's hard enough to get one, and one with good supercharge slots, instead of having to farm the stupid things until you get a 50% with supercharge slots together.

Now, granted there's no reason why you NEED adjacent SC slots and a max damage bonus, but people will want "The Best" anyway.

EDIT: Or how about an even better thing? Let us go through a procedure to move SC slots around and also to upgrade the item's base stats through some kind of process. Don't just make us dump nanites, that's boring. Make it an actual quest, make it an NPC that wants materials that you have to go out and find. Maybe if you want damage on a weapon, he tells you to go out and kill some sentinels to get 10 sentinel weapon scraps which only drop if you have the quest on you. Or if you want to upgrade its mining potential, he sends you to a planet to mine a special kind of rock which you can only do while the quest is active.

Great Idea to let us change slots! Wonder if there is a mod that gives max bonus for each class.

[ICountFrom0]

Something I'm always trying to figure out in a topic like this.

If you want the most mining, you do an atlantid with both mining lasers on it, as close to a 50 base as you can get, specially if it's in a cluster of supercharges. Because it's damage is so low, give it a shotgun so you get off a few shots and then use a hotkey to change weapons to something more deadly.

Sentinal, be it staff, or Rifle takes your weapon, 4 supercharges are key, right? Easily holds everything you need to crank one weapon type to the limit, maybe you'd put a fishing rod on it too, so you can fish, and shoot, and go back to fishing. ... you COULD, if it's rifle, do the double mining trick, but that won't get it even close to being a daily driver, so don't bother.

Grab yourself a royal with good scanning, and you can toss the rest of the junk on here. It's always amusing to have a maxed out royal, and it looks good. With luck you can toss the other weapon types you don't use on here, if only a place to store the X ranks that you've collected over the years incase you ever want to switch out the weapon on your sentinal?


So, the big question. Atlas staff, only staff with the lens, but it's not a quad square, so it's never going to max out on damage, and even though you can double mine with it, it aint going to be even close to good there either. Purely decorative, and everybody will be able to grab one when it goes redux this year it looks like. Really nothing good here, right?

[ICountFrom0]

Originally posted by No Man's Sky Resources:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3361309629

Oh, and about this, there's a weapon terminal on the Anomoly.
If you go there before anywhere else, or save and load on it, there's a weapon in it.
Does this mean the anomoly ALSO has a contributable weapon pool, or does it replicate the space station like a save and load on your freighter does?

[ICountFrom0]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

Originally posted by mystikmind2005:

The royal looks good for scanning and mining, but does it really do better on mining when the sentinal multitool has that special mining laser??

It does not. Sentinel multitool with the double mining laser, or a staff that has a runic lens, are tied for the 'fastest' multi-tools for mining as well. Even Atlantid with it's great mining bonus doesn't beat them. Damage bonus helps mining just as much.

what about atlantid with it's bonus AND you do the double mining laser?


Course, you'd need a runic staff, that somehow had the lens, a random chance, had 4 slots together, had 50 damage bonus, AND near max mining bonus... AND you'd have to choose not to use that for a weapon?

[Jaggid Edje]

Originally posted by ICountFrom0:

what about atlantid with it's bonus AND you do the double mining laser?


Course, you'd need a runic staff, that somehow had the lens, a random chance, had 4 slots together, had 50 damage bonus, AND near max mining bonus... AND you'd have to choose not to use that for a weapon?

Doesn't matter because a damage bonus is more effective for mining speeds than then mining bonus. Sentinel multi-tools and Staves with a runic lens both also have double mining lasers, and they have a damage bonus that is as good as the atlantid's mining bonus.

The end result is that if you have a sentinel multi-tool or a staff with a runic lens that is at the max-end of the potential damage bonus it will outperform the atlantid's that is at the max-end of the mining bonus.

I regularly use a stop watch to time the clear time of large curious mould and metal finger clusters to compare whether the mining bonus or damage bonus makes a bigger difference and right now it's still the damage bonus that helps the most. That's been true for quite a few years now (though it wasn't always the case).

Regarding that last point, you don't really have to make the choice between having it be a mining multi-tool rather than a weapon. If you get a great sentinel multi-tool like that, or a staff, you can make yourself copies of it via the expedition terminal and use it for both.

Though the whole 4 supercharge slots right next to each other is not really necessary. Adjacency bonuses are pretty negligible in terms of their impact on mining speed.

[SapienChavez]

Originally posted by mystikmind2005:

Originally posted by claytruck:

assuming you're talking about damage, yes, sentinal and staff are tied for highest damage

Cool... the other consideration is mining speed, specifically for runnaway mould.... however in my current game i do not really need to mine anymore, but for future reference?

I want to do more testing on this, but faster mining seems to yield less mold. At this point, its anecdotal and only an "observation" but enough for a hypothesis...

I have a massive mold farm (28 or so balls) that yields about 2500 mold. 2 1/2 stacks. I usually use a Royal tool for mining.

I upgraded a fancy new Sentinel tool with better mining and put better/faster X mods in it and only got like 1900 (less than two full stacks). Ran it a couple times and just said, nope.

my quick conclusion is that mining speed hurts output. needs testing (if others have not already)

[ICountFrom0]

Given that you can easily do double laser on the sentinal rifle, a high stat one of them with some good clustering would do for mining duty.
A lens equiped staff gives you a free cloak, but adds one more random factor to the system, and there's a lot of perfect stat ones already found out there, so make that the main attacker.

A good royal just becomes storage space, but at least it looks good.

Anybody disagree with putting a fishing rod on the primary weapon?

[mystikmind2005]

Originally posted by ICountFrom0:

Given that you can easily do double laser on the sentinal rifle, a high stat one of them with some good clustering would do for mining duty.
A lens equiped staff gives you a free cloak, but adds one more random factor to the system, and there's a lot of perfect stat ones already found out there, so make that the main attacker.

A good royal just becomes storage space, but at least it looks good.

Anybody disagree with putting a fishing rod on the primary weapon?

Definitely a NO if your relying on G (as i do)... if you have setup shortcut keys, if that's even possible?, then it should be no problem at all.