Prospectors is Wild West prospecting simulator game based on the EOS and WAX blockchains. The aim of the game is to earn Gold, which can then be converted into PGL. PGL is a cryptocurrency which can be exchanged for WAX and other currencies using sites like Alcor. You start with three workers who can mine for materials to sell, build tools and construct buildings to make prospecting more efficient. You can also get paid to perform these tasks for other players.
Silly names for your workers are optional.
Broadly speaking, there are three play-styles for this game:
- Nomad: your workers live free of any commitments, sending your workers from job to job, working for other players to earn gold. Jobs range from transporting, which requires no tools, to mining, gathering, building and creating. Nomads will need to ensure they get the best tools for the job, and maximise their movement speed with coffee and other speed boosts.
- Prospector: your workers mine the land for ores, gold, or other materials to sell on the open market. Prospectors who gather enough gold can rent out a plot that only they can mine on, build buildings to make mining more efficient, and pay other people's workers to mine for them.
- Business Owner: One step above a prospector, your workers operate a supply chain at a profit. For example, you might have a clay mine and use the clay to make bricks which you sell on the open market. Owning a business is incredibly profitable, but requires a lot of time commitment. This strategy is not recommended for casual players.
There is also scope for investment, by converting the gold you earn into PGL and staking it at the in-game bank. However, the interest rates are quite low - usually less than 0.1%. This strategy is not recommended, for this reason.
Is Prospectors a Viable Free-To-Play Game?
Just creating your first set of tools for a single worker takes a few days of work, and those tools only last 10 hours before they break. This can mean that you don't gather enough materials or do enough jobs with them to turn a profit. Meanwhile, purchasing tools which have a 100-hour lifetime can easily set you back 6-10k gold – something which will take you even longer to achieve by doing transporting jobs.
Ouch.
For this reason, unless you are joining an existing group of friends who will pay you high premiums or give you access to free or cheap tools, I do not consider Prospectors to be a viable free-to-play game. However, as far as pay-to-play games go, it does not take a lot of money to get going. As an example, let me explain how my first serious venture went down.
I had my sights set on building a gold mine, and chose a plot with 2.95 million gold on it. I invested $44 in PGL to start with, and that turned out to be…far, far too much. At the time, this netted me 2 million gold, of which I only needed around 350k to complete the project. That included getting certifications for my workers, renting the plot for two months, buying all of the tools and materials I needed, getting three wagons and some coffee to speed up transport and paying other people’s workers to speed up the building process. In reality, I would have been fine buying only $5 worth of PGL, and turning a profit of 2.26 million gold (after in-game conversion fees) - around $23.
Tips and Tricks
Prospectors is a lot of fun, but there is a lot of scope for mistakes and frustration, and the in game tutorials and wikis are a little unclear. With these tips under your belt, you can get ahead of the competition:
- Time is the hidden currency in Prospectors. Everything in Prospectors takes a lot of time. Mining, travel, building – everything takes hours, if not days or weeks. Don’t make moves you don’t have to. You often have to be willing (particularly at the beginning) to pay a premium to buy tools and materials that are closer to your location – you will have to pick them up yourself or pay others to bring them to you, and that costs time and money. The cheapest product on the market might have hidden costs – people in the far corners of the map tend to sell at a discount, but then you have to pay to get the product to you. It also means that you should not be afraid to hire other peoples’ workers. It might look cheaper to do everything with your three workers, but once you factor in the time it will take you, it normally will not be.
Central Yukon
- Pick a strategy, plan the strategy and stick to it: Choose a material that you are going to mine, or a product you are going to make, and stick to it like glue at the beginning. Until you have quite a lot of gold, diversifying will mean that it takes a lot of time to get your business off the ground. If you are a nomad, pick one type of job and get only the tools for that job. If you are planning to rent a plot, get all the tools and materials you need to build on it before you rent.
- Centralize your business for profit: People will pay a premium to buy goods on a central plot, such as the train station. This is for the reason I explained above - they don't want to traipse around for 4 hours to pick it up. This means that if you store your products at a central location, you can charge considerably more than the lowest market price.
- Coffee is your friend: Giving your workers coffee speeds up your movement times. As well as making it easier to snipe jobs at long distance, this will improve the efficiency of travel equipment which degrades over time, such as wagons.
Conclusion
While Prospectors can be a bit impenetrable at first, once you get going it is a lot of fun. Managing your in-game business, working out your profit margins and playing the markets really makes you feel like an old-timey businessperson. If you are willing to play it seriously, it also has the potential to generate you a small but consistent amount of passive income.
- Free to Play Score: 1/5 (not normally viable)
- Fun Score: 4/5 (great fun)
- Earnings Score: 3/5 (slow but steady)
