Mining #10 - Bonus Refinery

It is a good idea to always have at least 150k (450k is better) raw of each material (Ore, Gas, Crystal) in the event that a Bonus Refinery occurs. This is a rather special event on the server, and usually coincides around a special event (holiday, or after server crash compensation). Based on history, the Bonus refine is usually a 1 day event, but occasionally is 2 days. This shows up in the Refinery Tab, with a Pre-Cool Down timer showing when it will start, and how long it will last. Once you start refining, the cool down is 10 hours, so you can get in 3 for a 1 Day Bonus, and 5 on a 2 Day Bonus. 

*Prime Refine has no effect on Bonus Refine*

The type of resources vary by level, and it is still governed by random chance, but there are no Common Materials in a Bonus Refine batch, only Uncommon and Rare. This will usually produce a good yield of materials, especially if you have recently moved up in Ops Level (see data below for explanation):

For math nerds, this is from Maztec (Server-32):
The refinery basically operates as a random number generator between FLOOR and MAX. Where MAX = [ f(Ops / ( log(To) )) + f(R&D / ( log(Trd) )) + f(Ref / ( log(Tr) )) - f(PeriodicCap - PeriodicGain) ] and FLOOR = [ MIN - f(PeriodicCap - PeriodicGain) ]. Where f() is a function that is modified by those variables, To/Trd/Tr are time since that level was achieved, PeriodicGain is how much of an RSS you received within a specific period of time (24 hr and 8 day appear to be the time periods), and PeriodicCap is the maximum that’s you can receive a bonus to obtain within that time period. There appears to be a logarithmic decrease in the bonus quantities refined after upgrading Ops, R&D, or the Refinery, which is why those functions include not just the bonus amount for that level but are reduced by the quantity of time at that level. Note, when FLOOR or MAX would be below certain set amounts, the game does flatten out to the preset minimum amount for that level range. From there, it’s basically a matter of RNG(FLOOR,MAX), which generates a value from which the available Quality*Quantity values are factored out from HighestValue to Lowest Value. As people said, it appears (although I’m not absolutely convinced) that you get two rolls per chest and then the rewarded amount is SUM’d and you’re done.

The problem here is that it is very difficult to account for all of those variables, because the PeriodicGain includes some but not all of the sources of uncommon and rare refined materials that would otherwise be available. It appears that at a minimum it is likely something like PeriodicGain = aEventGain + bRefinedGain + cStoreGain + dItemsGain. Where a,b,c,d are some value of constant modifier to each of those and it appears there are some forms of each of those or subforms that are exempt from inclusion in PeriodicGain.

All of this combined ultimately means that it is very hard to fully reverse engineer how the refinery works, without a tremendous amount of data at each level and tracking of many seemingly unrelated variables.

Oh! I almost forget, in MAX, there also appears to be an f(ResourcesSpent / log(Ts)) which functionally decreases your gains the longer you go without spending resources.

Basically, when your’e saving up for that single 2000 uncommon part, if you’re not spending uncommons ANYWHERE, then your gain will slow down. There does seem to be both a general cap for these resources as well as independent caps based on resource type as well. But I haven’t quite figured out where to shove those into the predictive model.

Sooo..... in reality, the formula is probably fairly simple, but it has a lot of variables that go into it that impact the RNG range that generates the award.

For example, in tracking my own data, when I do NOT buy the monthly pack, my daily average TOTAL return on materials is about +9-15 (depends on month/levels/tc) each type, but my REFINERY rates go down by about -3 uncommon per refine and -0.2 rare per refine....
Finally the RNG range is large enough that it makes it difficult to really say what the floor and max really are because a fair amount of it is as it says... random.