The value of things you find and costs of traveling to locations multiple times has been an issue for many players, especially when they didn’t get lucky before the earlier patches and an item they needed might not have spawned when they travelled to the location.
To address these issues and many more, the next patch will change some of the basic aspects of how items are spawned and how much they are worth.
The first major change is how we generate what you can find in each location. Currently, all items are generated every time you enter a location. With the upcoming patch, they will only be generated when you enter the location for the first time. Every other time you travel to that location, you will be able to continue searching and digging. This change becomes especially important when your metal detector is limiting you in finding all items until you get a better one.
As we set up the dig sites only once now, this patch will also improve how items are distributed across locations to address another complain: for items to be more location specific. On top of the changes how we distribute them, the patch also adds many new items to find.
Currently, the pricing begins at $1 for trash items and goes up to about $50 for the really interesting ones. The upcoming patch will also change that aspect of game by completely revamping the pricing. While trash items remain at the low value, the more interesting items now go up in value up to several hundred dollars.
Yes, many of them are worth a lot more in real life, but that is a sacrifice of realism we have to make for the sake of balancing. Otherwise finding a single item worth ten thousands of dollars would basically make the entire economy aspect of the game obsolete.
We also altered the travel expenses to be more realistic, but increased the prices for better metal detectors to balance the in-game economy better. This however was not a zero-sum approach, just another step to make pricing more realistic. These price increases are easily offset by how much more items will be worth.
Additionally, each job you take for a location now will also have a cash reward on top of the prestige reward it had so far. Combined these measures should pretty much eliminate the need for grinding for cash if you don’t waste money going to locations every couple of finds instead of staying there for a bit longer.
Since we do not randomize the items every time you get to a location anymore, you will now also get a nice progress for each location showing you how many items you have found there and how much is still left to be discovered.
All these changes are great and address a lot of issues the community voiced, but where does it leave the Exploration Mode? While the overall changes such as new items and pricing still apply, the Exploration Mode retains its randomization of items every time you enter a location. However, the Exploration Mode will now stand on its own and can be played right away without the need to finish the Story Mode first.