Economics of Rocknoses

Introduction
Pets can be used for two different things:
 * 1) Improving your combat skills by taking them with you or to let them protect your home
 * 2) To get resources from them. This guide focuses on the pets that get you resources.

The majority of pets produce, while some produce (Sand Reaper and Spider) or  (Shoebills and Ostriches), but these products can be replaced or produced in easier ways.

The only pet that gives you another useful resource are:
 * Gold-vein Rocknose for (and )
 * Silver-vein Rocknose for (and )
 * Greater Rocknose for and

Basic requirements

 * Build an . The basic version of it is good enough. It is prefered that you use other Animal Pens if you want to raise other pets than rocknoses to not mess up the process down below.
 * Collect Gold. You should have around 250 and around 20.
 * To minimize problems it is advised to invest in one or more
 * You don't want to use the recipes with, so there is no need for them.

Getting a Pet
Rocknoses exist only in their bigger forms throughout the world and can not just be collected like other baby animals. The only way to get a pet is to purchase a. Currently there is only one merchant who sells those eggs, namely Shawna the Strange. Take your Gold Coins and go to The Den. The other NPCs there are hostile and you might have to fight your way in. You can purchase multiple eggs from her, each egg costs 10.

The eggs have a timer after which the egg transforms into a. You can wait a long time to let it hatch in your inventory or a chest or you use a to reduce the timer to a little over an hour (precisely 1:11:00). But pay attention: If the timer has ticked down and your Pebblenoses are still in the compost heap, then it is very easy to lose them. The timer of the Pebblenose might also be bugged. So set your clock, make stuff around your base and when the time is up take the Pebblenoses out of the compost heap. Otherwise all your invested Gold Coins will be wasted.

You can also place the eggs and/or the Pebblenoses into a to stop the timer. Make sure that it also contains.

Getting a gold-vein Rocknose
Now you have an empty Animal Pen, up to five Pebblenoses at a time and the same number of. Make sure no resources are in the Animal Pen, put the Gold Dust into it and then the Pebblenoses. The Gold Dust disappears and in the bottom right corner icons should be visible with a very slow growing bar. It takes 6 hours to let the Pebblenoses grow into Rocknoses. This timer is not critical. Right after you placed everything, you can add a stack of stone, which is the resource the Rocknoses will use to produce what ever they will produce. Do something different and come back later.

After they grew up you now have some and one or none. With a 20% chance you should get 1 Gold-vein Rocknose out of 5 Pebblenoses.

After this you can repeat the process. Take out all "bad" Rocknoses, put in the missing number of Pebblenoses, add the same amount of Gold Dust and add a stack of stone. This way your existing Gold-vein Rocknoses stay on their production timer while new Rocknoses can grow up.

After some of these cycles you will eventually get an Animal Pen with 5 Gold-vein Rocknoses.

Questions
There are some big questions:
 * Which feed is the best and how much does it cost to get those 5 Rocknoses?
 * How many eggs have to be purchased to get five Gold-vein Rocknoses (a full Animal Pen)?
 * How long does it take to get the invested gold back?
 * Is it worth it?
 * Are there better ways to get gold and silver?

Premises

 * To minimize rounding errors the goal is to get one Animal Pen full of Gold-vein Rocknoses.
 * Gold-vein Rocknoses use up as feed to produce  (80%),  (15%) and  (5%)
 * Each cycle they turn 1 into 1  or 1  or 1 . 5 Rocknoses use and produce 5 times that amount.
 * Each cycle takes 20 minutes.

Numbers / Mathematics
Formulas:
 * = ceil /  /
 * =  *   / 60 min
 * = ceil /  /
 * =  *   / 60 min

Conclusion

 * Only the receipt with has a relative low price. The other three are a waste of resources.
 * But even this way it takes at least 300 hours on the game/map to start, build up the fully running Animal Pen and to get the investment back. That's way too long.
 * Even after this you get only 75 (or ~250  or ~250 ) per 100 additional hours. Yes, it is passive income, but that is still way too long.
 * That amount is collected with 1-2 runs for ( as byproduct) through the volcano with a good tool and heat protective armor or with 2-3 runs through the underwater-chests in the eastern waters (area at Buccaneer Bay and Forgotten City of Xel-ha). Both ways take about 1 hour of active playtime. That is way faster.
 * For the calculation is even worse. You have to put in almost the same amount of gold but get back the same bad passive income, this time in silver. But silver also collects from the chests in the eastern waters (as a "byproduct" to gold) and can easily be harvested near Sepemeru (Grid  )
 * The main factor of the calculations is the time for one cycle. At 20 min it is very bad, at 2 min it could be profitable and at 2 sec it would be indeed "op"
 * Additional aspect, not taken into account for the considerations above: A Lvl 4 Blacksmith reduces resources necessary to craft coins by 50%. Combining the farm using a Lvl 4 thrall reduces the R.O.I. by 50%. The R.O.I. may become interesting, especially for players that are absent over working days.