Original Post — Direct link

Have you ever wondered, frantically running away from bugs: "Dang, did this cave really not generate enough Nitra for even two resupplies?"

Have you ever thought to yourself, longing for that overclock: "The wiki has to be wrong, or there's some kind of bug going on. Twenty-seven percent my ass, this is my 7th mission in a row without a machine event!"

I have. But I kept wondering: did I get (un)lucky? Sure, we know what the intended chances for most events are, but what if some other mechanic is interfering? And besides, if the odds of some event change based on multiple factors, what are they, you know, on average? For someone who just plays whatever the weekly assignments and daily challenges point to?


Well, the beauty of statistics is, you can't get lucky or unlucky a couple hundred times in a row. Or, you can, actually, but the odds of that are about as high as a meteorite hitting Earth and solving world hunger tonight. The larger your sample size is, the further you shift from anecdotal experience to objective reality.

So I started taking notes. Only machine events and cargo crates at first, but if you're me, things tend to get out of control. Soon enough I was recording every mission seed, the size of each Jadiz chunk, the type of every swarm I fought... And then I thought: "Wait a minute, GSG stream themselves playing every week. I bet I can scrape some useful data off of that".

Of course, a competent data miner can unpack game files answer many of those questions without the tiresome manual labor. But still, DRG isn't the simplest game to dig through (no pun intended), and it's always good to be able to confirm datamined values with actual footage.

And so, 3 years, ~800 missions and probably 10 000 screenshots later, here we are.


Before I present my observations and conclusions, some project parameters I stuck to:

  • To ensure I didn't miss anything, every cave had to be explored in its entirety, every nook and cranny. Speed didn't matter. Yes, that means my Point Extractions usually took upwards of 30 minutes, but I play on Haz 3 so it wasn't a big deal.

  • Mission choice was directed either by assignment or, once seasons became a thing, seasonal challenges, because at that point I didn't really need cores. Occasionally I just picked the double-warning mission to spice things up.

  • Lootbugs multiply resources they eat, which can contaminate data about how much Nitra was available (or, Krakuul forbid, something rarer like Phazyonite). To minimize this error, every lootbug was immediately killed on sight.

  • Every data point must be verifiable and backed up by a screenshot (or a URL). Unfortunately, I lost a portion of those during a migration from an older PC to a newer one, but screenshots starting from February 2022 are intact.

  • Mostly solo missions. You don't need other people to test RNG, and collecting minerals is much more reliable when you're the only one picking them up, especially given the previous point about screenshots.


I think you will agree that the sheer degree of nerd here demands that the results take the shape of a Google Slides presentation.

Here it is. Enjoy.

[Click here for the presentation]

External link →
about 2 months ago - /u/Robert_GSG - Direct link

You fill me with fear and awe, Miner.

Management says to tell you this monumental piece of work does not count against your quotas however, so you will not receive a bonus to your payout.