Mine\Crystal Pair Identification

Overview

Platinum and Gold mines rely on determining which crystals are linked to other crystals in order to properly mine their ores. The method described below will allow you to quickly determine which crystals are linked to which other ones.

Rules

First the rules of how the crystal links work:

• The Crystal that you will need to know the link for is determined by whichever crystal on the mine is different in hue from the rest.
• Each crystal only links to one other crystal
• No crystal is linked to more than one time
• Crystals may or may not link to themselves instead of another crystal

Crystal Link Identification for Platinum Mines

First of all you will need to determine a numbering scheme for the crystal on the mine. I usually number the crystals starting on the top row going left to right as 1, 2 and 3 then on the bottom row from left to right as 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Before starting make yourself a small chart on a peice of scratch paper like this:

1 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
3 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
4 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
5 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
6 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
7 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The first column is the number of the crystal you will be looking at each time you pull and the row of numbers after it are the crystals available to be possible links. As you determine that a particular crystal is not a valid link you will cross it off the list. If you determine that a particular cyrstal IS a valid link you will cirlcle it and cross that crystal off as possible links for the other crystals. Dont be worried if this doesnt make immediate sense as I will give detailed examples below to illustrate the principle.

Let's say, for example, that on the mine the crystal that is the odd crystal is crystal #3. To determine which crystal is linked to #3 we will work crystal #1. If we work crystal #1 and get some ore then this is in fact the crystal that is linked to crystal #3. We would update our chart as follows:

1 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7
2 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7
3 - o 2 3 4 5 6 7
4 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7
5 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7
6 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7
7 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7

What this means is that anytime the current odd crystal is crystal #3 we would work crystal #1 which is it's linked cyrstal. Also no other cyrstal will be linked to crystal #1 so the #1 crystal is x'd out for all of those cyrstals. When it comes to the next crystal to determine the link for you dont need to try #1 as it has been taken.

If in our example above crystal #3 was the odd crystal and we had tried to determine its linked crystal and tried to work crystal #1 but gotten a message that no ore was mined our chart would be updated like this.

1 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
2 - 2 2 3 4 5 6 7
3 - x 2 3 4 5 6 7
4 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
5 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
6 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
7 - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

This indicates that in the future when crystal #3 comes up odd we should try any crystal other than #1 in order to find which is the correct linked crystal.