I just wanted to vent for a minute. Is the idea that we should all be mining? All good things for Glitch-kind come from mining: currants, favor, experience. It's a bit of a downer, mood wise, but Earthshakers and Flaming Humbabas have the energy investment covered. A little bit of skill investment and you can be mining quickly, producing your own ESHP to donate all the gems you collect, and be generally having a decent time of it. At least, that's what it was like at the end of beta.
From what I hear, there are better bonuses for shared mining (which sounds like a good thing: the 1 or 2 chunks you got from help didn't cover the dozens you lost from splitting the rock), and now Poolookoo means that miners have the tragic choice between two wide open mines.
This time around, I went in for farming: Animal Kinship, Gardening and Croppery. And I've done okay for myself. I like that I can reliably make donatation akin to rubies (in the form of caterpillars) (and yes, I also like the idea of living sacrifices on the altar of Humbaba) rather than hope for more than just ambers.
I'm a little anxious, because a good deal of my comfortably-well-off comes from cheesemonging, and I expect the clever turks at TS to close the last loopholes there any day now. And cheesemonging was part of what made the slower returns of farming more acceptable.
Now it feels like Mab and Humbaba aren't such a good plan - that the Zillish arts are better positioned to do well, and the wise and well informed Glitch will suck up the 7 days of skill learning and get down a hole as soon as she can. And that's a little disappointing - a dominant strategy isn't a good characteristic for any game, even a big social sandboxy one.