Return is the value you got back expressed as a percentage of what you spent. It is the number every player quotes, and it is misused constantly.
The definition
Return = value received / cost spent.
Spend 100 PED on ammunition, decay and healing, receive 90 PED of loot, and you returned 90%.
Two details decide whether the number means anything:
- Did the cost include everything? Ammunition, weapon decay, amplifier decay, armour decay, healing. Leave any out and the return is flattered.
- Is the loot valued at TT or at what you can sell it for? These are different numbers and both are useful, but mixing them produces nonsense.
The most useful pair of figures is TT return (loot at trade terminal value, against full cost) and total return (loot at what you actually sold it for, against full cost). The first tells you how the activity is going mechanically. The second tells you whether you made money.
Why one session tells you nothing
Loot is highly variable. In recorded sessions most kills return less than they cost, and the shortfall is made up by occasional large ones, which is why small samples are close to meaningless.
That is an observation about recorded results, not a description of how the loot system works. Nobody outside MindArk knows how it works, and this site will not tell you otherwise. Treat anyone who claims to have worked it out from their own sessions the same way you would treat someone with a system for roulette.
A thousand kills is a small sample. Ten thousand starts to be informative. A single evening is an anecdote, and a single global is not evidence of anything at all.
This has practical consequences:
- A bad run does not mean your setup is wrong. It probably means you had a bad run.
- A good run does not validate anything. The setup that produced a large loot is not thereby a good setup.
- You cannot feel the difference between 88% and 92%. But over a year, that gap is the difference between an expensive hobby and a very expensive one.
The only way to know is to record it. Entropia Central Tracker does this automatically from your chat log, which is the whole reason it exists.
The structural point
TT return, averaged over enough activity, is below 100%. It has to be: the game takes a cut, and that cut funds its operation. Nobody has a strategy that beats this at the TT level.
That is not a reason for despair, it is the reason markup matters. Players who do well are not the ones who found a better TT return. They are the ones whose loot contains materials other players pay above TT for, and who sell those materials properly instead of dumping them at the terminal.
So the real formula is:
Actual outcome = TT return + markup on what you looted, minus markup you paid on what you consumed.
Every term in that is something you influence. TT return you influence with equipment efficiency and using it at the right level. Markup received you influence by choosing what to hunt or mine, and by selling it properly. Markup paid you influence by not overpaying for consumables.
What "good" looks like
Be suspicious of anyone quoting a specific target percentage as achievable, because the honest answer depends on the activity, the equipment, the creature or resource, and the state of the market for what it drops.
What is safe to say:
- Efficient equipment used at the right profession level returns better than inefficient equipment used underlevelled, reliably.
- Activities whose output has strong markup are better than activities whose output sells at TT, reliably.
- The difference between careful play and careless play is real but modest. It will not turn a losing activity into a profitable one, it will change how fast the losing happens.
Judging your own numbers
Once you have a real sample, ask three questions:
- Is my cost figure complete? Including armour and healing decay, and markup paid on ammunition.
- Am I actually selling the markup I loot? Loot sitting in storage is not income, and loot sold to the terminal out of impatience is markup thrown away.
- Would a different creature, resource or blueprint have better output markup for a similar cost? This is usually the biggest lever available to you, and it is a research question rather than a skill one.
The globals feed and the wiki are where that research happens: what is being looted, from what, and how often.