What comes out of the ground is only worth what someone will pay for it, and in Entropia Universe the buyers are mostly crafters. Understanding where your resource goes explains why its price is what it is.

The two families

Ore is the mineral family, found with bombs. Metals and similar materials.

Enmatter is the organic family, found with probes. Energy matter and biological materials.

Most areas favour one or the other, and most trips are planned around one or the other, because switching means carrying a second set of consumables.

The materials wiki lists resources with their sources and what they refine into.

Refining

Raw resources can be refined into processed materials. Refining is done at a machine, consumes the raw material and produces the refined one, and has its own small cost.

The refined materials are what most blueprints actually consume, so refining is the bridge between mining and crafting.

Sell raw or sell refined?

There is no permanent answer and that is the point. Both raw and refined materials have their own markets, and the spread between them moves with how many people are currently refining.

The considerations:

  • The spread. If refined sells for meaningfully more than raw plus the refining cost, refining is worth doing.
  • Liquidity. Sometimes the raw material sells faster, sometimes the refined one. A better price you cannot realise is not a better price.
  • Volume. Refining takes time, and at large volumes that time is a real cost.

Check both prices before deciding, every time. This is one of the few places in the game where a few minutes of research routinely changes the outcome.

What makes a resource valuable

A resource carries markup when demand from crafters exceeds what miners are supplying. That happens for a few structural reasons:

  • It is an input to something popular. Materials feeding widely used blueprints have persistent demand.
  • It is only found in specific places, or requires equipment most miners do not have.
  • It is a bottleneck. A blueprint chain is only as available as its scarcest input, and that input carries the markup for the whole chain.

Conversely, resources that are common, findable everywhere and feed nothing in demand sell at or near TT, which means mining them is a straightforward loss.

This is why "where to mine" is really "what do I want to find", and why the answer changes when the game adds new content that consumes a different material.

Following the demand

The practical research:

  • The auction shows what is being bought and at what price, which is the most direct signal available.
  • The market section on Entropia Central carries player listings.
  • Blueprints tell you what consumes what. The blueprints wiki lists recipes with their material requirements, so you can work backwards from a popular item to the materials it needs.
  • New content shifts demand. An update that introduces a new item class creates demand for its inputs, and the miners who notice first do well.

Some miners craft with what they dig up rather than selling it, capturing the value of both steps. This is a reasonable strategy and it has an obvious risk: it doubles your exposure to one market rather than diversifying it.

If you do both, keep the accounting separate. Mining that loses money and crafting that makes it up is not "profitable mining", it is a crafting business with an expensive supply department, and you want to know which one is which. See Reading a return figure.