Resources

Twenty-one pages, and almost all of them are about materials you already know. Obsidian is obsidian. Sulfur is sulfur. What changes from map to map is the address, which is why so much of this bucket reads as the same shopping list rewritten for a new postcode. The interesting exceptions are the four resources that did not exist until an expansion invented them, and those four behave nothing like the rest, because they were designed alongside an economy rather than dropped into an existing one.

One other thing shows up the moment you count the pages by map. Genesis Part 2 accounts for seven of the twenty-one on its own, more than the next three maps combined, and that is not coverage bias. It is the map that added the most new material to farm and moved the most old material somewhere unrecognisable, in several cases into space.

The four the expansions invented

Ambergris comes off orange rocks in the Space biome with a pickaxe or a mining drill, and it exists to solve two problems that also did not exist before: feeding a baby Magmasaur, and loading bombs into an Astrocetus. It is a resource with two customers and no general use.

Mutagel is the yellow-rock counterpart, found on the Space Bridge and inside Rockwell's Innards at 48.1, 29.5, and it is the only resource in this folder that comes with a clock. Our page puts the respawn at roughly eight hours, dropping to about an hour on some servers, which turns a Mutagel run into something you schedule rather than something you do when you happen to be nearby.

Hexagons are not really a resource at all but a currency, earned by finishing missions at Gamma, Beta or Alpha difficulty, by fishing, and by repairing the simulation's glitches, then spent at HLN-A on resources and loot crates. Genesis is the only map in the game where farming can be replaced by shopping.

Element is the fourth, and the one that ties the whole late game together, since it is what powers Tek armour, Tek weapons, Tek saddles and Tek structures. Our overview page collects the routes across every DLC: boss drops, Element Ore, dust harvested off wild Tek creatures, and shards.

Element has a printed price, and it is steep

Element is the only material in this bucket you can look up an exchange rate for, and putting two of our pages side by side gives you a number neither of them states. On Genesis Part 2, where you can also collect Element Crystals in the Space Biome and shards on the Shale and Ice Planets, HLN-A will simply sell you Element at 2,000 Hexagon apiece.

Meanwhile Lost Island pays Element for beating the Dinopithecus King, and it pays by difficulty: 60 on Gamma, 165 on Beta and 330 on Alpha. Convert that at HLN-A's rate and a single Alpha kill is worth 660,000 Hexagons of shop credit. The comparison is not perfectly like for like, since the shop is on one map and the boss on another, but it does tell you which end of the game the currency was balanced for, and it explains why nobody grinds missions for Element.

The old materials, relocated

Everything else in this bucket is a familiar material with a new set of coordinates, and the pages are best read as directions rather than explanations. The pattern that matters is which maps got written up for which material.

The one that turns farming into infrastructure

The Oil Vein page deserves singling out because it is the only entry here that stops being a farming route and becomes a building project. The veins are concentrated in the Low Desert and the Badlands, twenty-two of them across sixteen sites, and a vein on its own gives you nothing. Drop an Oil Pump on top and it produces one unit of oil into its own inventory every twenty seconds, indefinitely. That is the difference between a resource you visit and a resource you own, and it is the closest thing Scorched Earth has to a passive income.

How to use this bucket

If you know what you want and need to know where it is on a specific map, start here. If you have only just landed somewhere and want everything at once, our map guides carry a resource map per map, which is the broader sweep, and they also handle the everyday stone, wood, fiber and flint that never got dedicated pages. What turns any of this into equipment is in mechanics, particularly the crafting and engram coverage, and the gear that these materials eventually become is in items. The wiki hub ties the two halves together.

Frequently asked questions

What is the quickest route to a stack of Element?

Bosses, comfortably. Lost Island's Dinopithecus King alone pays 60, 165 or 330 depending on difficulty, against a shop price of 2,000 Hexagon for a single unit on Genesis Part 2.

Which map has the most documented resources here?

Genesis Part 2, with seven of the twenty-one pages, because it both introduced new materials and moved familiar ones into the Space biome.

Why does Mutagel have a respawn timer when nothing else does?

Because it is a finite node rather than a renewable harvest. Our page puts it at roughly eight hours, though some servers cut that to about an hour, so it is worth checking your own before planning a route around it.

Do I need Oil Pumps or can I just harvest veins?

You need the pump. A vein produces nothing on its own; the pump on top of it is what generates the oil, at one unit every twenty seconds.