Less than two months after the Halloween Zombie, I found myself considering a much smaller number: 30 PED stored in oil, with nothing on the PED card. I sold the oil and decided to enjoy a little mining. There was no elaborate plan behind it. Sometimes I simply want to take a finder outside and see where the walk goes.
On 4 December 2024, that modest outing produced 2,116 PED of Belkar Stone. My finder was unamped. In the screenshot I am carrying an F-105, and the claim window reads Vast (21), at a depth of 532 metres. Thirty PED had certainly given me an eventful walk.
The profession that stayed with me
Mining was how I had started in 2008. Even after other avatars, long breaks and hunting ambitions, there was something familiar about moving across terrain with a finder. The equipment had changed over the years, and so had my skills, but the pleasure of discovering a claim remained easy to recognise.
The picture catches golden light around my avatar on a green Calypso hillside. Tall trees frame the scene, my full name appears in the announcement, and Mining Challenge: Belkar II has just updated. Entropia has a talent for putting a spectacular moment beside a very practical reminder that there are still missions to finish.
I remember the small amount I began with because it makes the surprise vivid. It does not make the run a strategy I could repeat on demand. If the finder accepted requests, I suspect every miner would have a very different shopping list.
A claim with a long history behind it
Years earlier I had given my mining skills to Alex before stepping away. Now I was building the profession again under the same name. This claim connected those chapters without needing to recreate the past exactly.
In the EntropiaLife snapshot I kept, Belkar remains my highest mining entry. That is a satisfying line in the record, but the landscape is what makes the photograph feel like mine: trees, green ground and a finder carried out for a short session.
I had gone outside to enjoy a few probes. I came back with a milestone, another piece of mining progress and a photograph that still makes me smile. The miner from 2008 clearly had not retired. He had merely taken a rather extended break.