A whole lot of things have happened in the Prospectors online game since my last follow-up post! At the beginning of March, the devs made a huge update to the game and added a lot of novelties.

1st, you can't so easily change mined gold to in-game gold currency anymore. The devs introduced Central Bank and bank licenses for "private" banks, which can do such conversion -- for a fee (a modest 10% at the moment). However, the Central Bank is not built yet, so all gold conversions are stalled (both mined gold into in-game gold currency and in-game gold to PGL tokens). "Bank deposit" feature doesn't work either.

2nd, for workers, there's now a "cool-down period" (or "rest period" if you wish). If you're not a premium account, your workers must rest the same amount of time as they spent on work. That is, if my Mr. Good worked 300 minutes -- he now must rest idle for another 300 minutes before being able to work again.

3rd, there're now "premium" accounts. For 5 bucks a month you get a handful of privileges. Those are important mainly for plot renters, but e.g. "no cool-down period' is useful for nomads too.

4th, the update brought along new workshops, tools, and job types. Besides, there's a University where you have to buy a "professional diploma" for some "skilled job" types.

I don't know if those changes are for good or bad, but the game has definitely become much more complicated.

The by-products of the update are the increased number of confiscated plots and a "wood crisis".

For some unclear reason, quite a number of tenants abandoned their plots. I've missed some good deals at the land auction, some developed plots at a reasonable price. One such confiscated plot auctioned at the official rental rate even had a ready gold-mine, like 8M of gold reserves, and some other resources... Unfortunately, all those good deals ended late at night my local time, and I missed placing the final bid... So, my Mr. Good, Mr. Bad, and Mr. Ugly are still homeless.

Another curious thing is the wood crisis. There are almost no wood reserves left on Yukon! The price now is as much as 20 gold/kg. Mr. Bad and Mr. Ugly rush back and forth across all Yukon cutting and selling wood! I wonder what happens when there will be no free wood at all? Probably, the price will skyrocket, a golden time for those who rent plots with big wood reserves. I'm currently thinking about renting a cheap plot from the auction and making it my wood storage, to speculate wood afterwards...