Crabada Looting Guide
Introduction
Hello! I’m SkyWing. I found Crabada in the beginning of 2022 and fell down the rabbit hole pretty fast. The game not only gives great returns, but also has a surprising amount of depth. Its economy and current idle-game are delicately balanced and allows multiple avenues to generate returns. I’ve always wanted to do more writing in my life, and I think I’ve found the right community to write for in Crabada!
In general I do not like to give specific advice. My teaching style has always been to make someone understand my train of thought so that they can make their own decisions on sound principles. Teach a man to fish rather than give him the fish. This might be different than the Crypto content you’re used to.
Preface
This article will be an in-depth guide to looting. The Crabada dev team recently implemented changes to its looting mechanics to 1. stop bots from dominating the looting game and 2. lower the number of failed transactions. So far they have done an amazing job and as of 2022/3/15, looting is not frontrun by bots anymore and presents a challenging but very lucrative way to play the game.
This is not a beginner’s guide to Crabada, so I assume you are familiar with basics such as how to connect/operate metamask, buy TUS/crabs, use the marketplace, transfering crabs and making teams, etc. Now let’s dive in.
Basics
Looting is an alternative to Mining and Taverning. It is the most hands-on of the 3 and requires the most effort and time commitment. You attack an unattacked mine with a team that has higher BP than the defending party (taking into account factional advantages), and attempt to steal 65% of the mining party’s rewards. The mining party can choose to reinforce twice and activate Miner’s Revenge (MR), but even if they do you will come out ahead over time.
Here’s my looting returns over a few days with ~5 teams, to show you it can be pretty lucrative (as of writing this, 15 Mar 2022 is in progress):
Returns Breakdown
When you loot and win, you gain 221.7375 TUS and 2.7375 CRA, when you lose you will gain 24.3 TUS and 0.3 CRA. This means that winning a loot gives you an extra 197.4375 TUS and 2.4375 CRA. This roughly equals (with 1 CRA = 8 TUS) 217 TUS.
From my experience with 400+ loots over a week of looting mostly bulk teams, the mining party will reinforce twice about 30% of the time. This figure can vary a lot depending on the defending team’s composition though. A craboid-craboid-prime mining team will more often than not reinforce twice to get that 40% MR. Let’s go over some example scenarios for reinforcing and calculate our average return per loot for each. Assuming reinforcing twice costs 17*2 = 34 TUS here.
70% do not reinforce, 30% reinforce twice with 25% MR (looting bulks):
70% * 217 TUS + 30% * ( (1 - 25%) * 217 TUS - 34 TUS) = 190. 525 TUS / loot
50% do not reinforce, 50% reinforce twice with 33% MR (looting lux):
50% * 217 TUS + 50% * ( (1 - 33%) * 217 TUS - 34 TUS) = 164. 195 TUS / loot
30% do not reinforce, 70% reinforce twice with 40% MR (looting machine):
30% * 217 TUS + 70% * ( (1 - 40%) * 217 TUS - 34 TUS) = 132.44 TUS / loot
If you can get in 3 loots in 4 hours, the returns are already better than winning a mining mission, even at the worst assumption of 132.44 TUS / loot.
For reinforcing as the looter, you don’t care about MP at all and only need higher BP than the defending team. I won’t go into too much detail here as a separate article on this might be coming.
Drawbacks
Looting is very time consuming, as the cooldown on looting is 1 hour (if you reinforce right away as attacker both times). You need to be at your PC/phone pretty much at all times to get loots and reinforce. If a miner decides to reinforce last second on both reinforces and you’re not ready to attack back right away, your looting will last longer than 1 hour. It can be frustrating at times when you have trouble getting into mines. Mining and Taverning gives lower returns but are a set and forget way of earning TUS. Passive vs active income basically.
Getting Loots
Here’s the juicy part of the alfalfa! I will breakdown the mechanics of getting loots and elaborate on the various ways to make it easier.
Mechanics Overview
Players click on an available mine to attack, solves a captcha and the fastest one gets the choice to loot the mine. An important thing to note here is that every part of this process will affect your overall speed and whether you get the loot or not. The captcha solve time shown is misleading as it only counts the time from your first click on the captcha. How fast you refresh and see the mine, how fast you get to the captcha, and how fast you solve the captcha are all factors that affect your overall speed.
There are 2 main ways you can increase your chances of getting a loot. First, you try to be faster and minimize your time spent on every part of the process. Second, you try to have the least amount of competition for the particular mine you’re going for. Your chance of success will improve with practice!
You should always use the first team in your team list for looting, as this saves you time from having to choose another one. If you really want to change the team you loot with, you can change your team order by going to the Manage Teams page, removing crabs and putting them back in the new order. Maybe there will be an easier way to do this in the future.
Mobile Vs Desktop
This is subjective. I prefer desktop as I’ve been an FPS gamer basically my whole life. Desktop also has some other advantages I will go into later. Mobile is definitely more convenient and might give you a faster connection. Experiment to see which works best for you. You want to have the fastest internet connection possible and hopefully your latency to the Crabada servers are not too bad (mine is pretty bad, over 130ms). You can check this yourself by typing “ping play.crabada.com” in Command Prompt in Windows.
Team Composition
The mining meta changes over time but for now Ore teams are the most numerous, followed by Lux teams. This means that Lux/Machine/Sunken looters are popular and effective choices. Check out this useful mining population graph by 0xSaturn:
Many looting team compositions are viable here, but in general you want 3 pure crabs (6/6 purity). Out of the 8 classes, Bulk, Surge and Gem have the most Battle Points (BP) and are the best looting crabs in a vacuum. Here’s a useful info sheet on factional advantages and pure crab stats.
Your team’s faction is represented by 2 out of 3 crabs if they have the same faction, or factionless if all 3 are of different factions. More info on factional advantages here in the whitepaper.
The idea here is to maximize your available prey (% of available mines you can loot), and minimize your potential competition (other players looting with the same faction crabs as you).
Currently I would suggest looting with a Lux, Machine or Sunken team. Your third crab can be any pure crab, but Bulk/Surge/Gem are best for this as far as numbers go. Higher your total BP, the lower MR% the defending team will have IF the BP difference is close. (whitepaper link for exact MR% formula) Also the higher your total team BP, the more teams you can loot that are from the same faction as yours. There’s also an argument of having a Prime be the third crab for Machine/Sunken looting team as when you mine at night (you do sleep right?), you can get the Prime mining bonus.
Target Selection
This is an area where desktop has an advantage. On desktop you can see 8 mines per page, but on mobile you’re limited to the first 3 mines in the list before you need to scroll down (and nobody’s got time for that). This creates some interesting dynamics where sometimes you see a mine that’s usually pretty contested (ex: bulk team) get pushed to the back of the mining page (5+) and stay available for a long time. This is because mobile players typically only choose a mine to loot out of the top 3.
As a general rule, always go for a mine that has newly appeared after you refreshed the list. This ensures that the least amount of people possible have seen the mine and therfore less competition. So you want to keep refreshing the list, and only choose the mines that appear between 2 refreshes that had a short elapsed time between them. You don’t want to refresh too fast though, because if you see a mine you want to loot but accidently refresh again, you will lose precious time. Whether you decide to attack a mine or keep refreshing, the goal is to make your decision quick and accurate.
If you find that you can feasibly get a freshly appeared mine from an empty looting list without too much trouble, congratulations, you have fast fingers/hands and a fast connection. If you’re like me though, and have a lot of trouble getting into mines like that, there are some other tricks you can use.
Assume the looting list is empty. If a lootable mine appears, don’t take it. But from that point, any new lootable mine that appears within 3-5 seconds will give you a higher chance of getting it, since a bunch of your competition went for the first mine that appeared.
Extending this logic further, any time a large number of lootable mines appear, that is the perfect time to try and get a loot. Your potential competition is the least at this moment. On desktop if you can choose to loot a mine in position 4+, your chances of getting it are even greater. If you didn’t get it on your first try and there are still a large number of mines on refresh, immediately try again with another mine. You want to be trying to get a loot as often as possible when the number of available mines is high.
I find factionless mines to be highly contested, especially if their BP total is low. Probably because there are more competition for them, especially when players with lower BP non-pure teams can attempt to loot them as well. So your ideal targets are high BP mines that you have a factional advantage over. As long as you have that advantage and your 3 crabs are pure, you can loot any mine you’re advantaged against without worrying about the BP. Yours will always be higher after the -7% penalty to the other team.
If you’re having an especially hard time getting a mine against the faction you’re targeting, you can attempt to also loot mines of the same faction as yours but with lower BP. This is risky, as MR% goes up the small the BP gap between attacker and defender. There’s always the chance too that the defending team will hire a legendary crab with abnormally high BP against you. It could work though, and it has helped me from time to time.
Captcha
In general, you want to start solving the captcha as soon as possible, as every 0.1s counts. Look for the first icon and go for that one first, and as you do it, glance over and see the other 2 icons and finish up the captcha.
There is an argument for doing the first icon correctly and blind guessing the other 2. This will give you a 50% chance of getting the captcha correctly and save you a bit of time since you don’t have to look at the other 2 icons. I recommend this only if you’re going for a mine that’s highly contested and you want to optimize for speed. For example if you’re going for the first mine that appears after an empty list. I don’t recommend this approach if you’re going for a less contested mine, for example out of a suddenly appearing list of 8 mines. In that case, I value the accuracy more as there is less competition for your particular looting target.
The captcha can be buggy sometimes. In my experience, it can have a random loading time up to 0.5s, show you instruction icons that are different from your icons, have the instruction icons change as the captcha loads, and the background could make the icons unreadable, etc. I don’t know if this is intended randomization to give slower players a chance over time, but the only thing we can do is to move on to the next mine and keep trying. Hopefully these bugs can be fixed in the future.
Optimization
Here are some tips that can help you optimize your looting. Probably only applicable to desktop.
You can queue multiple transactions. For example, if you need to claim several mines/loots, click settle/claim on them all, then confirm all of the transactions at once. This saves you the time you have to wait after confirming each transaction as the screen is locked.
Similarly, to avoid having the screen locked up for several seconds after confirming a transaction, you can click to bring up the confirmation screen, but change the page to another page, then confirm. This will not lock up the screen and you can do something else immediately. For example, after getting a loot, I click X out of the mine screen and go to my active loots page. From there I will confirm the new loot transaction then I can immediately settle another loot that’s just finished.
One more thing about factions. If you’re having a lot of trouble getting loots, you can attempt to change your team’s faction if you’ve got more than 1 team. Example: you have 2 teams, Gem-Gem-Bulk (Lux) and Gem-Gem-Bulk (Lux). If you’re having a lot of trouble looting bulks but see a lot of Sunken/Machine mines available, you can change your 2 teams over to Gem-Gem-Gem (Lux) and Bulk-Bulk-Gem (Ore). This gives you an Ore team that you might have an easier time getting a loot in with.
Conclusion
Looting efficiently takes a lot of time and practice, no doubt about it, but it is a great way to earn some extra TUS vs Mining/Taverning, especially if you’re just starting out with few team(s). I hope you find this alfalfa useful in your quest to getting loots.
Follow me on Twitter at @KingSkyWing and spread the word about the alfalfa. Or not. We could use less competition in our looting lol. You can find me also in the official Crabada discord and in the Crab Cartel discord. Link is in my Twitter Bio.
Great article for us newbies trying to learn and get educated with looting... 👍🏻