tl;dr: Find a spot with the Scan Hammer, call down a thumper, keep the wildlife away from it until it's full, send it back. In this version of the game thumpers extract Crystite only, the ores went away together with crafting.

How It Works

• Equip the Scan Hammer and hit the ground. The scan shows whether there's a vein below you and how rich it is.
• Call down a thumper on the vein. It needs a bit of flat ground and some space above it.
• The thumping attracts creatures, and they go for the thumper. Every bit of damage it takes is your problem, since a destroyed thumper takes its load with it.
• Send the thumper back once it's full, or earlier, if the defense is about to fall apart. You get what it has collected up to that point.

The waves get bigger the longer the thumper runs. As such a thumper that's sent back at 80% is worth more than one that blew up at 95%.

Thumpers

(icon: thumper.png alt: Thumper size: large) Thumpers come in two sizes. A personal thumper is meant for one or two players. A squad thumper is meant for four to five players, attracts a lot more and shares its load equally between the squad members.

The Tiki thumpers are the same thumpers with a different look. Note that the item descriptions still talk about Iron, Tungsten, Titanium and Uranium Ore. That's a leftover, the veins of this version are Crystite veins, in three bands for the levels 1 to 19, 20 to 29 and 30 to 39.

Accord Thumpers and Skydock

There's a second kind of thumping you don't need your own thumper for. While a watchtower in Coral Forest is held by players, Accord Thumper events start nearby, after a short warmup in which the thumper gets reloaded and targeted. The resources go to Skydock, and once Skydock is fully supplied, the Chosen attack it. The supply percentage is shown in the activity log near Skydock and the watchtowers.

The Skydock Supply Officers at those watchtowers sell Accord Thumper Beacons, which start such an event right away, and offer the rare rewards of the Skydock event, once your reputation with Skydock Command is high enough.

Is It Worth It?

For the Crystite alone, a round of ARES jobs usually pays better. Thumping is worth it when a daily bounty asks for thumping runs, when you want to push Skydock, or simply because defending a thumper with a squad against everything the zone throws at you is still some of the most fun this game has to offer.

The tactics from the beta guides in the archive still apply, by the way: where to place a thumper and how the archetypes defend it hasn't changed much.