Icarus: How to Process Noxious Crust Before It Spoils

Prepare the documented mining and cleansing equipment

The developer identifies a Miasmic Pickaxe and a Tier 3 Cleansing Device as the equipment for the Noxious Crust resource loop. Prepare both parts rather than treating the gathered crust as ready-to-use finished ore. [1]

The update describes the Cleansing Device as biofuel-powered. Account for that processing equipment when deciding how much crust to collect. [1]

Steps

1. Obtain the Miasmic Pickaxe and the Tier 3 Cleansing Device for the mining-and-cleansing process. [1]

Treat Noxious Crust as time-sensitive material

Week 249 adds spoilage to Noxious Crust. The point of the change is to preserve the high reward while placing time pressure on processing it. Keeping an unprocessed stockpile forever is no longer the same resource strategy as before this change. [1]

The changelog specifies five minutes per unit and more than four real hours for a full stack of 50 to spoil completely. The timer is described in real time, not as four in-game hours. [1]

Cleanse promptly for the larger ordinary-ore return

For ordinary crust, cleansing quickly can preserve up to the five-times return described by the developer. The announcement contrasts that with allowing the crust to decay, so process it promptly when the larger ore return is the goal. [1]

Steps

1. Process gathered ordinary ore crust in the Cleansing Device before extended storage consumes its higher-yield opportunity. [1]

Understand what remains when crust spoils

Spoiled crust becomes one unit of the cleansed resource. Losing the crust form is therefore an intentional decay outcome, not automatically evidence that the inventory deleted the material. [1]

The changelog gives iron crust decaying into one iron ore as its example. That decay return differs from processing the crust while it still has the higher-value conversion opportunity. [1]

Use the separate Exotics conversion rate

Exotics Noxious Crust is explicitly reduced to a three-times cleansed rate. Do not calculate expected Exotics from the ordinary five-times ore example, and do not interpret that lower conversion as a missing-reward bug. [1]

Separate released changes from previewed experiments

The explanatory section discusses alternatives that were tested rather than chosen as this change’s core solution. Follow the released spoilage and conversion explanation when planning this task instead of turning every development experiment into an instruction. [1]