The drop rates for bc items, the actual percentages, are being kept confidential by the developer, however, we can get an idea on the item drops by looking at the Overseer channel on telegram (https://t.me/LostRelicsOverseer). You can also find the corresponding channel on discord.
Some of the quoted messages below may be old, but they are still relevant today in understanding more about drop rates mechanics.
Why are the drop rates kept secret?
Cliff (the dev), told us in the past that his experience with revealing the drop rates was worse than keeping it a secret.
Here’s a related message that explains it further:
“Every time I’ve announced anything like this (about drop rates in certain dungeons – editor’s note), the outcome has usually been negative or resulted in either more questions and misunderstanding about probability or outright accusation over personal experience. I’ve answered this question a lot over the last year whenever things change and I thought I’d try how it would go if I didn’t reveal it.“
Cliff Cawley – LR creator
Have the drop rates lowered?
This is a feeling that people get when they haven’t been getting as many drops lately, and Cliff answered many times that he didn’t change the drop rates (the actual percentages), however sometimes there is balancing and tweaking going on.
Here’s some older messages about balancing drop rates:
“Yes, drop rate balancing is extremely difficult with a fluctuating player base.
The drop rates are mostly the same from 2 years ago.
But as more players come in, more rolls per second happen and therefore more loot flies out the door faster.“
Cliff Cawley – LR creator (message on Telegram from March 20th 2021)
Here’s another message that gives more details:
“The more people playing, the more it will appear that better loot is coming out, because the fact is, more people are rolling the dice at once.
Think about this:
Let’s say there’s a 1% chance to get Item B and 99% chance to get Item A.
So if you do 1 million rolls, odds are that Item B will drop 10,000 times.
Now with standard games that have unlimited loot, that’s not a problem at all. More people playing doesn’t really change anything and there will always be more Item Bs.
With LIMITED loot it becomes a problem because you can run out and need to add more items.
So if Item B has only 10,000 items and you calculated the odds to make it last for say a month (based on 1 million rolls because your community was low then) but today you’re featured and now you’re getting 100k rolls a second, all of a sudden your loot is gone in about 10 seconds instead of a month.
So really, the loot drop rates need to scale with the active player base, otherwise you’ll be cleaned out immediately.
Cliff Cawley – LR Creator (message on Telegram from September 19th 2019)
How does drop rates work?
Even if we don’t know the percentages of the drop rates for items, we can understand how it works. For example, when someone turns-in bounties they might return some blockchain items back into the loot pool, so those items are going to drop afterwards to some lucky players.
One interesting example is when you turn in an item, let’s say you need to return 6 of item X to complete the bounty, so you return it and receive a bounty chest. Now, if you open it right away, you might get 1 of the item X immediately, while the rest of the 5 items will be distributed randomly to other players. This happened to people and it’s random, so don’t think that this will happen to you everytime, but it’s an example of how loot recycles.
This is also valid for crafting items. When someone turns in bc items to craft something, those bc items go back into the loot pool and start dropping.
Another important part of the drop rate mechanics is that it depends on the items supply. Here’s an explanation:
“Items with more supply have higher probability of dropping within the same rarity group.
If you have 100 swords and 5 axes, and you drop them at the same rate, the axes are quickly going to be out of supply. Instead the swords have a higher chance of dropping and as they reduce, you’ll see the axes start to drop more often. But they still have a small chance of dropping the entire time, it’s just low.
It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, until you’ve reduced the haystack down to a pile.“
Cliff Cawley – LR creator
How to figure out the drop rates?
Since the inception of Lost Relics, players have tried to find the drop rates percentages on their own. There are a few ways to approach this…
Analyzing your own drops
This method is probably the most straightforward, but it has a huge problem, the results will be very skewed. Some players are luckier than others, and that also changes with time. Even if you are a hardcore grinder and play everyday for years, your results will still be skewed because the sample is too small.
Analyzing the Overseer data
The Overseer channel provides drops data in real time, so one might think that he can simply scrape the data and get some real stats on the actual drop rates for each items, right? It turns out it’s a bit more complicated than that.
This has been tried before, the most notable mention is a player named Foo, who analyzed the Overseer data and posted it publicly on his website (https://lostrelics.foo.red/).
He tracked the data over a span of a few months, from version 128 to 156. He soon realized that there’s a real challenge in getting the actual drop rates because the overseer only shows the items you take out of the dungeon, not necessarily the ones that drop, so he changed the name of his results to TAKE OUT RATES instead.
So what? What’s the difference between take out rates and drop rates? Basically, if you drop a blockchain item and die, you’ll lose it so it won’t get reported in the Overseer (it used to, but not anymore).
Another issue is that many players don’t complete the the entire adventure and exit sooner, so there will be blockchain items left out without them knowing, since each adventure is pre-seeded and the loot is predetermined from the moment the adventure loads, but if you don’t kill all the mobs, you’ll miss some bc items.
Another issue with the Overseer data is that it doesn’t report all the loot. Sometimes it gets rate limited (too many messages posted in the Overseer telegram channel) and other times, the Overseer reporting simply changes. For example:
Overseer data used to show all blockchain items of all rarities that were taken out of the adventure plus the ones you lost on death. But now it only shows the rarities starting from RARE (blue) and above (and no more items lost on death). We can expect this to change again in the future, so we won’t be able to analyze the data consistently over a longer period of time if the drop data keeps changing.
Ok, so we’ll have to work with what we got, so what? That’s good enough, right? Maybe, maybe not. One thing that comes to mind is that you’ll have to separate the drops from bounty chests and those from adventures. Because if, let’s say you track all transcendental item drops (highest rarity), some will drop only from Bounty chests (like Nova Omega).
OK, OK, so we filter out the ones from bounty chests, now we’re good, right??? Now you can get a list of drops that only come from adventures, but hey, some come from harvesting and others come from killing mobs and chests. This is important, because the blockchain items that drop from harvesting (woodcutting, mining, scavenging, fishing) have a noticeable higher drop frequency.
Alright, but we were talking about transcendentals, we can figure out the drop rates for those, right? The problem is, they drop rarely enough that it’s difficult to compare with previous data. A year ago, we might have had a 10 times smaller playerbase and a different overseer reporting system, so the drop rates might’ve changed, rebalanced for the new conditions, especially since the game is growing at a fast rate.
Ok, forget about transcendentals, let’s talk about other blockchain items that drop more often, so we can track their frequency easier. The problem with this is that we got another metric to factor in, which is the supply. As Cliff explained in one of the messages above, the higher the supply the higher the drop rate (of course, we factor in rarity as well).
Let’s take legendary items as an example. These should drop at a higher rate than transcendentals, but then we had many months when their supply had run out, so their drop rate was zero. So how do we calculate the drop rate now? We’ll have to remove the items with 0 supply from the data. But then Cliff will add a couple of legendary weapons. Some dropped via an event (Windchaser – Easter Event 2021), which has to be filtered out as well because event items have a different drop rate than regular drops.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the drop rate will be different when there’s 5 types of legendary weapons at full supply versus when there’s just 2 types of legendary weapons at full supply. How about when some are in low supply? As you can see, the variables keep adding up.
The point is that it’s a real challenge to find some numbers close to the actual drop rates. And even if you could, the next update might change things around again so your data could show flawed drop rates just because you didn’t have enough time to get a decent sample size.
Think about it, if you find the drop rates for some items, it won’t change your luck. The only thing you can do to increase your drop odds is to keep grinding.
In the end, drops depend on your luck, so just enjoy the game; and if you want to make profit, a better way is to flip bc items.