Talk:Gemstone Island/@comment-76.18.196.116-20120525181342

Okay, in playing around a bit with my two emerald dragons, I just realized the gem harvesting timer is tied to each habitat on the island, not tied to each individual dragon. This wasn't evident to me with the descriptions so I thought it would be interesting to share. Here's what I found using two level 10 emeralds:

Dragon 1 was in habitat 4 and a gem was created this afternoon. I let the gem sit for almost one hour, then harvested. Immediately upon harvesting, the countdown clock on habitat 4 was showing 6:23:06:25 so it continued accumulating a countdown even while the gem was ready. This is great news- delaying harvesting a gem will not prevent the accumulation of continued countdown for the following gem. I assume this holds true until the habitat reaches its max of 3 gems, at which time I don't know if the timer will continue to count or hold until the habitat is emptied. This gives a little flexiblity, though, in not having to time to the minute to harvest gems and risk losing precious countdown time.

Dragon 1 was then moved to habitat 2 and the timer read 6:23:59:42 which reset the clock. I was worried at this point that the timers were still attached to the dragons themselves and I had lost my "extra" hour, but I let the timer countdown for about 10 minutes then moved dragon 1 back to habitat 4. The timer on habitat 4 read 6:23:05:39! Move the dragons back and forth between habitats all you like- the habitats hold the countdowns, not the dragons themselves. You won't lose progress changing habitats, but you do spread your invested waiting time thin and effectively increase the amount of time you have to wait for a gem to be ready, so use caution moving regularly. For fun renovations or restrategizing, moving dragons can be strategically and safely done without losing clock progress. Similar to how moving a dragon from a coin habitat doesn't clear the coins from the habitat- except in gem dragon habitats you have to wait for the habitat to accumulate a minimum amount of currency (gems) before you can harvest.

For my last experiment, I looked at dragon 2 sitting in habitat 2 with a timer of 9:54:20. I moved dragon 1 from habitat 4 into the same location as dragon 2 in habitat 2. The timer changed to 4:56:54 (approximately) which cut the timer in half. This tells us that having more than one level 10 gem dragon in a single habitat will cut the time on the countdown clock down by 50% or 66% and doesnt mean we will get three gems at once at the end of the week countdown, as i had earlier assumed.

This may not be new news to some here, but I haven't seen any information about how gem countdowns, harvesting, habitats, or dragon placement works. I have kept my two emeralds in separate habitats all week and only now realize I should keep them together to get gems more frequently. Having the gem harvest attached to the habitat rather than the dragons themselves makes a huge difference in strategy. I hope this is helpful to some! (and please no bashing if you already knew this and think it's intuitive; I've played a long time and am well advanced in the game and it took me sitting down and deciding to work this through to figure out the best strategy with gem dragons and habitats.)