Tried to do something unorthodox: using an excavator to fill the Hog Pan, because it's actually goddamn boring filling it with ~100 shovels of dirt, then doing that again because a full load from the Hog Pan(with extension) only fills the Wave Table by half.
Discovered after purchasing the excavator that there's an invisible wall preventing vehicles from reaching the Hog Pan site. Well, actually, there's a shin-high stick fence around it that's slightly difficult for me to jump over on foot, but it's really mostly just invisible walls.
It's supposed to get a bit easier with a Tier-2 setup, involving the excavator, mobile wash station, and magnetite separator, but the full setup would cost at least $50,000, whereas a full load from the Wave Table smelted into a bar, including the bonus nuggets(considered to be easy mode,
actual easy mode is when everything is free or $1) that account for around 80% of the gold I find, generally yields around $8000 in Spring(when the game starts, gold prices go up in Winter).
I
could get a loan to pay for that, but the loan rates in this game are usury.
Literally, it's usury. I looked it up; in Alaska(where the game takes place), the maximum legal interest rate on loans under $25,000 without a contract is 10.5%.
With a contract, it's 5% more than that. Loans over $25,000 are excluded. In this game, the minimum loan of $600 with a payback time of 3 days has an interest rate of
45%. The maximum loan you can take is $17,400 over 24 days... at a rate of
147%.