Please buff LTD demand and price a tad. (33% price, 3x demand)

You could. They're on the rocks you're blowing up, and you could scrape them off while you deploy the core charges. Indeed, it wouldn't even take any extra effort if you just bound the mining laser to the same button. Get a few extra tons of ore!

But you don't even think about it, because...why would you? It'd be pointless to grab them. That's my point.
If you are working in a well known area to you, you can often pick up missions to supply some of the "worthless" stuff, so storing stuff for later works.
 
This is a ridiculous argument. I COULD also bring subsurface missiles and mine those first. Or also bring lasers. Or my grandmother. If we go by what else we COULD do, we'd be here all night.

Bauxite is worth a fraction of core minerals all the time. LTDs are worth a little bit less then the others unless you do it wrong. It is not pointless to grab an LTD core if you come across one.
I mean, sure, you could do that, but laser mining bauxite would take you literally no extra time, since you could mine it at the same exact time as you prepare to detonate the core. My point is, why would you bother? Even if it took zero extra time, at best it's cargo space wasted on a less valuable mineral. And that's the same either way. Why bother carrying a core mineral worth 300k at best, when I could be using that space(and time) for a core mineral 2x-3x more valuable?

Honestly, I'm really not sure why you don't even seem to like the idea. This does happen to me a lot, so maybe you could help me understand. What did I do to make the idea so unappealing to you?
 
It's not really minmaxing, it's just being efficient with my time. If I were minmaxing profit I'd be out doing exobiology.

Ideally, there would be a variety of different circumstances that would make mining anything ideal in the right circumstances. That is, by and large, already the case for a lot of things. Rhodplumsite normally isn't worth bothering with but is the best during Public Holiday. Musgravite, Benitoite, and Void Opals aren't normally worth bothering with, but become so during Pirate Attacks.

Like...here. Look at this list:

View attachment 435116

Can you honestly tell me you'd mine Low Temperature Diamonds in this condition? Why would you ever bother, when every second you spend getting them is a second you're wasting not getting musgravite or void opals?
I look at the list and think the worst case is I get 423,174Cr/tonne, that is pretty much all profit.
Yes I could get over double that and if I found something that paid more I would collect it but as long as I wasn’t losing on the deal and as long as I didn’t feel like I was milking an exploit I would be happy.
I enjoy mining as an activity, I find mining to actually acquire a specific target much less so probably because of the increased focus needed to find the right stuff.
 
If you make them into core mining only, and then buff all core mining only minerals.

Why fix it only to break it?

Laser mining low temperature diamonds is not terribly practical, if you've ever done it. Icy rings cap out at something like 30% minerals, half-ish as much as in metallic rings, and LTDs themselves are much more rare than Platinum, as well, while selling for the same price.

You can pretty casually laser mine ~400 tons per hour of platinum if you're skilled, while for LTDs you'd have to be very, very lucky to get even half that. And again, same exact price and maybe 1/10th the demand.

There's a good reason people don't bother these days.
 
Holy heck no.

What about Methanol Monohydrate Crystals? Methane Clathrates? Jadeite? Taaffeite? Praesodymium? These are all in the same (or worse) boat than LTDs, but everyone tells me "Oh, bUt sOmE thIngS aRe mEaNt tO Be BaD".

If there's any hint of truth to that statement, why should LTDs get a buff just coz they might earn a little less than others, while so many other minerals just languish as completely ignorable?

Maybe these should become colonisation station components...
 
Holy heck no.

What about Methanol Monohydrate Crystals? Methane Clathrates? Jadeite? Taaffeite? Praesodymium? These are all in the same (or worse) boat than LTDs, but everyone tells me "Oh, bUt sOmE thIngS aRe mEaNt tO Be BaD".

If there's any hint of truth to that statement, why should LTDs get a buff just coz they might earn a little less than others, while so many other minerals just languish as completely ignorable?

Maybe these should become colonisation station components...
You jest, but I'd actually be 100% down for stations needing some mined goods instead of pure hauling. You'd need to tweak the numbers of course to make things balanced, but it never made much sense to me that you can just BUY everything to build a station, OR that so many minerals are useless.

That said, just because SOME minerals are useless doesn't mean even more should be. This offers the opportunity to make one currently-useless one have a purpose! So...why not?
 
it's a problem bigger than just LTDs.
I mean, just because it's a bigger problem doesn't mean you can't fix that problem incrementally. If you have unused minerals, I'd personally prefer to see them gradually used, for new content like colonization or other things.

Fix enough things one by one and eventually you don't have any problems left! The only mistake would be avoiding fixing anything because it doesn't fix everything.
 
I mean, just because it's a bigger problem doesn't mean you can't fix that problem incrementally. If you have unused minerals, I'd personally prefer to see them gradually used, for new content like colonization or other things.

Fix enough things one by one and eventually you don't have any problems left! The only mistake would be avoiding fixing anything because it doesn't fix everything.
This doesn't work towards that endstate, it actively goes against it.
 
In what regard?
The end fix is not "buff prices of stuff".

It's a holistic revisit of the way mining and market prices function. That's why I called buffing LTD prices "shuffling deckchairs" (on the titanic)... it's a useless endeavour and doesn't achieve anything towards what actually needs to be done... and it's not even a fix to anything when there's heaps of other minerals in the same state (and no, the solution isn't to buff their prices either).

Change them now, and you just need to change them again later, while plenty of other things languish because the actual fix isn't worked on.

Want to just buff prices? Methane Clathrates should be worth orders of magnitude more than LTDs, given supply, demand and scarcity. But again, that's not the fix.
 
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The end fix is not "buff prices of stuff".

It's a holistic revisit of the way mining and market prices function. That's why I called buffing LTD prices "shuffling deckchairs" (on the titanic)... it's a useless endeavour and doesn't achieve anything towards what actually needs to be done... and it's not even a fix to anything when there's heaps of other minerals in the same state (and no, the solution isn't to buff their prices either).

Change them now, and you just need to change them again later, while plenty of other things languish because the actual fix isn't worked on.

Want to just buff prices? Methane Clathrates should be worth orders of magnitude more than LTDs, given supply, demand and scarcity. But again, that's not the fix.

It's not really about price at all, when you get right down to it. It's about utility. I'd argue that all the core minerals are currently in a perfectly decent spot, because you have different conditions where you'd mine any of them, save for LTDs.

The answer to other minerals isn't buff prices, true, but that's just because there's no point in duplicating an already-existing niche. Rather, they should be given a NEW niche, such as colonization, to make them equally worth mining in their own specific circumstances.

That's why I attempted to highlight a potential alternate niche where LTDs, too, could be worth mining in some, but not all, circumstances.
 
It's not really about price at all, when you get right down to it. It's about utility.

your thread is literally...

"Please buff LTD demand and price a tad. (33% price, 3x demand)"​

Not "find more utility for mineables".
I'd argue that all the core minerals are currently in a perfectly decent spot, because you have different conditions where you'd mine any of them, save for LTDs.

The answer to other minerals isn't buff prices, true, but that's just because there's no point in duplicating an already-existing niche. Rather, they should be given a NEW niche, such as colonization, to make them equally worth mining in their own specific circumstances.

That's why I attempted to highlight a potential alternate niche where LTDs, too, could be worth mining in some, but not all, circumstances.
... thus my whole point that buffing LTDs doesn't work towards the solution at all, and simply makes things worse.
 
your thread is literally...

"Please buff LTD demand and price a tad. (33% price, 3x demand)"​

Not "find more utility for mineables".

... thus my whole point that buffing LTDs doesn't work towards the solution at all, and simply makes things worse.
Well, in the next post, I explained a little more deeply:
The problem is it's balanced a little bit too low right now. Other core minerals can get up to 700k or 800k, but LTDs even with the absolute perfect combination of states, can only get to 400k. And, to be fair, you can get it in more ways, including laser Mining and subsurface mining, but unfortunately even then it tends to fall behind, because it typically has about half the price but less than double the demand.

My thinking is that if it had a lot more demand, then it could be a viable option in systems that have seen a lot of mining recently, so the more typical core mineral prices are depleted. You know, Maybe monazite has zero demand so it has dropped to 400k, so LTDs also at 400k, but being able to mine them a little bit faster because they can be laser mined could become a viable option at that point.

So basically, by slightly buffing the price and demand(not so much as to make them better than core minerals in their wheelhouse), you could place them in the position of being a decent fallback mineral, good especially for smaller systems whose core mineral demand had been depleted.

This makes the system more interesting than currently, where you basically just mine monazite until demand is exhausted...and then mine more monazite AFTER demand is exhausted.

That's why I think it adds utility, by adding a new niche players can use!
 
As far as the balance goes. I'm kind of with the others buff the low value stuff. LTD can remain a bonus mineral if they made it so the other stuff in the belt was worth the time and space to mine. Right now low value stuff is almost as time consuming to mine as filling up on rare goods and not worth anything other than going onto the ignore list. If you adjusted the bottom end to actually be worth the cargo space you could probably keep the LTD and plat where they are. You fill up fast get a few diamonds that double your profits and you're not overrunning the demand but with most stuff being worth peanuts per ton and slow as sin to mine it's not a sane option.

Tritium also. Please make it easier to mine 500t/hr. I don't want to be spending 2-3 hours per carrier jump mining that doesn't seem sane and while someone in a good ring with a tweaked setup can get a jump every 30-45 minutes that still sees wrong.
 
Why fix it only to break it?

Laser mining low temperature diamonds is not terribly practical, if you've ever done it. Icy rings cap out at something like 30% minerals, half-ish as much as in metallic rings, and LTDs themselves are much more rare than Platinum, as well, while selling for the same price.

You can pretty casually laser mine ~400 tons per hour of platinum if you're skilled, while for LTDs you'd have to be very, very lucky to get even half that. And again, same exact price and maybe 1/10th the demand.

There's a good reason people don't bother these days.
I said they should be buffed if you made them mineable core mining only, and you keep talking about how you can't laser mine them as efficiently as platinum.
Laser mining is plase holder that should have been removed when core/sub-surface mining was introduced.
 
Laser mining is plase holder that should have been removed when core/sub-surface mining was introduced.
Core mining is rather obnoxious even more so than laser mining as you're looking for needles in a hay ring. Laser mining is not a place holder it's a baseline. Some things can be better one way or another but removing it would just make the game worse.
 
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