Why mining is STILL bad

[Elgered]

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+ mining is relaxing (when alone in a ring)
+ mining can be beautiful (but be honest, the "best" rings are the darkest, most boring)
+ now it pays the bills for fuel and repairs

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- mining is far less income than trading (ok, you've got some mining missions from time to time, but they are rare and traders also have theirs -even if they don't waste time looking for them) or bounty hunting and assassination.
- mining sometimes is really frustrating. Either the limpets explode because the roids are to close, or block their way, or they expire, because the next roid is too far away. Or they explode on launch, because the hit each other.
- micromanagement of the refinery module is sub-optimal and takes too much time. It easily can be optimized e.g. by allowing the same resource go to the same slot again.
- Limpet controllers IMHO require too much space or deliver far to little return for their size. The first supercomputers in history were not as big a remote control for 4 little cargo limpets (128m³) with a super short range and super bad path finding.
- Limpets always pick up the nearest cargo. So they pick up, what was just jettisoned.
- The first mining CG was a farce. Not only a high demand, a call out to the entire galaxy and not paying more than an average price, but also only giving a bonus for an amount that couldn't be reached.
- Mining is only interesting in pristine metallic rings, closely off HiRES. There should be incentives for mineral mining as well as a new commodity type for elements from icy rings (could be implemented with passengers, next to sightseeing-tours to belts and rings^^)
- It often takes a lot of time to get the cargo back to a station having demand for it. When dropping it off in an extraction economy, reputation suffers! (You feel like a slave. You are the base of their economy. Deliver what they live from, get paid less than elsewhere and your reputation drops each time. Great feeling.
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My suggestions for a better mining:

• Limpet Controller Overhaul (smaller controllers, more range, longer lifespan, better path finding)
• Prospector Overhaul (have a limpet drone tag an Asteroid instead of landing, then fly to the next). Each time releasing a prospector, you get an error because your cargo limpets can't dock. OR a "Composition"-Scanner, that scans the Asteroids without limpets and doesn't eat up all space in the ship
• Reputation gain for delivering mined cargo, even at "loss" (selling below average)
• More interesting sites. As well by pushing the outcome for "lower grade" Sites (now there is a focus on about 20 Sites across the galaxy) as well as making them a bit more beautiful
• Or introduce mining ships. The FDS/Orca are for passengers/armed forces, the T-6/T-7/T-9 for trading, the Viper/Vulture/Cobra/Courier/... for fighting, the two explorers for exploration,... There is space for small/medium/large mining vessels (~50 tonnes / ~150 tonnes / ~ 350 tonnes). Yes - they could be abused for something else (trading, passengers, maybe fighting platforms, or explorers with empty hulls) if they have the internal compartments to fit good mining equipment, but who cares?

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[ChaosCloud]

I really HATE the refinery UI, I had 70+% Painite in my 2nd bin, Gallite in the 1st, wanted to dump it, a drone came in and finished that one, cursor jumped INSTANTLY down and I vented the Painite, thanks for that FD.

And I mean the instantly literally, I selected the Gallite's bin and right in the moment when I pressed came the drone in and bumped the cursor down, whoever thought that it's a great idea to make the cursor automatically move in such a sensible area should be fired.

Edit: also why do drones REQUIRE you to close the cargoscoop to be fired?.... Aren't they fired exactly from there?
Did by any chance the same genius how make the jumping cursor say "we fire this from the cargobay to make the cargoscoop close before firing just to open up again"
In chance anyone doubts it, try firing a prospector while flying with an open cargoscoop, you will speed up because the thing closes and the open-penalty of it goes away properly for that, which can sometimes be more annoying than helpful but that's another thing.

 

[Red Fox Four]

Three major issues I have with mining.

1) Damn micromanagement of the refinery bin. Why can't we simply set it to auto-eject certain types of minerals? Either using a filter to "Only refine: <insert minerals>" (this ejects everything not listed).. or filter to "Auto-eject: <insert minerals>" (this refines everything not listed).

2) Scooping. Granted, the scooping is kinda sorted with the Collector drones. Using A rated ones that last 720s (12 minutes) and carrying 40 means you have enough drones to last you 720x40 / 3600 = 8 hours (or 4 if you use two at same time) so you don't have to around playing "Catch the flimsy fragment" while humping your Adder against the asteroid the fragment clipped inside like some horny barn-dog.

3) No "cargo" scanner for asteroids. Why is there no ore detector / scanner? Why does it have to be destructible throw-away drones? Not only are they throw-away, and one time use only, but they even take up cargo space. Make it a scanner, add various ratings to it (e.g. better rating and higher class = longer range and more accuracy wrgds to composition of the asteroid).

Drones are cool... but prospector drones is just a lazy copy/paste of the Collector and Hatchbreaker drones (or maybe just an advanced dumbfire missiles to be honest). Don't overdo the drones. Give us a proper ore scanner / detector instead.

 

[KaizoMK]

I had my first real go at mining yesterday and I had a blast.

I put in a suggestion to automate the refinery and fix the prospector limpets. With those fixes it would be an excellent profession!

 

[BillD]

Why do people keep saying prospectors are a waste of space?
What else are you taking out into the belts in your cargo hold? You take a load out, fire them and replace them with ore.
I take 120 out and always come back with a full 128t load of high value ore. I don't see the problem with them in general (other than a couple of bugs).
The cost is negligible compared to income. If you have a small mining ship with not much cargo space don't use them.
That will motivate you to upgrade if you hate tapping on rocks with a laser.

 

[Malkevin]

Do prospector drones still self destruct in Last Out order instead of the much more logical and useful First Out order?

 

[Evil]

I would do some mining; but the times I have tried, just left me feeling the whole process of mining is mind numbingly boring, it's not a very active experience. Even if they increases the CR return to ridiculous amounts, for me to like mining it would have to be alot more active or interesting.

You cant please everyone all the time.

 

[BillD]

Do prospector drones still self destruct in Last Out order instead of the much more logical and useful First Out order?

Yup that bug is still there.

 

[shadragon]

I just vented 70+% Osmium because the default focused entry when opening the refinery window is "vent the first ore" and it wanted me to tell it if it should put a new ore into one of the two free bins or if it should keep asking me on every single pickup from now on.

No system can fix operator error. You chose the wrong selection and no amount of rework can stop that.

Do you want to delete the file?

*Yes*

Are you sure?

*Yes*

"Oh, I didn't mean to do that! Stupid machine isn't designed right."

 

[KaizoMK]

No system can fix operator error. You chose the wrong selection and no amount of rework can stop that.

Do you want to delete the file?

*Yes*

Are you sure?

*Yes*

"Oh, I didn't mean to do that! Stupid machine isn't designed right."

The design of the refinery is abysmal, I submitted a suggestion about mining improvements and automating the refinery is at the top. If there's a capacity issue that can easily be addressed by the pilot, otherwise please put the gold in one of my nine empty bins for the umpteenth time.

 

[Wolfman]

I picked up on mining a couple of nights ago. I like it! I just went out with scanners and collectors. Picked a star to go to then scanned systems along the way. Nice bonus there from exploration income. I found a pristine system with metallic rings (No RES's) and got a nice haul. Now I can remove the scanners and just go to the system. It's about 150 Ly away but that's only 12 jumps in my python with one fuel scoop stop, so 20 minutes travel. Best of all... no pirates.

 

[Barking_Mad]

I like the fact it asks you to pay attention to what you are doing. Not much, but enough to keep you concentrating. Maybe I'm wrong, but it sometimes comes across that people want everything in this game to be :

a) Easy
b) Automated to some degree to avoid mistakes or having to do stuff
c) Highly Profitable

 

[ChaosCloud]

No system can fix operator error. You chose the wrong selection and no amount of rework can stop that.

Do you want to delete the file?

*Yes*

Are you sure?

*Yes*

"Oh, I didn't mean to do that! Stupid machine isn't designed right."

Lovely example if it weren't for the fact that there's no confirmation ("Are you sure?") and placing the cursor by default on "vent first non-empty bin" doesn't do a lot for preventing user error.

But you are right that it's my fault, my fault for bothering with mining while the refinery UI is clearly not ment to be used for extended periods of mining.

I like the fact it asks you to pay attention to what you are doing. Not much, but enough to keep you concentrating. Maybe I'm wrong, but it sometimes comes across that people want everything in this game to be :

a) Easy
b) Automated to some degree to avoid mistakes or having to do stuff
c) Highly Profitable

Can't agree with the "enough to keep you concentrating", though I'm bad at concentrating to begin with so my opinion is probably worth less than a sidewinder.
But I find it too monotonous to keep concentrating, my brain just shuts down mostly because of the repetevity.
The part where I am most concentrated is probably while I'm trying to figure the rotation axis out to get a good extraction point.

I can totally understand why full automation would be out of the question, I'm not that dense.
But just the above outlined accidental instant venting of valuables just due to bad UI design could atleast be addressed.
It's even dead simple to fix, just STOP the cursor from jumping to the next vent button and instead keep it sitting on the now hidden vent button, that would already solve the whole issue as bins aren't filled automatically and to get the cursor back in the first place would you have to move it first.

Or am I just insane for considering the UI bad for the simple fact that I vented painite the other day because it was in the 2nd bin and gallite in the 1st and I wanted to vent the gallite, a drone came in and finished the gallite and the UI simply went "oh the gallite is gone, lets vent the painite now"?
Well I probably am insane for not wanting to wait until all drones came to a stand still just because the UI is "bad"

 

[BillD]

I really HATE the refinery UI, I had 70+% Painite in my 2nd bin, Gallite in the 1st, wanted to dump it, a drone came in and finished that one, cursor jumped INSTANTLY down and I vented the Painite, thanks for that FD.

I Agree with you, in that the circumstances that cause this are a bit silly and easily avoidable, but its not such a big flaw that you need to redesign everything. I definitely don't want confirmations, there is enough to do already. There is an issue where stuff can come into the hopper and due to lag not be allocated straight away. It has caught me out where I saw Indite waiting to be allocated and automatically pressed the void button to flush it, but it actually was already allocated to a slot. So after I pressed the void, button, it was allocated after a short delay, the cursor moved to the first slot instead and it clicks that button voiding what you have in slot one instead.
Sounds long winded but it happens in a split second when your are going flat out with 3 drones. A simple fix is the void incoming button is always there regardless. So the cursor does not magically jump to the first slot.
It is generally poor ui practice to have buttons that change location or can disappear while you are using them moving focus to another button Automatically.
It has happened to me enough times for me to simply not allocate an expensive ore to the top bin. that way if it does occur, its no big deal.