Dramatically increase mining rates on lower-value mineable commodities.

[DemiserofD]

Some commodities are never, ever worth mining. I'm of the opinion that that shouldn't be the case; there should, at least, be OCCASIONAL circumstances in which mining anything can be a good idea.

For example, water currently is never worth mining, even in the same system as a faction in Drought, just because you can buy water and ship it in far more easily than you can mine it. I would like to propose a simple way to change this:

Dramatically increase the maximum percentage of lower-value rocks for mining.

For example, right now, the maximum percentage of an Icy rock is ~40%. That can be any combination of minerals, or just one. I'd propose removing the way these resources are tied together like this, and basing the cap of a given resource purely on the resource type. Water, for example, could have a cap of ~1000%.

Lets take a moment to analyze what this would actually mean. Water, in Drought or Famine, sells for a maximum of about 4000 credits. Rocks will give about 1/4th their percentage in tons of ore; for example, a rock with 40% Platinum will give about 10 platinum. So a player mining a rock with 1000% water would get one quarter of that, or about 250 water.

At 4000 credits per ton, that's the equivalent of one million credits per rock. By contrast, a 40% platinum rock would give you 10 platinum, each worth 300k, for a total value of about 3m.

This means a player might be able to mine a full cargo worth of water slightly faster than they could jump to another system to buy it, if the conditions(and prices) were right.

Similar changes could be made to most other mineable minerals. Bauxite, for example, could have a 500% increase in mining rate.

Again, the purpose here is not to make this more profitable than mining Platinum or other high-value commodities, at least not in most circumstances. it's simply to create occasional circumstances in which mining these minerals is a better alternative than simply buying it.

 

[Bottom Hat]

Non sarcastic question - didn't you do this thread a couple of weeks ago? Just curious as I thought it made some sense before.

 

[DemiserofD]

Non sarcastic question - didn't you do this thread a couple of weeks ago? Just curious as I thought it made some sense before.

No, but I did post it as a comment in another thread. I found myself thinking about it a little bit more, and decided to give it its own thread.

Glad you like it, though! The only real problem I can think of, is the fact that you'd basically fill up completely immediately. But that's not strictly a problem, it would just incentivize finding a station with a very nearby ring.

 

[Bottom Hat]

No, but I did post it as a comment in another thread. I found myself thinking about it a little bit more, and decided to give it its own thread.

Glad you like it, though! The only real problem I can think of, is the fact that you'd basically fill up completely immediately. But that's not strictly a problem, it would just incentivize finding a station with a very nearby ring.

Ah, that must be what I had in mind. I think the example of water for drought is a perfect one, and distance would be a bonus, as I imagine the majority of systems are within one jump of an icy ring.

 

[metatheurgist]

Would make more sense to reduce the over-abundance of "rare and valuable" commodities.

 

[Lugh]

The problem isn't that low value things need to be buffed its that rare things... well aren't rare.

rings need to have a finite amount of material in them as the amount goes down so does the spawn rate. this will mean once a spot is found and people flock to it it will be less viable to mine. as those points get mined out people need to go farther out to find new ones. don't want to go out then mine something more common.


Edit or the far better option of letting us build things either on a planet base or in carriers that require a variety of raw materials

 

[Jmanis]

The problem isn't that low value things need to be buffed its that rare things... well aren't rare.

But that's kind of the issue, right? Gold has equal rarity as, say, water. I worked it out once that if there was a mechanic which simply filled your hold with water instantly, on arrival at a belt, you still wouldn't earn anywhere near the rate as, say, mining osmium/plat/painite.

The impact on this is most noticable in mining missions; get 1m for mining 45t of methane clathrates or 15m for mining 45t of osmium. Both are equivalent effort, but one rewards 15 times more... it's a no brainer.... and to contrast the hour-or- more needed to do that methane clathrates mission against other missions, you could easily earn 50m in the same time doing any other missions, let alone the ~250m you could get from stacked massacres.

Pricing of mined goods should be (inversely) proportional to scarcity. The way it is right now is just dumb.

 

[Lugh]

Pricing of mined goods should be (inversely) proportional to scarcity. The way it is right now is just dumb.

yeah, the problem is there is no scarcity. that needs to be added before anything will change.

 

[RamirezKurita]

There's two separate issues at work here, both the relative lack of abundance of the "common" minerals as the OP suggests and the relative commonality of the "rare" minerals as pointed out by Lugh. Even if we could snap our fingers and magically fill our holds with the low-value commodities in a ring, they still wouldn't be worth mining due to the journey times. Both of these issues would have to be resolved simultaneously.

My suggestion for this would be for asteroids to have two composition profiles - a base mineral profile and a deposit mineral profile. When an asteroid begins to be mined it initially uses the combined mineral profiles, but as it becomes depleted it's profile begins to shift gradually to the just base mineral profile until eventually it's just giving fragments of the base minerals. Each asteroid would have a theoretically infinite amount of potential fragments under this scheme, although mining just the base minerals wouldn't be particularly economically viable.

Couple this with the rare minerals actually being rare, to the point where they are not viable to mine alone and should be mined as a by-product of other minerals, and you could end up with something workable where all minerals are worth holding onto under some circumstances. Basically, any mineable mineral with value in excess of 30k or so shouldn't be viable to extract alone, but should instead be considered a bonus if it is found on an asteroid with workable amounts of mid-value minerals. a 2% LTD deposit wouldn't be worth mining alone, but if it is on an asteroid that also contains 40% Bromellite (which would be worth mining), then a player would have to be mad to not also claim their free LTDs while mining the Bromellite.

For example, a metallic ring asteroid might have a deposit profile of 3% platinum and 35% samarium, while its base profile might be 30% gallite and 35% indite. The first few fragments dropped would therefore have economically viable amounts of Samarium and a touch of platinum (probably not worth mining unless you are also keeping the Samarium) on top of a fair amount of the low-value gallite and indite, but after 10 or so fragments, the "effective composition" would have fallen to around 1% platinum, 12% samarium, 30% gallite and 35% indite. After another 20-30 fragments, the asteroid will only be giving negligible amounts of the metals and would effectively only be providing the gallite and indite.

Such a system would not only make the lower-value minerals more viable to hold onto, particularly for slower miners that are more included to maximise their mileage from each asteroid, but would also raise the potential skill cap for mining efficiently as players would then have to make the call as to when to move onto the next asteroid rather than simply mining each asteroid to depletion. Players would have have decide whether to keep their base minerals, as the increase in rarity of the more expensive stuff will increase their economic viability and they would effectively become "free" as they would be mined alongside the good stuff from the same asteroids, rather than them being hidden away in their own economically unviable asteroids; the actual choice regarding the base would involve a lot of variables such as their ship's cargo capacity, their mining rate, their prospecting speed, travel time to stations and ultimately they would become far more situational.

 

[DemiserofD]

Would make more sense to reduce the over-abundance of "rare and valuable" commodities.

The trouble is, that alone can't solve the problem. You have to consider how quickly a player can jump systems and purchase those commodities. Water, for example, is very common; I wouldn't expect there to be a place where you have to jump more than two times in order to fill up your cargo hold. That means the total amount of time it would take you to trade water rather than mine it might be something like 14 minutes, in a worst-case scenario.

This means that, in order for water to ever be worth mining, you have to be able to fill up your cargo hold in approximately the same amount of time. Tweaking the more rare and valuable minerals might fix them, but it would do nothing to fix the problem of the cheaper minerals, which have just as many problems, if not more.