A Quick Mining Pass

[Kastor]

Mining is currently a mixed bag, if you farm palladium it's a LOT of money early game but pales in comparison to trading and bounty hunting later in the game.
Some problems:

• No one picks up the less valuable minerals.
• Big ships have no benefit when mining as cargo capacity is rarely a issue in mining.
• Bigger mining lasers don't confer any real boon.

I'd like to see a couple of simple change come to pass that I believe will balance out mining a bit and make it more viable late game.
Cheaper minerals should have a bigger yield per chunk. To the point where the cheapest ones will fill one or two cargo containers with one chunk. This makes mining less valuable ones more viable and gives ships with large cargo capacities a place in mining.
Bigger mining lasers should produce chunks with higher yeild, bigger laser, bigger chunk. This will help bigger ships fill up and give a reason to use the bigger lasers.

Mining is more dangerous than trading but is less rewarding once you get a cobra or bigger. This should help^

 

[Kadius]

Yield is determined by the quality of the field/belt, i.e depleted, pristine. Larger lasers just mine faster, don't think that needs to be changed.

They've already mentioned somewhere that, as it is, mining is barebones and will be improved upon, however with wings being beta tested till March, I wouldn't hold my breathe on improvements incoming anytime in the near future.


ps. people still mine?!

 

[Kastor]

I feel you have missed the point. My point is minerals that are cheap and common should always have a higher yield to balance them against the expensive ones. The quality of the field can still be factored in, so a high quality field would give gold that fills a container after 5 fragments and bertrandite that fills almost two containers with one fragment while depleted fields give 5% slivers of gold and 20% chunks of bertrandite.

In relation to your second point these are relatively simple changes that should* only require variable changes. So would be easy to implement long before they implement the other mining changes (drones and stuff)

*I could be wrong but that's how i would have programed it.

 

[Anteares]

Also...

While we're at it can we get a tapping utility that shows the asteroid on our radar as blue or a different color...or maybe allows the targeting of the asteroid with a sensor for what material it contained. I'm tired flying around and forgetting which asteroids I've already hit up. Its bad enough with the tiny cargo scoop box...but that I can understand. I can't understand why we wouldn't have sensor technology for after you tapped a particular rock, it marks it as mined and/or visited.

 

[ianstrauss]

There should be a drone component in the game (should be extremely expensive) that automatically scoops all mined minerals.

Mining take tons of time because of scooping ind is not justified by the rewards.

Also, it would help if theres some sort of a Asteroid Scanner that will show you what metals/minerals can you et from individual asteroids.

 

[PocketWettie]

Class 2 Lasers do get those chunks out nearly 3 times as fast though.

All the other points I totally agree with.

 

[OneAmongOthers]

While we're at it can we get a tapping utility that shows the asteroid on our radar as blue or a different color...or maybe allows the targeting of the asteroid with a sensor for what material it contained. I'm tired flying around and forgetting which asteroids I've already hit up. Its bad enough with the tiny cargo scoop box...but that I can understand. I can't understand why we wouldn't have sensor technology for after you tapped a particular rock, it marks it as mined and/or visited.

leaving a signature on every single asteroid can be a problem. Especially in a ring surrounding a planet. There is thousands of asteroids there. Imagine how cluttered up your radar or sensor information panel would be of you had to sort through all them asteroids. Maybe just a way to "tag" the current asteroid we are mining on. Maybe a computer or scanner we have to install in one of the internal compartments.

 

[PocketWettie]

leaving a signature on every single asteroid can be a problem. Especially in a ring surrounding a planet. There is thousands of asteroids there. Imagine how cluttered up your radar or sensor information panel would be of you had to sort through all them asteroids. Maybe just a way to "tag" the current asteroid we are mining on. Maybe a computer or scanner we have to install in one of the internal compartments.

Or a strobe gun - pow! Asteroid flashy thing means dont bother. However needs to be that only the user firing the tag is the only one that sees it.

 

[Cmdr Thrudd]

I think we're more likely to get some sort of new panel added to the cockpit displays listing nearby asteroids and their scanned values (once we get the scanner)