Advanced refinery

[Darty]

Every time I go mining, I think about this idea and how much fun it would be to have in game (imo of course).

The Advanced refinery would be a bit of an upgrade and a bit of a sidegrade to the existing refinery, similar to how enhanced performance thrusters are to thrusters. It would come in 3 sizes, size 4, size 5, and size 6. It would only be sold at Prospector's Rest. A size 4 advanced refinery would have 3 fewer bins than a normal refinery of the same grade, a size 5 would have 1 less, and a size 6 would have 1 more. It would also use much more power than a standard refinery. However, the bins of the advanced refinery would work differently. First off, they would be able to store up to 300% of a given resource, but for normal resources still creates a 1 ton canister at 100%. Secondly, if the resource is an ore (indite, galite, bertrandite, uraninite, rutile, coltan, lepidolite, and bauxite), the advanced refinery does not refine it at 100%, and instead waits until it gets to 300%, at which point it refines it into the metal the ore is of. This process will generally give you 2.5 x the max sell price per ton, but at the cost of requiring 3x the fragments to get one ton.

The advanced refinery would offer players more of a choice when mining. The current meta in mining (I believe) is to only go after the 3 p's and maybe osmium for missions. However, there are other ways of mining, including mining every asteroid you come across. For the former type of mining, the advanced refinery wouldn't be very useful, but for the later or a mix between the two, it would be very useful as it would greatly increase the amount of money they can make per ton without requiring them to be extremely picky. It would also allow players to mine metal rich rings and get metals like titanium and lithium which are often source and return mission items, which would allow miners to complete those types of missions as they can with ones that want gold or silver.

Overall, it would help diversify mining and give players more options, which is always good.

 

[space voyager]

3x the fragments for 2.5x the price? Considering how refining works, meaning that basically you take almost full load of limpets to get what... 3/4 of the load in refined materials, it would mean you'd get even less (1/6) worth for a single trip.

I'm not a full time miner, so please don't be mad if I'm not spot on, these are my experiences.

That said, I like the idea for an advanced refinery. It might be easier to implement a bit differently though, as your proposition involves a different price for the same material, which is an additional attribute for the game to handle (whether it was mined with an advanced refinery or not). An easier solution would be for the refinery to need less fragments to refine the product - this way you'd at least get more worth for your time investment.

Mining definitely needs a buff and an advanced refinery could be one way. More highly paid mining missions would be another.

 

[Cavindar]

3x the fragments for 2.5x the price? Considering how refining works, meaning that basically you take almost full load of limpets to get what... 3/4 of the load in refined materials, it would mean you'd get even less (1/6) worth for a single trip.

I'm not a full time miner, so please don't be mad if I'm not spot on, these are my experiences.

That said, I like the idea for an advanced refinery. It might be easier to implement a bit differently though, as your proposition involves a different price for the same material, which is an additional attribute for the game to handle (whether it was mined with an advanced refinery or not). An easier solution would be for the refinery to need less fragments to refine the product - this way you'd at least get more worth for your time investment.

Mining definitely needs a buff and an advanced refinery could be one way. More highly paid mining missions would be another.

How about both mining needs some loving after all.

 

[Lestat]

I wish they advanced the mining to the planet.

 

[Darty]

3x the fragments for 2.5x the price? Considering how refining works, meaning that basically you take almost full load of limpets to get what... 3/4 of the load in refined materials, it would mean you'd get even less (1/6) worth for a single trip.

I'm not a full time miner, so please don't be mad if I'm not spot on, these are my experiences.

That said, I like the idea for an advanced refinery. It might be easier to implement a bit differently though, as your proposition involves a different price for the same material, which is an additional attribute for the game to handle (whether it was mined with an advanced refinery or not). An easier solution would be for the refinery to need less fragments to refine the product - this way you'd at least get more worth for your time investment.

Mining definitely needs a buff and an advanced refinery could be one way. More highly paid mining missions would be another.

Most of the time miners are able to bring way more limpets than they need. If you don't target anything while deploying a collector, it will collect ANYTHING that is a valid target until it's lifetime is over. You can easily get dozens of fragments out of a single collector.

Also, I think you misunderstand what I meant by 2.5x the price. The refinery wouldn't be giving you the same commodity but worth 2.5x more, it would be giving you a different one that was more valuable. The logic behind this is that a lot of the resources you can mine are described as ores by the game, meaning that they can be smelted into a metal. That's what the advanced refinery is supposed to do, refine the fragments and then smelt them into the metal, which is worth between 2-3x more than the ore.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I like the idea of being able to mine titanium, gallium, etc.

But I don't like the way you are just raising the classes. A class 5 slot is twice the size of a class 4, a class 6 one is 4 times a class 4. So you are using the same arbitrary module scaling that FD has applied to limpet controllers. This starts getting ridiculous at the larger module sizes.

Reducing an ore (removing oxygen) would be a lot easier to achieve than purifying various ores. There is no need to require larger module slots to do this.
Also, 300% the fragments is too many. 150% would be sufficient to account for removing the oxygen/sulphur/etc.

 

[space voyager]

Most of the time miners are able to bring way more limpets than they need. If you don't target anything while deploying a collector, it will collect ANYTHING that is a valid target until it's lifetime is over. You can easily get dozens of fragments out of a single collector.

Also, I think you misunderstand what I meant by 2.5x the price. The refinery wouldn't be giving you the same commodity but worth 2.5x more, it would be giving you a different one that was more valuable. The logic behind this is that a lot of the resources you can mine are described as ores by the game, meaning that they can be smelted into a metal. That's what the advanced refinery is supposed to do, refine the fragments and then smelt them into the metal, which is worth between 2-3x more than the ore.

I admit I'm not sure what you mean. Ore is worthless right now. Advanced ref. would be giving me a different commodity than what I was refining? I'm probably reading this wrong, because that would mean my silver fragments would turn into gold? If that is the proposed mechanics I'd stick to normal refinery. I want to get what I'm mining as usually I'm mining a certain commodity for a reason. I don't think I've ever just mined for the sake of mining and selling the full cargo hold.

BTW, mining silver and gold for the stations being repaired is at least somewhat profitable right now as the stations are giving out missions. Those pay more than the metals' worth.

Anyway, when you're looking for a certain commodity, you'll spend quite some limpets for prospecting. And many of the limpets will drop while looking for the next asteroid with the same commodity.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

This is quite an interesting proposition.

Especially if the base mineral ores don't just morph into the primary metal, but also provide small amounts of the more valuable metals they also typically contain.

E.g. Bauxite is mostly about the Aluminium but because of the sheer volume of it that gets processed, it is also the world's primary source of Gallium.

 

[Darty]

I like the idea of being able to mine titanium, gallium, etc.

But I don't like the way you are just raising the classes. A class 5 slot is twice the size of a class 4, a class 6 one is 4 times a class 4. So you are using the same arbitrary module scaling that FD has applied to limpet controllers. This starts getting ridiculous at the larger module sizes.

Reducing an ore (removing oxygen) would be a lot easier to achieve than purifying various ores. There is no need to require larger module slots to do this.
Also, 300% the fragments is too many. 150% would be sufficient to account for removing the oxygen/sulphur/etc.

I'm not too set on the refinery class system, I just threw it out there as a possible way of doing it. I would also prefer if it was twice the bins for every size, but I since the normal refinery doesn't work that way I didn't want to add more inconsistency there. I think normal refineries should also double bin count every size, but thats beyond the scope of this suggestion.

I do think there should be a bin should be less for the advanced refinery, as each bin can hold more. This is part of the reason I chose to suggest larger slots, because an advanced refinery with 10 bins each holding 300% could store 30 tons worth of metals (for example 300% gold in each slot), which would be more than a typical size 4 cargo rack.

I chose 300% because refinery stations do exist, and they tend to buy the ores at 1/2 - 1/3 the cost of the smelted product and I didn't want the advanced refinery to be more efficient than the station refineries, because why would anyone want to build a big expensive station refinery if any old fart could run a more efficient version off of their cobra.

 

[Darty]

I admit I'm not sure what you mean. Ore is worthless right now. Advanced ref. would be giving me a different commodity than what I was refining? I'm probably reading this wrong, because that would mean my silver fragments would turn into gold? If that is the proposed mechanics I'd stick to normal refinery. I want to get what I'm mining as usually I'm mining a certain commodity for a reason. I don't think I've ever just mined for the sake of mining and selling the full cargo hold.

BTW, mining silver and gold for the stations being repaired is at least somewhat profitable right now as the stations are giving out missions. Those pay more than the metals' worth.

Anyway, when you're looking for a certain commodity, you'll spend quite some limpets for prospecting. And many of the limpets will drop while looking for the next asteroid with the same commodity.

There are 2 classes of resources you can get from mining. Metals, like gold, silver, osmium, ect, and mineral ores, like galite, indite, uraninite ect. Ores are refined into metals at refinery stations, which is why they buy minerals and sell metals. The advanced refinery would refine metals the same way the normal refinery does, but for the ores it would fill all the way up to 300% and then refine the ore into the associated metal.

Again, limpets aren't really an issue as ores tend to be more common than metals anyway (meaning you need fewer to find a vein) and large ships are already able to bring 2-3x the limpets they need if they are being picky. Part of the purpose of the advanced refinery would be to help make bulk mining (grabbing just about everything) more profitable, so I really don't think limpets are going to be an issue.

 

[space voyager]

AH, now I get it... Sorry it took a while and thanks for the explanations.

 

[John Streutker]

It is an interesting idea, but I think the new update might render it obsolete. If I'm not mistaken, you can now set the refinery to ignore certain fragments. The need for prospecting limpets is going away unless you really, really want to find that one type really fast. Now you can just mine every rock with collectors out, they'll pick up everything and vent unwanted crap so you'll always have bin-space for what you want. It won't create the metals, but you're only going to get the really valuable stuff that you choose.

 

[MadDogMurdock]

It is an interesting idea, but I think the new update might render it obsolete. If I'm not mistaken, you can now set the refinery to ignore certain fragments. The need for prospecting limpets is going away unless you really, really want to find that one type really fast. Now you can just mine every rock with collectors out, they'll pick up everything and vent unwanted crap so you'll always have bin-space for what you want. It won't create the metals, but you're only going to get the really valuable stuff that you choose.

Prospectors still multiply the number of fragments - essential mining kit IMO

 

[John Streutker]

Prospectors still multiply the number of fragments - essential mining kit IMO

I was not aware... So even if you're not looking for something specific you should just hit the rock with a prospector first? I've done all the mining I think I'll ever do but that's good to know. Thanks.

 

[Darty]

It is an interesting idea, but I think the new update might render it obsolete. If I'm not mistaken, you can now set the refinery to ignore certain fragments. The need for prospecting limpets is going away unless you really, really want to find that one type really fast. Now you can just mine every rock with collectors out, they'll pick up everything and vent unwanted crap so you'll always have bin-space for what you want. It won't create the metals, but you're only going to get the really valuable stuff that you choose.

If you are mining everything and filtering out any resource worth less than a certain amount this would still help you because low value ores are very common so being able to refine them into a more valuable metal would still increase the rate you fill up your hold quite significantly.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I was not aware... So even if you're not looking for something specific you should just hit the rock with a prospector first? I've done all the mining I think I'll ever do but that's good to know. Thanks.

Yep. Even strip-mining (keeping everything), it's much more efficient to use prospector limpets.