Do i need a friend at frontier to find void opal in rings?

[pakriksz]

Or a cheat that i need? A DLC? Some people talk about a lot of mined void opals, yet in an icy ring with pristine reserves, in a void opal hotspot, i've used 40 prospector limpets, and found only one rock with void opals, no matter what colour they have in pulse wave scanner. Others have only junk content (water, hydrogen peroxide, bromellite, oxygen, etc).

If i look at how much time i spent searching for void opals, i'd earn much more in metallic rings if i were there. What is the secret?

 

[Backelaer]

In my experience there's still rng inolved. Sometimes I find multiple in a relatively short period, sometimes it's about 1/40 limpets like you. I scouted a couple of systems just outside the bubble where there's void opals so when one location doesn't offer me the goods, I jump to the next one.

 

[Lobey]

I always found Neptune's ring to be pretty good for them - pulse the scanner, the image intensifies after the second pulse is the best way I can describe it - it's not colour so much as it's "density" your looking at - when you recognize the pattern of a "core" roid you'll practically never waste a probe again. If your not finding a core roid of one type or other after 8-10 mins - go elsewhere as that instance\area might be mined out.

 

[Heater]

I just mined 196 t in about 3 hours... so I do not know what your doing wrong...
Can you post a video of it? maybe we can help you out.

 

[MadKonigKynalak]

Or a cheat that i need? A DLC? Some people talk about a lot of mined void opals, yet in an icy ring with pristine reserves, in a void opal hotspot, i've used 40 prospector limpets, and found only one rock with void opals, no matter what colour they have in pulse wave scanner. Others have only junk content (water, hydrogen peroxide, bromellite, oxygen, etc).

If i look at how much time i spent searching for void opals, i'd earn much more in metallic rings if i were there. What is the secret?

You're prospecting the wrong colour rocks. The ones you want are like a bright gold colour, and a certain shape. As far as colour goes, if you're not sure if its a bright gold one chances are its not. Pay attention to the rock shape when you find one, and it will make future prospecting much easier.

 

[Kentai]

Or a cheat that i need? A DLC? Some people talk about a lot of mined void opals, yet in an icy ring with pristine reserves, in a void opal hotspot, i've used 40 prospector limpets, and found only one rock with void opals, no matter what colour they have in pulse wave scanner. Others have only junk content (water, hydrogen peroxide, bromellite, oxygen, etc).

If i look at how much time i spent searching for void opals, i'd earn much more in metallic rings if i were there. What is the secret?

Have you checked for visual fissures on the asteroids? They'll be selectable once you use a prospector limpet but you can save your limpets and time if you can recognize them visually. Only asteroids with fissures can be detonated for void opals afaik. Using your ship lights or better yet night vision can make the fissures easier to spot. They'll look kind of like light green spider webs on a darker green background with night vision. I've also heard that only one model of asteroid in the icy rings is able to be detonated so once you find a void opal asteroid again take note of its shape. Any other contenders for detonation will be that same model. Once you can recognize that asteroid shape from a distance you'll save even more time as you'll be able to visually rule out non-contenders, even the ones that appear fairly yellow after using the pulse wave scanner.

If you have some time this video helped me a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMZPQ-PSYgk

At around 8 minutes in he'll show you what these fissures look like using night vision.

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

I had this problem too. You just have to learn how to be more efficient at finding asteroids based on their brightness, size and shape. And once in a while you may just have a bad location and may need to move somewhere else or just reenter the instance.

 

[Captain Jack Sparrow]

Have you checked for visual fissures on the asteroids? They'll be selectable once you use a prospector limpet but you can save your limpets and time if you can recognize them visually. Only asteroids with fissures can be detonated for void opals afaik. Using your ship lights or better yet night vision can make the fissures easier to spot. They'll look kind of like light green spider webs on a darker green background with night vision. I've also heard that only one model of asteroid in the icy rings is able to be detonated so once you find a void opal asteroid again take note of its shape. Any other contenders for detonation will be that same model. Once you can recognize that asteroid shape from a distance you'll save even more time as you'll be able to visually rule out non-contenders, even the ones that appear fairly yellow after using the pulse wave scanner.

If you have some time this video helped me a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMZPQ-PSYgk

At around 8 minutes in he'll show you what these fissures look like using night vision.

If the rock isn't bright yellow, it's not going to be void opal, but you want him to fly up and inspect the roids fissures visually? That's absurd. You can launch a prospector and find out much quicker than flying up on every bright yellow rock that has fissures. Void Opals aren't the only roids that have fissures. Any rock with a deep core of LTD, Alexanderite or Grandiderite will have have fissures too. I've also found that the "shape" is over stated as they aren't exactly identical. Sometimes, you can fly for awhile and simply not find a candidate and it's not because you not finding them, it's because they aren't there. Someone once said that they are always rotating. Not true. 2 of them I found last night were not rotating, at all, while others rotating and it's not the first time that has happened. Seems that players like to make these statements and pass them off as "facts" when that's far from the truth. Much akin to the old way of hunting HGE. Bro-science of "fly this speed while doing this from the main star, blah blah blah" which was all . It was RNG, plain and simple and there was no way to manipulate it. I'm starting to think VO mining is the same.


Personally, I think people exaggerate the amount of void opal they find in a time period. A friend and I found an unexplored system way out past coal sacks. So that ruled out "exhausted" which was our intention of flying out that far. We split up to 2 of the planets. 3 hours later, we each only had 63 tons. Moved to another void opal hot spot in another system and after snagging 1 void opal roid entering that hot spot, it was over 45 minutes before I found a second one. Sometimes you can fly for several minutes with little to no orange roids and zero yellow. I mention the orange because every time one of these threads pops up, people act like the problem is that OP can't find the bright yellow VO roid in the sea of almost yellow roids. FWIW, I've now mined VO's in more than a dozen systems and most of that has been outside the bubble. It's great money, but I don't think it's as quick and easy as people make it seem.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

Or a cheat that i need? A DLC? Some people talk about a lot of mined void opals, yet in an icy ring with pristine reserves, in a void opal hotspot, i've used 40 prospector limpets, and found only one rock with void opals, no matter what colour they have in pulse wave scanner. Others have only junk content (water, hydrogen peroxide, bromellite, oxygen, etc).

If i look at how much time i spent searching for void opals, i'd earn much more in metallic rings if i were there. What is the secret?

Try to avoid the centre of the hotspot. Unless it's a fairly empty or out of the way system, it's probably being mined by other players.

I had more luck about 2-4Mm out.

 

[JetsonRING]

Or a cheat that i need? A DLC? Some people talk about a lot of mined void opals, yet in an icy ring with pristine reserves, in a void opal hotspot, i've used 40 prospector limpets, and found only one rock with void opals, no matter what colour they have in pulse wave scanner. Others have only junk content (water, hydrogen peroxide, bromellite, oxygen, etc). If i look at how much time i spent searching for void opals, i'd earn much more in metallic rings if i were there. What is the secret?

When I first began void opal deep-core mining I made a post very much like yours, frustrated at my seeming inability to find void opal mother-lodes.

As with anything else in Elite Dangerous there is a learning curve. The first time I tried void opal mining I must have wasted a couple hundred prospector limpets for very little return but, after a while, as I stuck with it I began to recognize mother-lodes in the pulse wave scanner results, learned to recognize them even more by sight as I got closer to them and then confirmed their appearance with prospector limpets.

I have earned a few billion credits mining void opals and even though I am getting better at recognizing them I still go through a lot of prospector limpets. I am guessing that with even more practice I will get even better and eventually be using fewer and fewer prospector limpets.

A couple of tips:

Absolutely FILL YOUR CARGO RACKS WITH LIMPETS before starting out. You might use a dozen or more before finding your first mother-lode and so by that time will have room for ores in your cargo racks. It is far, far better to discard a few limpets over the side to make room for ores than having to return to a station to buy limpets or even to synthesize them.

Void opal mother-lodes, when pulsed are generally bright yellow/gold, medium sized and popped popcorn shaped.
At a certain, near medium distance you will see, as you pulse the mother-lodes, black lines indicating fissures.
Once a prospector limpet is attached the precise locations of the fissures where the seismic charges need to be set will be indicated and labeled.
Void opal mother-lodes tend (for me at least) to be near the top & bottom "edges" of rings, presumably to give CMDRs room to more easily gain some distance when blowing up mother-lodes. Note in the picture below the mother-lode is close to the "top" edge of the ring, near open space:

 

[zipline]

For me, they have always been a bright gold colour that got even brighter towards the end of the pulse wave and acted that same way even when close by. I sometimes spot the fissures, but mostly I just fire a prospector at them. I still get false positives and often other cores like LTDs or Alexandrite, but they still pay well. If you find multiple hotspots on a ring go for the shaded ones if possible as it is much easier to spot the potentials way off in the distance. If I don't get a result after about 20 mins I move on as I believe RNG and other cmdrs mining that area means success isn't always guaranteed. Maybe you can make 100 million per hour, not been my experience, but I have taken my time and enjoyed the tranquility and still made very good profits.

 

[Feros-da-Grundig]

I recommend to sub r/eliteminers. Personally I feel this is one area of game mechanics the best experts are not on this forum. Unless CMDR SpanningTheBlack is here too. I put in some research there myself but that CMDR is an information geyser about mining.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EliteMiners/comments/amgbyh/core_density_determinants/

https://old.reddit.com/r/EliteMiners/comments/amtb3q/pristine_hotspots_table/

 

[Sylow]

[...]

Nicely written. One thing i also learned when doing that: when you have too many limpets, remember to set limpets to ignore, so your collector limpets don't just always try to collect the limpets again, which you just jetisoned.

 

[JetsonRING]

remember to set limpets to ignore, so your collector limpets don't just always try to collect the limpets again, which you just jettisoned.

When I jettison limpets I simply use the "JETTISON (ABANDON)" button which apparently sets them to "ignore". o7

 

[pakriksz]

Why is video needed? About 60 prospector limpets sent to shining, and some non shining rocks, and 1 of them had some void opals, and one some low temperature diamonds both in pristine hotspots.

I don't care about limpets lost, they are cheap. Just i wrote it to show how rarely i get any prize...

I've jut tried a trade loop route, and i'm earning 2 million every 15 min, while i'v earned 6 million in 4 hours searching for opal and diamonds...

 

[Deleted member 38366]

This is a before - after Screenshot Collection I made to calibrate my eyes in the early days of Core Mining...

Note that lighting conditions have a profound effect on the specific color you're looking for from a distance.
Only when fairly close-up, the trick of maintaining the Pulse Wave Scanner depressed revealing a 1 sec inverted color-scheme will give a very reliable indicator if an Asteroid is truly a Core Asteroid.

The coloring can change when closing in to inside ~3-4km, then again when approaching it to inside ~1.5km; thus not everything that looks very promising from a distance is good - but the opposite is also true.
Average looking ones from a distance can become ultra-bright inside 4-5km under some lighting conditions.

Also note that the smallest type of Asteroids never seem to be a Core Asteroid - presumably because there's no destruction/explosion modeling for these in the 1st place, ruling them out.

Additional trick : when well inside the dust area of a blown-up Asteroid, any nearby Core Asteroid is often very easy to spot when Pulse Scanning from that position, if one exists. Doesn't always work, but can sometimes result in a "lucky streak".

PS. I like entering Hotspots with 1000-3000km from the Center, if the Hotspot size permits it. Had a few well-known spots that didn't yield any Core Asteroid within 100km of the Hotspot center.
Just a theory, but approaching the Hotspot center from a larger distance so far tended to produce a nice yield, presumably/possibly because noone ever mined in that exact position.

Spoiler

 

[Red Anders]

Why is video needed? About 60 prospector limpets sent to shining, and some non shining rocks, and 1 of them had some void opals, and one some low temperature diamonds both in pristine hotspots.

I don't care about limpets lost, they are cheap. Just i wrote it to show how rarely i get any prize...

I've jut tried a trade loop route, and i'm earning 2 million every 15 min, while i'v earned 6 million in 4 hours searching for opal and diamonds...

So what do you want, advice or a pity party? If it's advice, lots of people gave you some - you could always do something crazy like say thanks. If it's a pity party, well fine but don't be shocked if people don't particularly care.

 

[Marklar_]

Why is video needed? About 60 prospector limpets sent to shining, and some non shining rocks, and 1 of them had some void opals, and one some low temperature diamonds both in pristine hotspots.

I don't care about limpets lost, they are cheap. Just i wrote it to show how rarely i get any prize...

I've jut tried a trade loop route, and i'm earning 2 million every 15 min, while i'v earned 6 million in 4 hours searching for opal and diamonds...

If you sent out 60 limpets and only found two cores, then you don't know how to use the scanner properly to find cores and need to work on that. If you understand how to spot the right rocks, you'll know right away from a good distance whether or not it has a core. When I approach to launch a prospector limpet I already know it has a core, the only question is what kind.

Also, just because a ring is pristine doesn't mean that the void opal hotspots aren't depleted, the pristine/depleted status of the ring itself doesn't seem to have much to do with the hotspots as far as I've been able to tell. In a good hotspot VO rocks are easy to find, when I'm in a good one oftentimes when I find a VO rock my collector limpets are still up from the last time. When they start getting hard to find, I move to another hotspot. Sometimes it's hard to find a good hotspot, but when you do you don't have to pray to RNGJesus to find a VO rock, they're fairly common.

 

[Kentai]

If the rock isn't bright yellow, it's not going to be void opal, but you want him to fly up and inspect the roids fissures visually? That's absurd. You can launch a prospector and find out much quicker than flying up on every bright yellow rock that has fissures. Void Opals aren't the only roids that have fissures. Any rock with a deep core of LTD, Alexanderite or Grandiderite will have have fissures too. I've also found that the "shape" is over stated as they aren't exactly identical. Sometimes, you can fly for awhile and simply not find a candidate and it's not because you not finding them, it's because they aren't there. Someone once said that they are always rotating. Not true. 2 of them I found last night were not rotating, at all, while others rotating and it's not the first time that has happened. Seems that players like to make these statements and pass them off as "facts" when that's far from the truth. Much akin to the old way of hunting HGE. Bro-science of "fly this speed while doing this from the main star, blah blah blah" which was all . It was RNG, plain and simple and there was no way to manipulate it. I'm starting to think VO mining is the same.


Personally, I think people exaggerate the amount of void opal they find in a time period. A friend and I found an unexplored system way out past coal sacks. So that ruled out "exhausted" which was our intention of flying out that far. We split up to 2 of the planets. 3 hours later, we each only had 63 tons. Moved to another void opal hot spot in another system and after snagging 1 void opal roid entering that hot spot, it was over 45 minutes before I found a second one. Sometimes you can fly for several minutes with little to no orange roids and zero yellow. I mention the orange because every time one of these threads pops up, people act like the problem is that OP can't find the bright yellow VO roid in the sea of almost yellow roids. FWIW, I've now mined VO's in more than a dozen systems and most of that has been outside the bubble. It's great money, but I don't think it's as quick and easy as people make it seem.

OP is clearly aware of the pulsewave scanner and how to use it, as they say in their post that they're finding low quality ore even in asteroids that are glowing. That led me to believe that they may be firing prospector limpets into non-core asteroids, so I wanted to help them identify contenders rather than wasting prospectors. I did a lot of this so I didn't want them to go through it too. There's no way to tell what type of core it will be that I'm aware of but aren't void opals only from cores? So why not help them be able to discern which of the bright yellow asteroids to fire prospectors into? I've been fooled by variable lighting too many times and wasted too many limpets to rely on the color alone so having a second way to qualify asteroids is useful.

 

[Lobey]

JetsonRING's screenshot shows exactly what you are looking for - that black hatched pattern in a bright roid will always be a "core" - luck and rng have very little to do with it - it's the difference between finding 3 in 20 mins or 3 in 45 mins if you happen to hit on an already well mined spot.
Just because a ring is someplace very remote might not mean it's all that unique btw - I strongly suspect that certain ring types and instances are shared across different locations (can't prove that, but it seems very likely) - so a ring around say Neptune might share an instance with one at Shinrarta for example.
Also I suspect some folks might be see-ing something different depending on video card and driver - if you never see pattern's like in that screenshot - might be worth checking for updated video drivers (can't hurt).