Frontier why is the motherlode now and egg cup full?

[Ceekay]

Unless you can see a surface fissure it's not going to be a core asteroid, I use the pulse wave to find a suitable roid and visually inspect it for fissures if there's none visible move on.

 

[B1rdy]

That isn't everyone's goal though, NeilF, and not everyone plays the game with efficiency being the primary criterion in any activity. You clearly do, and you keep doing you, but Frontier has done a pretty good job of putting more choice into Mining, and the most they *need* to do is reign in the top end a bit.

While your first claim is probably correct, it also shows, that FDev modelled their game against purposeful or directed play styles. But this is contrary to (a certain extend) to mining missions, which make the player "search" for specific stuff. The actual search is, however, limited to locating a ring with the desired ressources, but without providing tools for that besides the Galmap and bookmarks. If you are in the correct spot, it is just a dice roll if the resource in need is presented to you. Almost no skill involved at all, if you manage to not fly in circles. Firing prospector after prospector seems really awkward regarding the scope of the rings. They seem unfit for the task like cleaning a bathroom with a tooth brush. And the PWA is no help at all to locate resources. By the way how can the FSS and the probes detect the mining materials, anyway, but not their exact location?
From a game world integrity perspective as well as game mechanics perspective, mining is in a weird place. But that seems to be overlooked by the majority of players, because it generates cash.

Edit:

As usual, I was just doing it wrong (and how frontier had described how to do it in their demo videos...)

This makes me wonder, if FDev initially wanted core mining to be very rare. The first mining beta had only a very low amount of core deposits. It seems they then realised, their main feature is too rarely to be experienced and dialled the number of core deposits up so much it skewed the mining mechanics.

 

[Brrokk]

Just guessing, I think cores were meant to be found only very rarely and be an occasional bonus. I think that's why the wave scanner shows them glowing no brighter than many others; so that they wouldn't be farmed. But something went wrong in implementation and many players can see "tells" in the wave scanner glow. Reports have included green shading, black regions, flickering black squares and even an X-ray view of the core. I'm pretty sure these are all artefacts from people's graphics hardware and FD never intended them. That's why different people report different tells. I see the flickering black squares but not the other effects. It will be very hard to stop all these hardware effects from happening to return to the intended situation.