Engineers Mining for materials in rings

[Renascent Angel]

I can't seem to find a guide to explain how to do this most efficiently. Can someone point me to one? Or at least help me out?

Right now, I'm looking for Zirconium. But I've never done mining before so I don't know the best places to look. The rings don't tell you what materials they have in them, so how do you know?

I just spent about an hour mining in a hazrez pristine ring without a single drop of Zirconium. I got Molybdenum and Chromium though so I know that rare mats are still dropping. Where do you find Zirconium?

Before you ask: No, I will not do SRVs. Driving them is such a ridiculous pain in the that I ragequit that .

 

[YinYin]

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/337796-testing-of-mining-for-materials

You only know via trial and error. Every ring will only have 3 elements of the group Zr is in. So if you come across 3 others this one won't have it. At all.


The very best approach is going for metal rich rings. Particularly high content asteroids in extraction sites.

edit: some more pointers considering you might not know any of this

Class 2 mining lasers have the best efficiency (fragments/distributor energy).

If you don't have a refinery, collector limpets will ignore fragments and only go for the material drops.

An A grade prospector will boost the amount of fragment drops and thus likely the amount of possible material drops as well.

You also get more fragments from asteroids within 20 km of an extraction site (intensity doesn't matter).

And you can return to any asteroid for the same content. They replenish after 2 hours.

 

[Renascent Angel]

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/337796-testing-of-mining-for-materials
You also get more fragments from asteroids within 20 km of an extraction site (intensity doesn't matter).

Really? So there's no point in particular in going to a hazrez site over others for mats then?

 

[YinYin]

Yeah, fragment count is the same.

Higher intensity means higher average resource % on the asteroids.
It might however also mean higher average material content on asteroids (more medium/high labels).

Since you won't be bothered by pirates just collecting materials you can certainly go for hazardous in case it does have more asteroids with higher content.