Well cmdrs,
This weekend was my first attempt at mining, and as I wanted to experience the void opal boom for myself, I opted for deep core asteroid mining.
So I kitted out my phantom with 96 tons of cargo space, prospecting & collection limpet controllers, a small refinery, a small shield gen, a small fuel scoop, my DSS, a pulse wave scanner, 2 seismhic charge launchers and an abrasion blaster, gosh, there is a lot of gear in there tat I have never used before, but I was pre-armed with all the help from cmdrs on here & youtube.
Started on Friday morning and most of my playtime was spent on kitting out the ship, but I managed a little time around some icy rings and despite being a complete newbie, I still managed to snaffle about 7 tons of void opals and some bromelite. After logging in & out an npc pirate appeared so I had to scurry back to a nearby base that inara said were paying £1.6m for VOs but only got half that.
On Saturday I headed to another system, and after many hours of play, snaffled nearly 25+ VOs, 35+ LT diamonds and some alexandrite, got interdicted on wayback to another base and somehow managed to escape a hatch breaker limpet through high waking and made it back and this time got the full payout ... funds started looking very healthy.
Today had my last run, not as successful but got two smaller hauls of mainly VOs and headed back to same base as yesterday and got £1.6m the first time but only half that the second time.
With the npc pirates, as others have said, they only seem to spawn after you first drop into the hotspot, so if your cargo is empty they just scan you and eventually high wake out, I just followed them around and scanned them (one drop had 4) until they got bored and went, after then I would enjoy uninterrupted mining, and if I needed a break I would head back to a base, outrun the usual interdiction on the way and sell my cargo so I could start the next session empty again.
I did find locating the asteroids a bit hit and miss though. I got better over time and just went for the ones that stayed bright gold even when close and then just fired a prospecting limpet at them. I did start to notice roid shapes that would glow bright from a distance and dull when close so stopped wasting my time with them. I suppose this aspect of mining i. e. the false positives is how I guess it would be in the real world, so whilst a little frustrating, realistic!
I did struggle with the seismic charges a little, sometimes too low and had to go back and other times too high so lower yield, but part of this I think may be due to a PS4 bug with fissure targeting, but I definitely improved over the 3 days.
So, all in all I thought asteroid mining was quite fun, not really a grind and with good payouts, and I certainly won't be selling my mining gear, I'll store it up for now as I will definitely be doing it again.
This weekend was my first attempt at mining, and as I wanted to experience the void opal boom for myself, I opted for deep core asteroid mining.
So I kitted out my phantom with 96 tons of cargo space, prospecting & collection limpet controllers, a small refinery, a small shield gen, a small fuel scoop, my DSS, a pulse wave scanner, 2 seismhic charge launchers and an abrasion blaster, gosh, there is a lot of gear in there tat I have never used before, but I was pre-armed with all the help from cmdrs on here & youtube.
Started on Friday morning and most of my playtime was spent on kitting out the ship, but I managed a little time around some icy rings and despite being a complete newbie, I still managed to snaffle about 7 tons of void opals and some bromelite. After logging in & out an npc pirate appeared so I had to scurry back to a nearby base that inara said were paying £1.6m for VOs but only got half that.
On Saturday I headed to another system, and after many hours of play, snaffled nearly 25+ VOs, 35+ LT diamonds and some alexandrite, got interdicted on wayback to another base and somehow managed to escape a hatch breaker limpet through high waking and made it back and this time got the full payout ... funds started looking very healthy.
Today had my last run, not as successful but got two smaller hauls of mainly VOs and headed back to same base as yesterday and got £1.6m the first time but only half that the second time.
With the npc pirates, as others have said, they only seem to spawn after you first drop into the hotspot, so if your cargo is empty they just scan you and eventually high wake out, I just followed them around and scanned them (one drop had 4) until they got bored and went, after then I would enjoy uninterrupted mining, and if I needed a break I would head back to a base, outrun the usual interdiction on the way and sell my cargo so I could start the next session empty again.
I did find locating the asteroids a bit hit and miss though. I got better over time and just went for the ones that stayed bright gold even when close and then just fired a prospecting limpet at them. I did start to notice roid shapes that would glow bright from a distance and dull when close so stopped wasting my time with them. I suppose this aspect of mining i. e. the false positives is how I guess it would be in the real world, so whilst a little frustrating, realistic!
I did struggle with the seismic charges a little, sometimes too low and had to go back and other times too high so lower yield, but part of this I think may be due to a PS4 bug with fissure targeting, but I definitely improved over the 3 days.
So, all in all I thought asteroid mining was quite fun, not really a grind and with good payouts, and I certainly won't be selling my mining gear, I'll store it up for now as I will definitely be doing it again.
