I normally fill half my cargo capacity with limpets before setting out mining, prospect liberally and will usually end up dumping limpets as my hold fills.
Been that way for years, so whatever I'm doing seems to work for me!
Powerplay kills the fun!
- Thread starter andre3000
- Start date
Been that way for years, so whatever I'm doing seems to work for me!
Given that my ship can fly faster than a limpet, I don't feel like it's any slower to go visually inspect the asteroid. Even if I'm capable of sending two or more simultaneous prospector limpets, I still have to wait for them to reach the asteroids and scan them. And given how far and in between the yellow-highlighted asteroids are anyway, I still don't feel like it's significantly faster than just flying to them. I sometimes might send a limpet to one asteroid while I'm examining another, but it only feels slightly more convenient, not significantly faster.
A couple of hours of mining yields me about 30k on average iirc, so 100k+ merits suggest at least 6 hours if not more depending on activities chosen, per day. Aforementioned couple hours already feel like borderline grind to me, let alone doing a multiple of that on a daily basis. No thanks.
Why do we dash towards a hypothetical end by gaining merits as fast as possible? Unless competing for control of a system or some such, enjoy the journey. Mix up activities, mine, bounty hunt, transport power commodities or do the Weekly missions. Or not. The longest journey starts with a single, small step.
An asteroid with a prospector limpet on yields more fragments than one without. Prospector limpets therefore speed up the process of mining a given tonnage.
I'm doing core mining, not laser mining.
Oh, you don't even mine the asteroid before splitting it, or harvest the subsurface deposits? I like to hoover up everything.
Enter "Why Not Both?" meme here.
Seriously, if I was in your position, I'd be maximizing my efforts by prospecting every asteroid I came across as I searched for asteroids with fissures. You never know if you're passing a treasure trove if you don't stop to look.
<<< Been my philosophy in this game since 2014.
Because asteroids with fissures can be so extremely far-and-in-between, as mentioned earlier. It can literally take me an hour to find a single one, and that's checking yellow-highlighted asteroids as fast as I can, meaning literally hundreds of them. If I stopped to laser-mine and extract the surface and subsurface deposits of each one, it could take 10 hours to find a single asteroid with fissures.
And the reason why I want to only core-mine is that it appears to be so much more lucrative. Like twice or even triple the merits per hour, even when it takes a long time to find those core-mineable asteroids.
Yeah I see what you mean. The players I'm referring to are dropping Platinum at 40k to 50k/load. Other than that I don't have any specifics.
I should mention that my mining merit 'returns' are based on a 128t Krait 2 miner with 3 mining lasers (the other hard points are for core mining, to mix things up a bit).
I imagine if those players use dedicated laser-mining Cutters and load them to the brim that would be the most efficient. For me, 120-150t of cargo is the limit for a single session for laser mining, for core mining it's a bit less even. Anything beyond that for a single session and things become a chore, and I usually have to switch to other activities as a palate cleanser.
Personally, I’d say the same regardless of whether you’re competing for a system or not. What’s the point of playing a game if you’re not having fun?
Journey before destination.
I’m not saying stop and strip mine each asteroid you encounter. I’m saying that while searching for the yellow asteroids, you shoot some of them with a prospector limpet, to see if they’re worth laser mining. For example, only strip asteroids with 30% of one of the three P’s.
It could very well be that you’re so focused on playing the lottery of core mining, that you’re ignoring all the potential sources of wealth around you. That’s the impression I’m getting from your previous posts. But then again, I’ve never bothered mining much.
But from posts I’ve been reading, it’s laser mining, not core mining, that’s at the heart of others mining success. Just like for me, it’s the missions, not “rescues,” that are my primary source of merits. The latter has a much higher theoretical earning potential, but in practice it’s so variable that I’m treating them as a parallel activity, one done alongside the more reliable activity, rather than the main one.
At least you got me curious. I really should take the time to see how well I do with mining… assuming there’s a strategically valuable system. Which is why I’ve ignored it up until now.
Not in my experience. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm getting about 2-3 times more merits per hour via pure core mining than with laser mining. (If there's a trick to lasermining to make it 2-3 times more profitable, I haven't really seen it despite asking. Maybe I have just missed it.)
The thing about core mining is that the minerals you get are like 10 times more valuable than the ones you get from laser mining, and even just one core-minable asteroid gives you about 10-12 units, sometimes even a couple more. If it's valued at eg. 500k credits per unit, that's over 5 million credits just from one single asteroid, and several thousand merits. If you happen to find several asteroids with fissures, and you get like 50 units, that's 25 million credits, and easily 20-30 thousand merits.
I'm not getting that much even by filling up the 320 tons of my laser-mining Type-8 (and doing that usually takes quite longer). I might get something like 10-15k merits, after spending more time.
Are you doing laser mining in HazRes ?
Hazardous resource extraction sites? No.
Here's the answer. Try there.
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i must admit i read a lot abouit mining in hazRES and i tried it once.
i must have done something wrong as i got my ass kicked and barely made it out with my ship in 1 piece. i would like to try again however as the potential rewards are significantly higher
i must have done something wrong as i got my ass kicked and barely made it out with my ship in 1 piece. i would like to try again however as the potential rewards are significantly higher
thanks!