Rare and Valuable Minerals

Osiricc

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The big rocks you can crack open while mining are fun, but they seem super common now. Maybe I was just bad at it years ago, but I swear they used to be harder to find, and more valuable.

I'd suggest they swing hard in that direction. Make those big, crack-open type rocks you find while mining harder to find.
Then, maybe 1/1000 or so has something super valuable, like a new mineral that's worth enough you might earn 1bil or more from cracking it open and collecting the minerals. You might mine for 80 hours without finding one, but then you might find 2 in a row if you got lucky.

I think that element of having something super rare in a game adds a lot of excitement when you finally do come across it. That "golden ticket" feeling; just one more rock, maybe it's the next one!
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
Ops right the deep core situation is dead easy and commonplace. Might not be as lucrative as laser mining platinum or whatever the laser meta is atm.

Sub surface abrasive and deep core should be alot harder and more rewarding. Dunno about 1 in 1000. Perhaps a ratio like 100 to 1 ie prospectors fired at 100 possibles and only 1 is the real deal. But at todays prices it would quickly become redundant as most would just switch to laser mining.
 

Osiricc

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metatheurgist said:
Bwahahaha. Bit late for that now, the entire economy has been wrecked. You do that now and all the latecomers will be over you for "pulling the ladder up".
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Mining isn't a ladder though, it's more like a moldy footstool. If anything, this would help newbies. They would have the chance of hitting the big one and getting rich quick.
 

Osiricc

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GroG79 said:
Talk about grinding!
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Exactly, welcome to Elite! This would add a different flavor of grinding, the "grind forever and get nowhere, or maybe get lucky and hit it big" kind of grinding that is missing from the game's wide array of grinding activities.
 

Luriant

Luriant
You want a Lottery instead hard work. And thats not how procedural generation work, the ores are determined, the cause of mapped mining.

I know players that do MAPPED Cores, some use the asteroids belts, the big clusters have a guaranted Core, and the content is the same each time. You can make a list of valuable cores, and visit system after system in that list, every 6 days.

This mapped cores list is secret, Cores are unique and dissapear for everyone if somebody break it. Thats why mapped surface ores are more popular, the community share this maps.

Work smarter, not harder... or random.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
The problem is the entire mineral market is non-sensical and lacks any sort of nuance whatsoever.

"Common" and "rare" minerals are misnomers... arguably the "rare" minerals are more common than "common" minerals thanks to hotspots, because the distribution of minerals is pretty much even, and worsened by the fact gather rates of any identified minerals are equal within the mining category, regardless of type. People only cared and noticed this was even a thing when Tritium for FCs was needed, but lacked the perspective to see this was an issue with mining writ-large.

Things like Methanol Monohydrate Crystals, Methane Clathrates and other low-value mining-only things, you could literally introduce a game loop where you simply arrive at the asteroid and your cargo hold fills up instantly with these things, and you still wouldn't outstrip the earn rates of the higher-value minerals.... which pretty much sets the scene for how insane mining is at the moment, and how valuable the high-end minerals actually are. Introducing a mechanic on top of that to just randomly have a 1 in 1/1000 chance of landing a billion credits when you're mining would just be utterly ridiculous.

I've written lots in the past about fixing mining (tl;dr two threads; bulk harvesting and availability of cheap things, and optimised hunting for rare things, with mutually exclusive fits so you can't do both), but I don't want to re-write that one yet again.

Maybe if we were talking about needing to jump out ~10,000Ly away, searching for days inside dangerous environments like these and having to haul the thing all the way back to a particular engineer in the bubble (and, it's corrosive to boot)... then we could be talking about a reasonable game loop, rather than just "oh, just randomly I got a billion!" (1 in 1000 ain't low odds)
 
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Osiricc

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Jmanis said:
Introducing a mechanic on top of that to just randomly have a 1 in 1/1000 chance of landing a billion credits when you're mining would just be utterly ridiculous.
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I don't know, I think would be exciting. As it stands, I'm not even mining, seeing as how I can make a pretty consistent 1-2billion/hr clubbing baby seals at a spire site. Would this be any more or less ridiculous than that?
It would be a fun addition I think (assuming they could actually make it more random, good point Luriant). It would be more like real mining too, some just get lucky and hit the mother lode, others can toil away for ages and get the usual drips and drabs.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
This is the problem with this game. We keep comparing everything to the most absurd credit fountain and saying "It's not enough". The problem is the CR fountains, but as I said in my first post it's far too late to fix that now.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Osiricc said:
I don't know, I think would be exciting. As it stands, I'm not even mining, seeing as how I can make a pretty consistent 1-2billion/hr clubbing baby seals at a spire site. Would this be any more or less ridiculous than that?
It would be a fun addition I think (assuming they could actually make it more random, good point Luriant). It would be more like real mining too, some just get lucky and hit the mother lode, others can toil away for ages and get the usual drips and drabs.
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On spire sites, yes, that it's ridiculous and it shouldn't exist. Unfortunately, FD have never been very timely with fixing these things.

All the FOTM cash cows are toxic for the game's economy, because they set an unrealistic measure of what earn rates should look like by exploiting edge cases of (in my opinion on spire sites) broken mechanics. This results in threads like this where unreasonable comparisons such as Orthrus farming at spires, gets used as justification for other equally ridiculous income sources... and also results in overlooking more critical issues with the game

For example, massacre stacking works not through seeking out areas of significant pirate activity and fighting the strongest threats, but by actually seeking out the areas with least anarchy presence, and dealing with the weakest enemies on offer. That makes no sense.

On "more like real mining", it's nothing like real mining... just randomly hitting rocks and suddenly "oh look! Cash everywhere!" is not it. Real mining is a result of survey and assessment of potential locations for the right conditions to increase the likelihood of finding the mother lode, which is to my point about going outside the bubble to dangerous locations. You need an engageable game loop that requires thought and understanding in order to maximise chances of getting a good find (and it needs to carry inherent risk)... not just "today i drew lucky number 12 and suddenly i have all the money"... that's not how any mechanism in the game should work.
 
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