Refinery Usability Improvements

[Kalven]

Preamble:

I waited to make these suggestions until after I had a chance to try out the new 1.4 mining improvements. I had hoped that the new 1.4 "auto-refining" activity would reduce the annoyance of mining with smaller refineries, but it doesn't help very much.

Once the 1.4 refinery finishes a canister and empties the refinery bin, the auto-assign frequently chooses to start refining the "wrong" ore (i.e. the one I don't want). This forces me to manually vent it from the refinery, instead of the hopper. This results in the same number of selections/clicks as I had before 1.4, except the new clicks are the refinery area instead of the hopper -- which means making a mistake and venting the wrong material is a lot more painful, since I lose all the accumulation.
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My suggestions:

[ 1. ]

The following change would make mining with smaller refineries less annoying:

• Once an ore is assigned to a bin in the refinery, keep the bin assigned to the same ore unless manually vented -- even if this means the bin would show 0% accumulation.

When the refinery finishes a canister, immediately refine any leftovers of the same material in the hopper into the same bin.

If there are no leftovers, display the refined amount as 0%, but don't free the bin.
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Optional: Handle corner case where multiple refinery bins contain the same ore.

• When multiple bins finish refining the same ore, keep only one of the bins assigned to that ore, and free the other bins.

For example, imagine you had kept refining more palladium after your cargo bay was full, and filled up three refinery bins to 100% with palladium. When you sell cargo back at the station, making room in your cargo bay, these bins will produce canisters. After the three bins finish refining, two bins are freed, and the remaining bin will stay assigned to palladium. If there is any palladium in the hopper, it will go to this bin.

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This would be icing on the cake, since this special case only comes up once per mining trip, not over and over again while mining. It could easily be dealt with by manually freeing the redundant slots.
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[ 2. ]

I feel less strongly about this one, and I've already seen many people suggest variants of this, but here my attempt at a refinement.

Add an "Auto-vent" check-box to the hopper.

• While checked, each time a material is manually vented from the hopper, it gets put on a rejection list. Any further ores of that type will be automatically vented from the hopper as long as the "Auto-vent" box is checked (preferably with a small info message and sound effect).
• If you uncheck the box, the hopper will stop auto-venting, and it will also forget the list.

This allows rejection lists to be customized and changed without needing any new UI elements for the user to specify which ores should be rejected. It might be nice to have a way of seeing which ores are on the list. But if you are struck with a sudden fear that you are auto-venting painite, you can just clear the list to make sure -- it won't take long to build it back up again.

For maximum convenience, this list would be persistent across sessions, but if the state were purely client-side, and the box just defaulted to unchecked at the start of every game session, it would still be an improvement (and you wouldn't have to wonder what your rejection list from last play session was).
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Not an suggestion, but a "thank you":

Thanks for fixing the Refinery UI so it doesn't vent materials when I look at the refinery while firing the mining lasers. I think it was seeing the trigger being down, and interpreted that as a click (even though I was just holding it down from before). I lost a fair amount of ore and refined materials by glancing to the right to check the refinery status while mining in the Oculus Rift. It doesn't seem to happen anymore, and it's a relief to have that fixed.

 

[Lestat]

I think player should be doing something other than texting or watching tv. That ops accidentally hit the wrong bin is part of the game.

 

[YinYin]

This allows rejection lists to be customized and changed without needing any new UI elements for the user to specify which ores should be rejected.

I like that.

I think player should be doing something other than texting or watching tv. That ops accidentally hit the wrong bin is part of the game.

It's a bad part of the game. I prefer adjusting my position to the asteroid I'm mining, closely watching my limpets, to minimize their flight time and avoid losing any. Piloting over menuing.

 

[Pegasus Prime]

Hey there!

Had the same thought as Kalven regarding an 'auto-vent' feature while mining, also having the same frustrations with bins choice which ore to process. It would be great if developers could add one of these features in the upcoming update.

Best regards.

 

[Ambient.Impact]

I definitely agree about the auto-venting issue. This is something that would make mining far less annoying for me. The way I imagine it, there could be a series of checkboxes below the bin section on the refinery tab, one for each metal or mineral. On the other hand, the automatic method Kalven suggested is pretty interesting. Either way, I'd love to see this implemented in one form or another.

 

[Lestat]

Understanding you can go into a area with No ships and mine a million credits or more at a time in a cobra. With no danger. Mining is fine. Managing your bins should be a chore. The game should not play it self.

 

[Ambient.Impact]

Do you mine, and do you enjoy the bin management?

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Or rather my question is why should it be a chore? Do you like menus that much?

 

[Psycho Romeo]

Do you mine, and do you enjoy the bin management?

- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -

Or rather my question is why should it be a chore? Do you like menus that much?

It's not about that. It's about making the process less automated. Income in ED is a product of a human hand, not a refinery reject spreadsheet.

There's a degree of work involved. It's not supposed to be 100% fun.

 

[Ambient.Impact]

It's not about that. It's about making the process less automated. Income in ED is a product of a human hand, not a refinery reject spreadsheet.

There's a degree of work involved. It's not supposed to be 100% fun.

I agree that work in this game is supposed to be the product of a human hand, but I can't understand why there's so much opposition to such a small change. I mean, the game takes place over a thousand years in the future, in a world where ships have flight assist on by default. It seems unrealistic to imagine, to me, that we wouldn't have computers designed to automate some parts of the mining process. We still have to find asteroids, determine which ones have the stuff we want, mine them, manage drones, and ferry the stuff back to sell. I don't see how automating a small part of the process would make the game too easy or not feel like work, it would just reduce some of the cognitive workload and friction from the interface, which I can imagine software engineers 1000+ years from now would easily be able to do.

 

[Psycho Romeo]

the game takes place over a thousand years in the future

Oh my god this argument again. What's next? Are you going to start talking about how it's just a QoL upgrade?

The issue I mentioned isn't about cognitive workload specifically . The issue is automation. FD avoids it like plague. That's part of their design ethos. I see no reason to deviate in this case.

 

[Muffet]

I mean, the game takes place over a thousand years in the future, in a world where ships have flight assist on by default....

Stopped taking you seriously after that. This argument is always what people pull when they have nothing better to back their argument.
Everything should be automated then, and would be like a movie, say "i want to mine!" then the ship buys everything, find the most profitable system with the minerals in high demands, goes there, mine and defeat/flee from pirates on its own, gets all the goods and sells it for you back at the station, makes you the dinner and puts you in bed.

Ah, the marvelous future.

 

[Ambient.Impact]

Oh my god this argument again. What's next? Are you going to start talking about how it's just a QoL upgrade?

The issue I mentioned isn't about cognitive workload specifically . The issue is automation. FD avoids it like plague. That's part of their design ethos. I see no reason to deviate in this case.

Alright, fair enough. I didn't realize this was a constant thing.

Stopped taking you seriously after that. This argument is always what people pull when they have nothing better to back their argument.
Everything should be automated then, and would be like a movie, say "i want to mine!" then the ship buys everything, find the most profitable system with the minerals in high demands, goes there, mine and defeat/flee from pirates on its own, gets all the goods and sells it for you back at the station, makes you the dinner and puts you in bed.

Ah, the marvelous future.

You honestly think that's what people like me are after? I love the game as it mostly is. I've played it for almost 200 hours now, and I'm going to play it for many more. If I didn't like it the way it generally plays, why would I be here?