So, the upcoming Mining reveal? What are you hoping for?
- Thread starter NeilF
- Start date
While I do really like the sound of improved mining technology it will all be for nothing if something isn’t done to rebalance commodity prices to make it all actually worth it...
Over time, bounty hunting, mission rewards, passenger transport and exploration data have all become increasingly profitable and its now got to the point that a player can make credits quicker in a 2 million credit Eagle than they can in a billion credit mining Corvette.
Increasing the value of commodities across the board would invigorate both mining and trading simultaneously while also improving smaller aspects of the game like planetary salvaging in the SRV, signal source drops, and npc piracy would become a more lucrative and dangerous career choice.
Deep space salvaging should be a career akin to treasure hunting and provide moments of joy and wonder when you discover wrecks filled with valuable forgotten cargo that’s actually worth the time finding.
Smaller ships would also become more viable for mining which would unlock the career far earlier in a CMDR’s playthrough.
So yeah...
...quadruple commodity prices please. Job done.
Over time, bounty hunting, mission rewards, passenger transport and exploration data have all become increasingly profitable and its now got to the point that a player can make credits quicker in a 2 million credit Eagle than they can in a billion credit mining Corvette.
Increasing the value of commodities across the board would invigorate both mining and trading simultaneously while also improving smaller aspects of the game like planetary salvaging in the SRV, signal source drops, and npc piracy would become a more lucrative and dangerous career choice.
Deep space salvaging should be a career akin to treasure hunting and provide moments of joy and wonder when you discover wrecks filled with valuable forgotten cargo that’s actually worth the time finding.
Smaller ships would also become more viable for mining which would unlock the career far earlier in a CMDR’s playthrough.
So yeah...
...quadruple commodity prices please. Job done.
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I still have hopes about 3.3 Q4 myself. But with the precedents, i don't think that 3.3 will accomplish the hype players seems to have. So a riot is highly possibly. Salt for a better life! XD
I agree, im often just ignoring the things i find floating about because they are worthless and not worth the time to collect.
I only harvest engineer materials.
It’s the same on planet surfaces, I’m constantly finding platinum, gold and other goodies that simply aren’t worth the time calling my ship for due to it landing several km away and the SRV’s infuriatingly low cargo capacity.
So yes, weapons to break/detonate/cut asteroids apart, and then weapons to extract. Or indeed devices you can attach to mine on the asteroids surface etc...
TBH... A list like that, with exploration gameplay of the same nature, and an equally empty DLC would make my life easier. It would mean I could finally just give up...
BUT, the hope is FD have openly declared Q4 is about significant improvements to core gameplay, which when combined with a payable DLC, surely must mean significant stuff. Surely, they can create some involved bar raising mechanics? With basically a clean slate in these areas, four years in, and with 100+ people working away on this title? Surely?
Ask any Scottish football fan. It's not the despair that'll kill you, it's the hope...
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I agree with you 100%. I can hardly imagine the Fd really content for miner / explorer programmed (or can program satisfactory), hence the rejection for the "Focused Feedback".
This is where I see Gold Rushes required. ie: Exploration can find stateful hot spots of very valuable mining. These were result in very high finds of the material in question, but as they are found/mined the location will reduce, from an intial 100% down finally to 0% when it's then gone forever. Such locations, if they vary in size, could mean they're worth doing alone, or in a Wing, or even in a Squadron?
And of course, if you find one, and you're not interested, tell the Rock Rats where it is, and they can go and mine it anc give you some commission (somehow)
AS for salvaging, this was another area I'd hope a physics engine could be applied, allowing CMDRs to cut ships apart, pushing/pulling sections away, to get to items to salvage.
Interesting thread.
If players are getting some sort of squadron command ship would be nice to see a mining version that could act as command and control in a mining area. Allowing allies to dock/repair/refine, launch fighters to defend miners maybe? Can see value of a group storage hanger for stored materials mined to free up space on individual ships. That sort of thing.
If players are getting some sort of squadron command ship would be nice to see a mining version that could act as command and control in a mining area. Allowing allies to dock/repair/refine, launch fighters to defend miners maybe? Can see value of a group storage hanger for stored materials mined to free up space on individual ships. That sort of thing.
This is where I see Gold Rushes required. ie: Exploration can find stateful hot spots of very valuable mining. These were result in very high finds of the material in question, but as they are found/mined the location will reduce, from an intial 100% down finally to 0% when it's then gone forever. Such locations, if they vary in size, could mean they're worth doing alone, or in a Wing, or even in a Squadron?
And of course, if you find one, and you're not interested, tell the Rock Rats where it is, and they can go and mine it anc give you some commission (somehow)
AS for salvaging, this was another area I'd hope a physics engine could be applied, allowing CMDRs to cut ships apart, pushing/pulling sections away, to get to items to salvage.
This is why I make the usual suggestion that mineral density in rings and belts should be a dynamic variable, rather than a static one generated by the stellar forge. Depending on the local economies, populations and states, rings will deplete or recuperate over time. This would make mining a bit more varied than simply looking up a list of pristine metallic rings, but instead require either knowledge of the local area to find where a decent ring set is or to simply mine outside human space. Gold rushes would naturally occur if a particularly valuable ring system had its local economy suffer a major bust, but said gold rush would only last as long as it takes for activity in the region to pick up again.
*cough* in deep space all belts are pristine...*cough*
The only thing you should expect and the only thing I can predict is that you will be disappointed.
I hope for
1.
Asteroids being a bit more physical.
Moving, colliding, being destroyed or cut apart by weapons fire. To make fights in mining regions more fun.
2.
Mining being possible with any weapon.
Mining laser should be getting most materials of course.
But other weapons should also damage and mine materials.
Especially explosives should be a great way for fast mining.
Albeit at the expense of getting far less material in total due to destruction.
3.
Refinery Rework so it either has no slots at all or gets an automatic slot management where you can preemptively decide what materials are refined and which are dropped. So you dont have to drop each piece manual.
4.
Planetary Mining. Planets that can be mined should have patches on the Surface where ships can mine for one or more of the Materials the Planet has.
5.
Prospecting should be a scanner not a drone.
And it should add that asteroid as a contact permanently so you can prospect an area and then mine it.
6.
Asteroid Belts should get some love rather than being a total of like 50 asteroids for the entire solar system.
Greetz
1.
Asteroids being a bit more physical.
Moving, colliding, being destroyed or cut apart by weapons fire. To make fights in mining regions more fun.
2.
Mining being possible with any weapon.
Mining laser should be getting most materials of course.
But other weapons should also damage and mine materials.
Especially explosives should be a great way for fast mining.
Albeit at the expense of getting far less material in total due to destruction.
3.
Refinery Rework so it either has no slots at all or gets an automatic slot management where you can preemptively decide what materials are refined and which are dropped. So you dont have to drop each piece manual.
4.
Planetary Mining. Planets that can be mined should have patches on the Surface where ships can mine for one or more of the Materials the Planet has.
5.
Prospecting should be a scanner not a drone.
And it should add that asteroid as a contact permanently so you can prospect an area and then mine it.
6.
Asteroid Belts should get some love rather than being a total of like 50 asteroids for the entire solar system.
Greetz
EXPLOSIONS.........EXPLOSIONS.......AND MORE EXPLOSIONS!
I'll get my coat
I'll get my coat
Resources fluctuating? Hmmm... Interesting... To some degree I guess it's the same as my proposed "stateful hot spots"... as long as they are fairly dynamic.
ie: With your proposal as long as FD could inject a Gold Rush by tweaking the number in some systems, and then as CMDRs hit the area and mine, the "finds" would reduce until back more to a normal value, great!
That said, I don't see how a Gold Rush would be affected by the local econony. ie: If it goes bust how to valuable metals increase in quantity there? If it was a more sublte random thing that would seem OK?
I'm just curious how long this process takes in your mind. I'm not even talking about things that are 400k light seconds away, just a system where everything is within 10k light seconds.
Riôt
Who knows... If all you're planning on doing is going system to system to system going [FindingNemoSeagull] Mine! Mine! Mine! [/FindingNemoSeagull] then clearly deploying drones etc isn't going to help. But if you're entering quite a big system, keen on seeing what's there (properly) and with more involved things to discover with Q4s mining and exploration improvements, maybe some people will want to utilise what these offer by covering more of a system more quickly with the use of drones...
Anyway... It's all hypothetical
The local economy, both in terms of type as well as state, would affect drain rate of local deposits, as it stands to reason that economies such as extraction (and probably industrial and refinery to a lesser degree, or high tech for ice rings) would place a much greater drain on their local deposits. Similarly, an extraction economy in a state of boom would be far more productive than an economy in a state of bust, which would drain its local deposits more as local workers would be mining more to keep up with boom demand. Couple this with using player behaviour as a yardstick for general migratory NPC behaviour (so if vast amounts of players are all mining in the same location, it would stand to reason that it is a good place to mine and so for every player would could quite easily assume 1000s NPCs are joining the party), and we can estimate the overall mining rate in a given ring or belt.
This would be balanced against the rings own ability to uncover new minerals and deposits through its own internal abrasion and attrition as the chaotic nature of the rings wear away the surfaces and expose new minerals. Particularly chaotic, dense or fast moving rings would expose minerals at a greater rate, while stable ones would take months to recover from significant activity. In addition to this, some rings would naturally be more mineral rich than others, or even having different proportions of minerals within them, so they could still be profitable even if mostly depleted; other rings may still be a waste of time even if completely pristine.
Who knows... If all you're planning on doing is going system to system to system going [FindingNemoSeagull] Mine! Mine! Mine! [/FindingNemoSeagull] then clearly deploying drones etc isn't going to help. But if you're entering quite a big system, keen on seeing what's there (properly) and with more involved things to discover with Q4s mining and exploration improvements, maybe some people will want to utilise what these offer by covering more of a system more quickly with the use of drones...
Anyway... It's all hypothetical
I would be on board if this game had 10,000 systems, or even 100,000. It has a great many more than that, however.
I like the probe idea(s) personally, but they put the bulk of the time spent in the wrong place. The bulk of the Exploration time should be spent in the actual finding of the thing(s), not waiting to make a decision as to whether or not we are going to go look closer in the first place. I would hope that most of us could agree on that.
Right now, I am quite happily trucking 404kish light seconds per run to help Olivia's group repair their station - time spent travelling isn't an issue for me, but when I think about how much longer it would take me per system using most of the probe proposals, I just can't get behind them. I would be quite fine taking 30-60m trying to find something that showed as an echo from my ADS pulse (as an example), because I have the information to make that decision right away, and the time spent would be in the actual Exploring and finding.
That's just me, but I do feel like this would be a better approach, overall.
Anyhow, I'm just going to throw this gauntlet down here - if we do not get more planetary types (yes, plural) with the Q4 update, it will probably be a bust, anyway. There just isn't anything reasonable to find on the barren worlds we currently have access to, other than nice vistas and some minor environmental effects. Again, just my opinion, but any new mechanics are going to feel quite lackluster if we don't have an expanded playground to use them on, preferably with more things to do on those new planet types.
Riôt