Asteroid belts are basically useless, and have been since ring mining was released half a decade ago. That seems like a shame, because they're a cool idea. Rather than mining in one ring constantly, you'd drop into multiple asteroid belts, one after another, looking for good stuff. Unfortunately, they just don't provide enough to ever make this worthwhile.
Here's a simple-ish idea that could be applied to asteroid belts, to make them more worth doing; increase the size of the rocks floating there.
Rather than 5-8 normal-sized rocks, giving you between 10 and 15 tons of ore total, you would have 5-8 rocks varying in size between the largest asteroid, and ones the size of an asteroid base. These rocks would have fifty to a hundred times the ore you'd find in smaller rocks, but would change their ore type randomly from week to week, to prevent perma-farming.
So you fly all over the bubble checking rocks, and when you get lucky, you find a rock that drops you a few hundred platinum in one go. Then you keep exploring.
Here's a simple-ish idea that could be applied to asteroid belts, to make them more worth doing; increase the size of the rocks floating there.
Rather than 5-8 normal-sized rocks, giving you between 10 and 15 tons of ore total, you would have 5-8 rocks varying in size between the largest asteroid, and ones the size of an asteroid base. These rocks would have fifty to a hundred times the ore you'd find in smaller rocks, but would change their ore type randomly from week to week, to prevent perma-farming.
So you fly all over the bubble checking rocks, and when you get lucky, you find a rock that drops you a few hundred platinum in one go. Then you keep exploring.
