Sub-Surface mining, whats the point?

[Factabulous]

i know right, that's just the icing on the cake!

Even that would be ok if they added it into the gameplay - maybe make deeper deposits (to the right of the display) more lucrative, but there may be nothing there (like happens with the bug), so you lose out. So you get to choose to xplode early, or wait for a potential motherlode.

But as it is, it's not lucrative, sometimes broken, requires ammo that soon runs out and an extra hardpoint. All fixable - one day, until then I won't bother thanks.

 

[NeilF]

Unable to get small seismic charges in the game i was forced to have a play with sub surface mining, but whats the point of it?

now all this came about while harvesting water and other stuff for the CG but i also went to a LTD hotspot to .... well mine some LTD, as exciting as gathering water for the CG is i just wanted to have a crack at sub surface.

Armed with 32 limpets in the Dolphin and stocked up with sub surface missiles here's the stats

Limpets - 3,200 CR
Re-stock - 4,324 CR
Fuel - 30 CR

Total - 7,554 CR

Profits from LTD from a LTD hotspot - 0 CR
Filling cargo hold with "stuff" to sell - 18,259 CR
Time spent - 30 mins

Profit per 1/2 hour - 10,705 CR

Nerf it quick!

but seriously... whats the point of sub surface if all they spawn is water, Methane Clathrate and other such clagnuts?

As I mentioned here a few months back, I have no ideal how the design meetings and internal testing allowed the new mining mechanics to be released as we now have them - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...one-feeling-it-s-unbalanced-not-quite-working <-- Subsurface missile issues are mentioned in this post!

It has the now all too common trademark FD "why do that," half baked hallmarks IMHO


And it makes me very worried for the major headline development now underway, if this last effort (the new mining mechanics) has so many quite obvious issues with it.

How do you feel? Do the mining mechanics feel like they were a well designed and balanced set of features? Assuming the answer is no? Why weren't they? How is it there's so many obvious issues that could and should have been solved in the design phase long before coding? And the fact it got through internal testing without addressing them too? Does it give a nice warm feeling of confidence as regards a larger more complexe development now taking place?

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

As I mentioned here a few months back, I have no ideal how the design meetings and internal testing allowed the new mining mechanics to be released as we now have them - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...one-feeling-it-s-unbalanced-not-quite-working <-- Subsurface missile issues are mentioned in this post!

It has the now all too common trademark FD "why do that," half baked hallmarks IMHO


And it makes me very worried for the major headline development now underway, if this last effort (the new mining mechanics) has so many quite obvious issues with it.

How do you feel? Do the mining mechanics feel like they were a well designed and balanced set of features? Assuming the answer is no? Why weren't they? How is it there's so many obvious issues that could and should have been solved in the design phase long before coding? And the fact it got through internal testing without addressing them too? Does it give a nice warm feeling of confidence as regards a larger more complexe development now taking place?

i joke about the testing during their lunch break for sub surface missiles, but it wouldn't surprise me if the meeting invite for testing sub surface missiles conflicted with Sharon from accounting's birthday cake singalong where the office gathered around her desk and regaled about what they're up to at the weekend and ate cake.

meanwhile sub surface missiles went untested, somebody mentioned it in the 3.3 launch review meeting but there was a squirrel outside at the time so it again got glossed over while braben chased it with a stick.

in either case i really do question how something so fundamental got through to launch, but even more so, that's it now, were stuck with it until the next mining pass in 2037


[Edit] - can anyone also remember that live stream when they were talking about "asteroids with cores, they're the red ones right" its like they didnt even have a clue what was going off!

 

[NeilF]

i joke about the testing during their lunch break for sub surface missiles, but it wouldn't surprise me if the meeting invite for testing sub surface missiles conflicted with Sharon from accounting's birthday cake singalong where the office gathered around her desk and regaled about what they're up to at the weekend and ate cake.

meanwhile sub surface missiles went untested, somebody mentioned it in the 3.3 launch review meeting but there was a squirrel outside at the time so it again got glossed over while braben chased it with a stick.

in either case i really do question how something so fundamental got through to launch, but even more so, that's it now, were stuck with it until the next mining pass in 2037


[Edit] - can anyone also remember that live stream when they were talking about "asteroids with cores, they're the red ones right" its like they didnt even have a clue what was going off!

LOL! You may be onto something here! With a hundred people involved in ED, that's a a birthday every 3 or 4 days on average! That could account for not only what's happened to new mining, but just maybe a lot of the past 2-3yrs?

 

[Stealthie]

Says a lot about the current paradigm when people can get so sniffy about the opportunity to mine Cr10m of stuff in 10 minutes. [sad]

Mining Painite, I can often find 'roids with 3 or 4 SS deposits, each one yielding 3t to 4t of ore.
That would seem to put the yield from SS mining in the same ballpark as what I earn from mining in general.

Seems odd that LTDs and VOs aren't found in SS deposits but I guess that's another reason to mine Painite instead.


As for the mini-game, I think there's a little bit more to it than "release trigger in blue zone".
If, for example, I fire off 2 SS missiles in quick succession I'll get 2t of stuff before the deposit is depleted whereas if I wait between shots (usually as a result of the roid tumbling) then I can get up to 5t from the same deposit.
Also, I get the impression that you're supposed to hit blue zones "in the right order", somehow.
If, for example, I hold the trigger down and wait for the indicator to move almost all the way to the right before releasing it (in a blue zone) then I often won't get a blue zone appearing at all next time I try.

It's as if the mini-game is trying to depict the idea that your drill is munching through a bunch of "layers", one after the other, and if you don't stop at each one then it's wasted. [where is it]

Kind of difficult to verify that, though, cos you can only mine each roid once.

 

[Unknown Zombie]

No - I thought the same as you but it's mostly cosmetic. The mini-game is basically 'release the trigger in a blue zone'. I don't think there's even a bonus for hitting the narrower blue zones.

The peaks and valleys in the top graphical display represent how "hard" the material is that the drill is currently traversing. The drill bit slows down (minigame scrolls slower) in dense parts and speeds up (minigame scrolls faster) in less dense areas. The graph is just giving you a visual representation so that you can anticipate the speed fluctuations and judge the timing of your trigger release accurately.

 

[Maolagin]

Indeed, Sub-Surface Mining exists but doesn't fulfill any meaningful role in the mix of Mining mechanics & tools available.

Without all core materials appearing as Sub-Surface deposits (or a Sub-Surface exclusive, i.e. "Gemstones" or something to that tune), there's nearly no point in ever wasting a hardpoint and dragging those along.

The occasional Sub-Surface mining bug (Sub-Surface deposit integrity remaining - but no blue zone appearing anymore at all during drilling) doesn't help either.

To the contrary, the principal utility of the drill is that SS deposits are guaranteed to spawn surface minerals, and thus can augment the collection of those commodities. Of course they don't compete with core mining for raw profit; currently nothing except possibly R2R mapping can. But there are plenty of reasons to mine besides max profit. Like mining missions, which mainly request surface minerals.

As for bugs, I don't think we have any way to know if that is erroneous or intended gameplay that we just haven't worked out yet (partly because not enough people are exploring this mechanic). As Stealthie mentioned above, it seems like there are patterns. And of course there isn't a bright line between the two. The multiple abrasion blasters thing was fun gameplay, even though it was also just a bug.

 

[TheSisko]

No - I thought the same as you but it's mostly cosmetic. The mini-game is basically 'release the trigger in a blue zone'. I don't think there's even a bonus for hitting the narrower blue zones.

Yes there is - the narrower the blue bar, the more yield of material you get. This was revealed in the updated Frontier training video for Mining in 3.3.

I've gotten over 1 ton of material from just one little rock released from 'narrow-blue' subsurface mining.

 

[Ambrosius Dalfinger]

Core Mining is the problem. It needs to be nerfed and sub-surface mining needs to be made more profitable. The excuse that it's just a game anyways is hollow rationalization imo. ED without halfway functional economical mechanics (and economy is imperative in ED) becomes a shallow flight simulator with some occasional pew-pew. It loses immersion and believability. Like a badly written novel it ceases to excite.

Seems like ED simply tried to make it easier for newbies by providing them with an unbalanced one-trick-pony, which is of course a flawed short-term motivation on the part of FD. It doesn't pay off to provide quick rewards for beginners whilst boring to death the more experienced customers.

 

[Schmack]

Maybe it's been answered but there are missions that require you bring back X number of these units. The missions sometimes pay out pretty decent compared to the actual price of the commodity. I'll grab these things sometimes if I know the station where I am selling my other high priced stuff has missions for the other things.

 

[space voyager]

Says a lot about the current paradigm when people can get so sniffy about the opportunity to mine Cr10m of stuff in 10 minutes. [sad]

Mining Painite, I can often find 'roids with 3 or 4 SS deposits, each one yielding 3t to 4t of ore.
That would seem to put the yield from SS mining in the same ballpark as what I earn from mining in general.

Seems odd that LTDs and VOs aren't found in SS deposits but I guess that's another reason to mine Painite instead.


As for the mini-game, I think there's a little bit more to it than "release trigger in blue zone".
If, for example, I fire off 2 SS missiles in quick succession I'll get 2t of stuff before the deposit is depleted whereas if I wait between shots (usually as a result of the roid tumbling) then I can get up to 5t from the same deposit.
Also, I get the impression that you're supposed to hit blue zones "in the right order", somehow.
If, for example, I hold the trigger down and wait for the indicator to move almost all the way to the right before releasing it (in a blue zone) then I often won't get a blue zone appearing at all next time I try.

It's as if the mini-game is trying to depict the idea that your drill is munching through a bunch of "layers", one after the other, and if you don't stop at each one then it's wasted. [where is it]

Kind of difficult to verify that, though, cos you can only mine each roid once.

I very much doubt about this waiting adding more ore... The subsurface deposit has its "health" bar and in my experience it has always been consistently lowering with each missile. In some deposits by 50% (meaning two missiles only), some by 33 and some by 25. I don't think I ever saw 20%. The health went down by the same % no matter how long it took for me to fire another missile.

As for making it more lucrative, it wouldn't hurt to sometimes get more than one unit. Perhaps tie it to hitting the centre of the blue zone and/or the narrower zones.

 

[Maolagin]

I very much doubt about this waiting adding more ore... The subsurface deposit has its "health" bar and in my experience it has always been consistently lowering with each missile. In some deposits by 50% (meaning two missiles only), some by 33 and some by 25. I don't think I ever saw 20%. The health went down by the same % no matter how long it took for me to fire another missile.

As for making it more lucrative, it wouldn't hurt to sometimes get more than one unit. Perhaps tie it to hitting the centre of the blue zone and/or the narrower zones.

Is there a visible health meter somewhere, or are you inferring that from the number of missiles a given deposit will take? And if the latter, how do you know, since you can't test the same deposit twice? Have you found that it's constant for given asteroid models, for instance?

And as TheSisko just said a few posts back, the payout *is* tied to hitting the narrower zones. Only ever produces a single chunk per shot, but the chunk can refine to potentially over 1t of the commodity.

 

[KDarrr]

If asteroid has subsurface deposit, and I blow up asteroid with seismic charges. What happens to subsurface deposit? They become surface deposit or disappear?
Or it just better to collect subsurface, then blow up steroid?

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

If asteroid has subsurface deposit, and I blow up asteroid with seismic charges. What happens to subsurface deposit? They become surface deposit or disappear?
Or it just better to collect subsurface, then blow up steroid?

As far as I know (but I'm not 100% sure) after che core explosion all previous surface and subsurface deposits are destroyed. This would not change with the small seismic charges.

 

[Ian Skippy]

There is no point. When they added it the deep core "specials" were not in, so that also gave nothing. Really they should change sub surface and surface deposits to also spawn ltd / vo / etc.

This. Initially ALL of the new mining was fun but pointless. They then made core mining non-pointless but ignored the rest. Its a consistent issue with balance in this game; a handful of the FD devs is able to vaguely land a sidewinder on a pad, and nobody has any kind of clue as to what the game is like for actual players past the beginner zone. Whenever they have to put a number into a variable it is typically off by an order of magnitude, or more. "balancing", which normally is changing tiny percentages to find the sweet spot, is done in ED by adding or removing zeroes.

After a while you stop thinking about it, and when they invest time and energy in developing a mechanic nobody ever uses because the payouts are comically absurd you simply dont register and pretend the entire thing doesnt exist. Its OPs like this that remind you just how absurd it all is.

 

[NeilF]

If asteroid has subsurface deposit, and I blow up asteroid with seismic charges. What happens to subsurface deposit? They become surface deposit or disappear?
Or it just better to collect subsurface, then blow up steroid?

I'd image they're just gone... Would make sense from a gameplay and game universe point of view?

As regards the thread - It's fascinating that the two go-to mining mechanics at the moment (for CRs/hr), both highlight how subsurface deposits are pointless, and how this highlights how hard FD seem to find it to create balanced, considered game loops/mechanics. If the mining revamp can create such questionably balanced mechanics, that could so easily could have been balanced and improved, what does that suggest as regards our hopes for the biggest development since release coming next year (given they've also just released a huge buggy mess and delayed Fleet Carriers seemingly due to development issues)?

 

[Factabulous]

This. Initially ALL of the new mining was fun but pointless.

Heh - I was right back in March \o/

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

yep Sub surface still pointless, Clagnuts i tell the...

may as well delete it from the game

small seismic charges though.... i think the ops onto something.

 

[KDarrr]

I never did mining, just started yesterday - to get access to engineer.
And it is a lot of fun!
1) I don't need to hunt for pirates, they come to me - my combat rating going up.
2) Flying between asteroids - is fun.
3) Exploding asteroids graphics and sound - amazing.
Very good experience and I was never fan of mining in any game.
I don't do it for money or efficiency - I play game for fun.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

I never did mining, just started yesterday - to get access to engineer.
And it is a lot of fun!
1) I don't need to hunt for pirates, they come to me - my combat rating going up.
2) Flying between asteroids - is fun.
3) Exploding asteroids graphics and sound - amazing.
Very good experience and I was never fan of mining in any game.
I don't do it for money or efficiency - I play game for fun.

Three great reasons we need class 1 Seismic charges ^^

<- imursion breaking cat approved!