what is wrong with my progress and particularly mining

Hi,

I branched off the this thread from https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/game-balancing.558895/post-8817882 because this discussion doesn't belong there.

Because I wanted to know if I have been making a mistake by tring to mine at places that don't have a suitable quality of resources, I set up for mining last night despite I didn't want to play until Odessey has been released. I have always found that hotspots have, if any, only trace amounts of the mineral the hotspot is indicting, which makes mining totally broken. Last I time I had to mine, it took me about 6 hours to get the 10t Painite for an engineer. Other players seem to be having the same experience while yet others seem to be happyly mining hundreds of tons of minerals within an hour or two.

Perhaps I have made a mistake or not (or lots of mistakes); it has been bugging me enough that I decided to find out. So last night I set up for mining and entered a Musgravite hotspot in a ring in Silikians. The gas giant the ring is around shows as pristine resources. I didn't have much time left and could only do a short survey, and I found the usual picture: There was a single asteroid having a Musgravite core --- which surprised me because they are so rare --- and a bunch of other asteroids that had various kinds of minerals none of which are precious.

Somehow I overlooked to bring the seismic displacement missiles and couldn't mine any Musgravite. So I laser mined a few tons of relatively worthless stuff that will pay for the limpets and the fuel. I'll go back today and see what I'll find.

I don't understand the PWS bug, though. The asteroids didn't seem to look any different and didn't seem to be less frequent, and turning around and scanning in the direction I was coming from didn't seem to reveal any more asteroids. Is the bug not relevant on xbox?

I wish we could navigate by coordninates and drop navigation beacons. That would make things so much easier.
 
You haven't said anything about your ship nor your experience of mining. As you mentioned Painite, I will assume that that's what you were trying to get and you don't have a lot of experience.

The best method for painite is laser mining for which a pulse wave scanner is useless, so you shouldn't normally have one. You mine Painite in a double or triple hotspot if you want to get it in a worthwhile quantity. Use Google or search the forum for the latest hotspots or use any of the various 3rd party tools, like this one if it still works. I notice all the prices are several days old or more:
.

To answer your opening statement, yes, it was a mistake to mine in places that don't have a suitable quality of resources, but only if you were trying to optimise your returns. Some people are happy to drift round the galaxy doing a little bit of different things without worrying about how many credits they get.

Generally, to get the best returns from mining, it's better to take a ship either fitted out only for laser mining or only core mining.
 
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6 hours to find 10t of Painite for SJ sounds similar to what it was like before the main mining update. This, combined with having to mine 500t of then almost worthless commodities made SJ the most hated unlock for many cmdr's.

If I had to take a guess I'd say you went mining in a pristine ring but not a painite hotspot. Or perhaps got the reserve type wrong...

I believe it works something like this...

Major reserve/Painite hotspot = Painite Cores Only
Pristine Reserve/Painite hotspot = Painite Cores and Painite laser mining.

I could be wrong here, but if I'm right it's really not explained very well in the game.
 
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Given the recent changes, the "meta" is in a state of flux. Changes may be coming thick and fast.

I'd recommend keeping an eye on current prices and demand while mining to see if what you are commonly finding is worth anything. For instance I found a lot of Osmium recently and whilst not a premium commodity, it made me a tidy profit. Enough to fund my FC for a few weeks anyway.

If you want to maximise your guaranteed earnings per hour, then mining may not be the best way to do it currently.
 
Major reserve/Painite hotspot = Painite Cores Only
Pristine Reserve/Painite hotspot = Painite Cores and Painite laser mining.
You are wrong.

As @Bottom Hat said, metal rich=cores only, metallic=all variants.

I wish it would be easier for new players to find out what types of rings to look for for laser/SSD/SD/core deposits, it would seem logical for a society in the 34th century to at least have a guide on THAT, but unfortunately, just like many other things in ED, you're left to find out on your own, reinventing the wheel as you go along about something that really should be common knowledge.

And no, the Wiki isn't any help on that point either. Look up a mineral/metal, and it will, at best, give you a vague hint as to where to go to find it.
 
I don't understand the PWS bug, though. The asteroids didn't seem to look any different and didn't seem to be less frequent, and turning around and scanning in the direction I was coming from didn't seem to reveal any more asteroids. Is the bug not relevant on xbox?
How do you fly when you are mining, in a straight line or are you trying to be more efficient by flying in a zig-zag pattern?
 
1. Goto ring and mine a bit of everything
2. Once you have "samples of the ore" go to nearest station to sell
3. Look where and what is selling high in nearby stations and focus mining on that - set other materials to ignore

For mining:
Be selective with the roids you mine
Make sure you bring a lot of collector limpet controllers.
Also get as close to the roid as you can when you mine, in addition try and mine the roid so that you are "mining the ceiling" that way the chunks will fly down below your ship, making it quicker for the limpets to collect them


Hope that helps
 
How do you fly when you are mining, in a straight line or are you trying to be more efficient by flying in a zig-zag pattern?

I loosly keep going towards a hotspot or away from it or towards the planet. Unfornutately, there is no indication which asteroids I have already depleted, so I have no other good way to avoid going back to the delepleted ones.
 
You haven't said anything about your ship nor your experience of mining. As you mentioned Painite, I will assume that that's what you were trying to get and you don't have a lot of experience.

I have said a lot about it, just not here. For the purpose of this thread, it doesn't matter what mineral I mine. The purpose for now is to verify if I made a mistake by going to hotspots that may be expected to give miserable or no yields because I didn't verify the quality of the resources.

I don't know if hotspots are relativ to the indicated quality in that they still show up as a hotspot despite that there is none or none of the mineral indicated by the hotspot. If that's the case, that needs to be changed, because the indicated quality is irrelevant. There is no hotspot when there is not an abundance of the mineral indicated by hotspot, no matter what the quality of the ring is.

I have some experience with mining. You can say I don't have much experience with it because my experience is that every so-called hotspot I have found and tried has none or only trace amounts of the mineral indicated by the hotspot. There was only one exception which was a triple hotspot someone else had found and a lot of people went to to mine LTDs. IIRC, the best yield I got was 120 or 130t of LTDs in a bit more than an hour, and that was considered low. The devs dried out the place, and the only mining I did since was 10t Painite for an engineer, which took about 6 hours to get. What you can say is that my experience with mining has been nothing but bad, with the one exception that lasted only for a short time (making several trips, I got maybe 300t in total before they were gone).

The statistic says I have made 15559832765 credits from mining and have mined 2043 minerals. Except for a few credits, all that money is from the one exceptional place. The statistic says I made 1.8 billion from trading. I suspect that income from passenger missions counts as trading; the amount is very odd because I really haven't done that much actual trading.

The best method for painite is laser mining for which a pulse wave scanner is useless, so you shouldn't normally have one.

I was told that I should have a PWS and prospector limpets and that I should use the scanner to find the asteroids that contain minerals and that I should use a prospector limpet to see what minerels the asteroid has and to get a better yield. I wonder if using A rated prospectors increase the yield more than lower rated ones.

You mine Painite in a double or triple hotspot if you want to get it in a worthwhile quantity.

Mining in multi hotspots seems like a good idea (if you can find one). So far, the double hotspots I have found didn't have any more of the indicated material than any other hotspots. I haven't found triple or more hotspots yet.

Use Google or search the forum for the latest hotspots or use any of the various 3rd party tools, like this one if it still works. I notice all the prices are several days old or more:
.

That would push me into the direction some people call "highly specialized mining", which involves travelling hundreds or thousands of LY to some place to mine and to go back and forth between the place and places to sell. I don't want to do that, and since the purpose of this thread is to figure out if the surface scanner and/or the hotspots is/are broken in that hotspots are indicated that don't have an abundance of the mineral indicated by the hotspot, it won't be useful to do that.

To answer your opening statement, yes, it was a mistake to mine in places that don't have a suitable quality of resources, but only if you were trying to optimise your returns. Some people are happy to drift round the galaxy doing a little bit of different things without worrying about how many credits they get.

How does this mistake show? I doubt that every place I checked was indicated as poor quality which might explain the hotspots not having their mineral --- and it would still be a bug to indicate a hotspot where is none.

I would have made a bug report about this, but the bugtracker didn't let me log in, so I couldn't.

Generally, to get the best returns from mining, it's better to take a ship either fitted out only for laser mining or only core mining.

Why is that?
 
If I had to take a guess I'd say you went mining in a pristine ring but not a painite hotspot. Or perhaps got the reserve type wrong...

I went to several places, and I'm very sure it was a Painite hotspot where I finally found some. Where else would I go than to a Painite hotspot to mine Painite?
 
Given the recent changes, the "meta" is in a state of flux. Changes may be coming thick and fast.

I'd recommend keeping an eye on current prices and demand while mining to see if what you are commonly finding is worth anything. For instance I found a lot of Osmium recently and whilst not a premium commodity, it made me a tidy profit. Enough to fund my FC for a few weeks anyway.

If you want to maximise your guaranteed earnings per hour, then mining may not be the best way to do it currently.

I just want to find out if it's (still) true that all the hotspots have at best trace amounts of the mineral indicated by the hotspot or if it's because I happened to go to hotspots only in places that indicate a low quality of resources.

Last night, I was going for Musgravite because it seemed to be one that would pay the most of those I found at the place I am at. Prices are higher today, with Musgravite still the highest. Maybe I can find some ...
 
If you're laser mining painite, don't bother with hotspots mate, like I said earlier, go to a pristine metallic and just prospect for rocks, not cores.
 
So I went mining for Musgravite. The outcome was 27t Musgravite and 2t Samarium. I mined the Samarium only to see what it was since I haven't found that mineral often.

I spent one hour in the ring, so this does not include any time that is usually needed for any preprations, and it doesn't include time needed for selling.

The 27t of Musgravite are from two cores. I started 80km from the hotspot and moved loosely towards the hotspot, through it and another 80km further towards the planet. That's all the Musgravite I found within the 160km.

However, it was the best mining experience I have had so far at any self-discovered so-called hotspot. I even found two cores and got 27t! I never found that much before.

Does anyone seriously think that a place like that should be called 'hotspot'? I don't. It shouldn't show up at all. Someone who can please make a bug report so that the hotspots and/or the surface scanner can be fixed.

Here's the boring video if anyone wants to see it: https://enpt.hopto.org/2020-11-27-ED-00.mp4
I haven't played in a while, so I'm rusty.
 
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Ok how do you know which asteroids you need to mine when don't know anything about them, even not if they do contain any minerals at all?
You drop into a hotspot and use a prospector limpet to get the contents of a roid. Laser mining is best done in overlapping hotspots, in the area where the biggest overlap occurs, as the chances of running into a rocks with a good yield is much higher. I usually ignored anything under 20%. I used to take a prospector limpet controller with the ability to have more than 1 active limpet. This gives you a sense of direction. As the rocks are persistent, it is even possible to record the route you take, and mine the exact roids the next time you visit when you find a nice route. Laser mined roids have a respawn rate of 3 hours I believe (it was 2 hours, but they changed it). So a mined surface roid is minable again after 3 hours
 
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It might be worth suggesting that the OP try out the double LTD hotspot in borann. That'll give you a good idea of how to laser mine in hotspots.

The main thing to get from this thread though - you don't need the pwa for laser mining. You find out what rocks to mine by firing prospector limpets at them, and hoping you get some good results.

Some people get results from going after particular shape and sized rocks, but really it's quite a crapshoot. But going to the double hotspot there will show you what it's like when it's working.

The other main thing, is that core mining is totally different - you need the pwa there, but many like yourself find it to be crappy.

And for core mining, it seems again that hotspots are not very hot. To the point that some miners don't bother. Be prepared to waste a lot of time core mining, unless you're combining the two types. The sweet spot of the hotspot is hotly disputed to exist, and I don't know where it is.

So, it really depends what you're intention is OP - are you trying to make big money, or are you just starting out with mining? Laser and core mining really are very different in terms of what you'll find and where, so I'd suggest trying out laser mining first, so you get used to how prospectors work - they tell you what is in a rock, and will double or triple what you get from it - can't remember the numbers, but don't go if you don't have a prospector is the takeaway message from this.

But let us know what you want to achieve and attain and we can help. Otherwise it's just a big field of rocks until you have had a good couple of practice runs. Good luck OP.
 
So I think a clear answer to the OP is that a hotspot does NOT only have trace amounts of the mineral. But there are an unending sea of asteroids, and very few of them are worth mining at all. Finding them is the hard part and it is possible to be unlucky in that regard. The experts map them, so they basically go back and farm the same asteroids day after day. So they get predicable high yields per hour.

So you find a hot spot and you drop in. I think people pick EITHER core mining or laser mining, but not both. There are two different techniques for finding asteroids. PWA for core mining, or prospecting for laser mining. You can definitely drop into a hotspot and not find any cores. Its like a needle in a haystack. Not everyone is into that sort of wild goose chase. Prospecting is much more likely to yield a good return in a reasonable time. Although "good" and "reasonable" are relative.

I started playing a few weeks ago. Started with a sidewinder, worked my way into a Cobra MK III and now I am using a Python. I usually find my own hotspots because I like exploring, but you can easily use eddb.io to find one near you. This is my ship: https://s.orbis.zone/apcY. I just start out with 100 limpets and warp to the hotspot, drop down, wait for pirates to leave, set destination to planet and start moving slowly through the field. I have my right mouse set to fire a prospector, and my left mouse set to both mining lasers AND collector limpets. I move in a straight line towards the planet and fire prospector limpets until I fine one I like. I am NOT picky. if its medium density or better and has a combined total 30% of decent minerals (platinum, osnium, painite, etc) I laser it and refine it. Takes about 4 minutes. Then I hunt for more. As my limpets run low I may get less picky and start mining anything with good minerals in it. In about an hour I have 128t of minerals. usually whatever "hotspot" type this is I will have more than 50 percent of my cargo. Let's say that its 60% plantinum, with the rest as (hopefully) minerals that I can get more than 100K/t for. Then I treat the selling of the goods as the next fun part. I usually try to sell the better item first, then find my next stop, use Single Route Finder - EDDB to find a commodity to buy and take with me (if I sold 70t of platinum at my first stop I buy 70t of a commodity that will sell for a good price in the next stop. So in the end, in about 2 hours I will make a pretty modest 30-50mil depending on my luck. I am very laid back about it all. I know that is very low income for some, but it is high enough for me that I can choose not to do it if I don't want to. A few sessions and I put together a nice little asp explorer for unlocking engineers (which I am doing now) or get a nice little combat ship for combat missions. Anyway I am way off topic.

TLDR Yes, hotspots has lots of minerals. They are spread out and hard to find, but not as hard to find as in non-hotspots.
 
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