I leave it where it's at, in the bubble of course. If you pay for it, they will come; just check out what the other FC's in the area are offering, and adjust as necessary to get some action. I have never had a buy order take more than a few days to completely fill. I haven't tried it in/near Colonia, but I would assume that the same strategy would work, but it would probably take longer to fill due to the smaller population and I would think you would have to offer a better deal.
What's the most efficient way to mine Tritium?
- Thread starter BradHann
- Start date
I have had a buy order active for Tritium (set at 1000%) for literally months and nobody has touched it. You will not get any takers unless you use a plugin to post the market data to Inara for other players to see.
It helps if you're in the trade or FC owners club discord where you can place buy ads for more exposure.
True. I routinely use EDMC, and didn’t even think about mentioning this.
a balance to the abilities of carriers doesn't have to revolve around a time sink that involves an extremely sparse activity such as tritium mining currently is. there are options the developers could have taken beyond "make the player have to visit more roids that will have a random dispersal and amount of what they want so most of their time is spent doing nothing".
why is that an acceptable option for this game? everything getting balanced by an effective timer involving no player activity to the point where out of game activities are needed to stay awake? instead of having the balanced mechanic involve activities that engage the player for longer or ideally, harder when the player doesn't want to just check out and spend time vs effort?
i don't accept time sinks ( having to travel to, as you say, 10 times the number of roids to acquire the same amount of fuel as would take a less stupidly distributed ore) as decent game balances unless you can do something in game while they are occurring. in mining tritium you can't. because pretty much everything else you are coming across is worthless.
you can't gain skill in guessing where tritium will be. it maxes out at ice rings. everything beyond that is guess and check unless you incorporate external tools and/or mapping. most of the time spent tritium mining isn't spent in the actual mining activity, it's in getting to the roids you will mine.
that's why you can't get good at it. the best miner vs the avg is not going to make that big of a difference in total time spent mining tritium. unlike other ores that are more available.
I was in Colonia recently dropping off another account that will live in Colonia and faced with a diminished load of Tritium for another go at the black. I mined a hotspot nearby, got about 150 units into a hold of 512 or so and decided I would play Star Citizen before I spent the several months packing my FC full up with Tritium that I mined. So I found an FC that happened to be selling Tritium at a highly-inflated price and bought every bit of it for more than 2 billion credits. Best 2+billion I ever spent and would happily do it again to avoid having to mine that much Tritium. I'll leave that to the pros LOL
P.S I made that up in less than a week doing Exobiology/Exploring.
P.S I made that up in less than a week doing Exobiology/Exploring.
Did you try getting gud at launching prospector limpets and then travelling from roid to roid?
what?
I can certainly mine, as good as anyone. The message was DO I WANT TO MINE as much Tritium as I needed to top off my FC and the answer was a firm no. Things would be different if there were more concentrated Tritium deposits to mine with a good yield, you'd spend less time searching and more time mining. Which would be OK, I don't mind putting the time in as long as I felt like it was productive time.
There are. They're called subsurface deposits and the pulse wave scanner shows you exactly where to find them. Seems like you're just to stubborn to admit it / try anything except laser mining.
a) Start your big deep space journey with +20,000t of tritium. That's enough to get you a very very long way.
b) When your tritium supply gets below 5,000t start supplementing it with occasional mining. Without too much pain the last 5,000t lasts for twice the number of jumps. If you don't like tritium mining plan your route accordingly. If you hate mining maybe ts worth planning ahead and move towards bubble or colonia.
c) If you don't like mining, park your carrier at strategic locations. It doesn't need to go everywhere your ships go. Use it as a base. Exploring every fringe star requiring a +100Ly jump is obviously a bad idea if you aren't up for refueling. Strategic parking and exploring the neighborhood will save dozens of carrier jumps.
d) If you don't like mining, don't move your carrier for no reason. Traveling for the sake of traveling is pointless. Have a goal and a plan.
e) Why are you waiting for your carrier jump timer? That makes no sense to me. Either have the carrier travel (following or leading, whichever) while you do exploration activities, or land on your carrier and set the jump at the end of your play session.
100% agree if a cmdr departs on a big deep space journey without a goal, basic plan, and prep.
If a cmdr wants to travel vast distances but doesn't want to mine tritium, figure out the best type of journey and method that fits. Before departing.
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it's a snarky call back to the previous posts referring to getting good at tritium mining.
since tritium mining, like most things you can mine in ice rings amounts to having to visit many, far separated rocks for an rng chance to get something.
Indeed. or if there was other things to do in between trit rocks.
pulse wave tells you a deposit exists, not what that deposit is. you still need to prospect to be sure.
there are fewer rocks with sub surface deposits than laserable trit in trit hotspots. that means you are traveling longer between your next potential trit sub
the end result is basically a wash, with the rates of sub surface being not that significantly different on average to the more reliable if not more boring laser mining. granted if you are good, you spend more time at the roids and have to visit fewer of them... but this is not a real significant time saver. and you still end up with basically just a small amount of tritium for a lot of time spent visiting rocks and shooting them.
when i go mining i have the tools for doing everything as the opportunity arises and i mix it up. but mining tritium is boring beyond reason. mining anything in ice roids is super lame. fdev could have balanced ice roids without recreating the ltd 'problem' if they put at least a little effort into making the various ice ores have some purpose besides converting to credits. tritium is fuel... great... now let's do something interesting with a bunch of the other currently worthless stuff.
that's less a solution to an issue with the enjoyability of a game mechanic and more a way to circumvent it. if it was just tritium impacted because fdev really wants you to buy it and only mine if absolutely necessary.. then sure, it's valid to make it really unattractive to mine. but it's generally how they balance 'value' in mining, by increasing the time you have to spend travelling between rocks and how many repetitions you need to do.
if the answer to 'how should i do this central gameplay for this thing i need' is don't.. then it's designed poorly. fdev should want players to participate in the mechanics they made available, not push players away from them.
it's not a matter of hating mining. that implies some kind of subjective bias or opinion. its like saying, if you hate getting sick, then do xyz. it's about a mechanic that does nothing to hide its contempt for your time as a player where the game loop you are being funneled into doing consists of mostly empty do-nothing activity because implementing something better would have taken longer than i guess anyone was willing to spend on it.
well i wouldn't think someone going out in the black is just carrier jumping system to adjacent system. its generally doing a 500 ly jump to some destination system whether you are exploring the area between jumps or not.
so i don't see how that saves jumps. the destination is the same, the shortest path is the same... so the number of jumps is the same.
sure, if you're crazy and have no course at all and just carrier jumping all over... but that kind of person obviously isn't concerned with anything being discussed here.
what if the goal is to live in the black and explore for years and you don't feel like being thousands of ly from your carrier at any given time?
dealing with the inadequacies of mining by avoiding the entire mechanic is not a good solution. nor should it be one fdev would want players to take in a game that consists mostly of empty systems you can only mine or visit and look at.
because if i have a choice of watching a loading screen i have to initiate 12 times back to back across 15 minutes vs sit on the carrier and watch YouTube or literally do anything else, which is the better use of time?
if I'm 'exploring' during this journey then yea, you can not count carrier timers as wasted time. but that's a specific single use case, and doesn't get to apply to any of the others where you aren't interested in your journey becoming multiple times longer to take.
in here, your (and others) idea of prep is to cut out mining as much as possible. that's bad design. all you can do out in the black is mine and honk at systems or look at non reactive planets or basically do that on surfaces to plants.
why put so much of something in the game to only make it so unappealing that players would spend billions in credits to avoid having to do it?
if it were something avoided because it was hard and required skill that most players don't have that would be one thing... but it's avoided because it is objectively a boring, time consuming activity with little to no redeeming value.
what i disagree with is not that the player isn't 'doing it right', it's that the 'right' way to do it shouldn't be, 'avoid doing it' when that thing is one of the central game roles the whole game is built around players doing.
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Everything you are saying points to you using a fleet carrier as a standard exploration ship with a 500Ly jump range. And it looks like you are using your carrier as a ship to cruise around the galaxy.... jump... jump... jump. And if you are doing this then yes, you are going to burn through tritium and must wait for 15min jump timers.
You are arguing against a game mechanic that exists because a fleet carrier is not a standard exploration ship. It appears you want a standard exploration ship with a 500Ly jump range.
If you use a fleet carrier as a fleet carrier, and plan & prep accordingly... your journeys will be less painful.
and you are arguing for a mechanic (tritium mining and timers) that balances fleet carrier movement that doesn't involve any enjoyable gameplay or player interactivity. I'm not saying using a fleet carrier to trek around the galaxy is a good idea nor that it shouldn't be discouraged.
I'm saying the method of discouragement should involve more gameplay.., not the least developmental effort time sink option that threatens players with boredom. suffering thru the lack of gameplay via tritium mining or waiting on arbitrary timers is not the only option nor is it a good one to balance carriers or player activity in the black. some effort and creativity could see carrier travel involve additional gameplay in order to limit them... rather than activities that are so unrewarding and tedious and/or require the player to simply wait.
the majority of the game is filled with empty systems where the only thing you can do in them is mine or honk/look at. it makes no sense that the limit to players participating in that is 'make them so bored they wish they didn't bother'. it makes no sense why the developers would want that to be their answer to any aspect of a game they want players to enjoy. this is a badly designed response to the game that should be resolved with something that encourages players while making them work for a reward worth the effort.
mining icy things is a core activity you are supposed to participate in. it should not be balanced with a playless time sink such as sparse spawn and worthless fill items. there's nothing about that option that a player is going to go 'I'm glad I'm doing this'
Crumbs, look, you don't like mining. That's OK, but the only solution really is to avoid it. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Complaining about it to other people who quite enjoy it isn't going to make anyone change their mind.
There's nothing special about mining in this regard. I don't do much combat because I don't much like it. This marks off some parts of the game from me, but I don't maintain that it's bad game design; I just recognise that it's not designed for me.
If you stick to the glowing rocks, sub-surface tritium is way more abundant than laser. It's not even close. Also 90% of deposits are tritium, so you don't waste any time.
I addressed this compromise earlier in the thread:
The mining is quicker but overall it's slower or on a par with laser mining once you take mat collecting into account.
I also think there's quite a few contributors that have a significantly different idea of what counts as a long trip is compared to my own & that's probably going to be different for each reader & their individual situation.