One trick is to disable your collector limpet controller and re-enable it. That will kill any active collector limpets, so just launch more instead of jettisoning them.
Okay, I had another mining run this morning trying to concentrate a bit more on being efficient at money making and targeting more valuable metals/minerals.
I wrote down a lot of data while mining to try to get a feel for how lucrative each type of rock was and the estimated credits/hour when done. Here is a quick log that I hand wrote that may be helpful for others (17.6 ly from Orcus, Bhare system, A3 planet at a normal extraction site this time):
8:07am Dropped in at site from supercruise
8:08am found an Indite/Silver + Osmium rock. Passed on it.
8:09am found a Bertrandite/Gold rock. send in prospector to mine it. 28.88% Gold, 19.33% Bertrandite.
8:12am rock depleted and all fragments collected. Total of 6 Gold, 4 Bertrandite.
8:13 to 8:15am found rocks of Gallite, Silver/Bertrandite, Bertrandite/Gallite.
8:15am found a Painite/Bertrandite rock.
8:16am prospector sent, 34.97% Painite, 12.66% Indite, 6.16% Bertrandite.
8:19am rock depleted
8:20am all fragments collected and processed. Total of 10 Painite, 1 Bertrandite, 2 Indite
8:22am found a Painite/Gallite rock.
8:22am prospector sent, 43.48% Painite, 10.55% Gallite
8:25am rock depleted
8:26am all fragments collected and procesed. Total of 13 Painite, 3 Gallite.
8:27 to 8:30am spent time looking up items and deleting limpets and low cost items to make room (running 76 total cargo in an Asp).
8:30 to 8:31am two low quality rocks.
8:32am found an NPC miner and checked out what they were mining. Only <6% each of Gallite/Silver/Gold. No thanks!
8:33am found another Painite rock, Painite only this time.
8:34am prospector sent, 46.36% Painite.
8:38am rock depleted.
8:39am all fragments collected and procesed. Total of 15 Painite.
8:41am Head for home to Tombaugh Station in Orcus. This is one jump at 17.6ly. I upgraded to the B FSD so I can get to a 20 jump range while fully laden. Otherwise, pretty much using conVurt’s build just above and comes in around 11.7 million total.
8:46am Docked at Tombaugh.
My total haul was:
6 Gold
38 Painite
1 Bertrandite
1 Gallite
(I destroyed the Indite and extra Bertrandite and Gallite)
I turned in one Painite for a mission for somewhere around 100k. I sold the 37 remaining Painite for 1,310,873 and a total of 1,375,110 including the Gold and the rest. While this may have been fortunate to find those nice rich Painite rocks, this was a return on 39 minutes of time from arriving at the field to returning home to station. I could easily see averaging 1-2 million in a nice fit Asp like this and a good metal rich field.
Heck, the one rich Painite rock that I depleted in 4 minutes netted me 460,577 alone so there is quite a bit of potential there. I am wondering if there is a different appearance to the rocks with different metals/materials in them. Here are a couple shots of the good Painite ones I found:
Painite rock 1
Painite rock 2
Some other observations:
Left with 35 limpets and only used maybe 10 on the trip. 20 is probably plenty to fill a cargo hold for a trip.
With 2 med lasers, you only use them maybe 25% of the time. Most of the time I wait for my limpets to go collect so could probably get away with 1 med laser although it may take slightly longer to knock off that first chunk to test the rock and to knock off the first couple chunks. After that, I did a lot of waiting and not firing.
Looks like I should have chosen mining as a career. I went from having $50K to totally broke due to a series of lost battles. And then I was in huge debt because of reviving my current loadout. And just when I thought I had another shot on delivering a contraband, the wife called for help with some chores. I thought I had press Esc to pause the game only to return seeing my ship blown into pieces. I thought I could take another loan but my butter fingers chose the Sidewinder loadout. I get sent to the first station I started, no cargo and no money!!!
So, is there a easier and quicker way to make money now?
When I toiled in the grind mine last time I was making 235 credits per Animal Meat, with a very low capacity to carry anything
Flying between
LHS3774 LHS3774
Oleskiw Station Dalton Gateway
animal meat 1290 1019 1055 -235
liquor 829 558 588 -241
Bio Waste 15 20 98
So you can imagine how many trips it would take to be able to buy a new ship.
And why I quit playing.
And the missions were equally useless most of the time, as they’d send you far away for a meagre profit.
All I wanted to do was to ‘sign up’ with a faction and blow stuff out of the sky or just blow stuff out of the sky for reward.
But I dont think my current ship even has guns, or I probably sold everything to make more space for cargo.
Suppose I should just delete the ship, or the game.
Just hitting escape doesn’t pause the game as in a fully single-player experience contained entirely on your PC, since this game isn’t, even if you’re playing in Solo mode. You have to actually save and exit to main menu or save and exit to desktop.
Elite: Dangerous can be a little rough starting out and some of the really good money making opportunities seem to come once you have established yourself a bit and have upgraded ships and equipment.
However, there are some things you can do to make money with a starting Sidewinder, I believe. Does it come with a basic starting discovery scanner? I did a fair bit of scanning the main stars/planets you can see while traveling around to get some starting cash. As mentioned, some early delivery missions can be okay and joining in on some pirate kills at a Resource Extraction Site or at a Navigation Beacon can be profitable. Just wait around until the authorities shoot up a pirate enough to jump in and just a small amount of damage (if you are the only PC) can grant you the full bounty. If you can fit a Kill Warrant Scanner, you can pick up even more bounties on that same ship if you scan them first. Just remember to see who the bounty is with and make sure to travel to a station with that faction to turn them in.
Otherwise, if we have some folks that are having trouble getting started and want to get a jump on the game, I would be willing to join up in a wing with folks and go to the nearest RES or Nav Beacon and blow stuff up for bounties with them. They share bounties with wing mates, it seems, so it could be a way to assist in building up a bankroll to get off the ground a bit. Plus, doing combat in a wing can be quite a bit of fun.
I just got back into the game again recently so there may be other good opportunities early on. I should be Commander Kelan in game (just look for Kelan) and shoot me a friend invite. I play in the Veloxi group mostly so join that too and give me a holler in game if there is interest, or post here and we can try to plan a time/date/location to meet up.
When Horizons comes out will base+Horizons be the only version for sale or will they still sell vanilla as a separate package? I’d like to pick this up but know I won’t have the time to play it before the winter sale. If I could put it off for a few more weeks there’s no reason not to – unless the base game will no longer be up for grabs.
And so the student has become the master…
#proudofthepadawan
Wow, you got lucky with all that Painite. I’ve never seen that much in one place so quickly. Maybe that’s because it was a ‘normal’ extraction site?
I haven’t dared one of those yet, as I thought it was just the enemy spawn rate/type that was affected by the intensity.
I just completed a There and Back to the Witch Head nebula.
Even with a little additional exploring, I didn’t discover one new planet. LOL. There must be some sincerely OCD surveyors out there.
Any of the QT3 groups still active? I doubt our play time will match but it’s good to be able to see some friendlies once a while. Will the game indicate friendlies in-game?
As far as I know the group is Veloxi still. Join up!
Cool! Thanks Brian. I’ll join when I can!
Hmm, good question. I love compiling numbers and analyzing them so will keep a log of each mining run I do and what types of rocks I find and see if I can detect a pattern. I am not sure where to find a Haz Res in a metallic belt yet, though.
I just figured there may be a higher % concentration of metal/mineral per rock in the more dangerous sites. I have no idea if that is true, though. I can see where getting people together for mining ops could be beneficial. If the Haz Res have better output, but needed some combat pilots to run defense for the miners, that could work out well as a team. Lower ranked players could either haul back and forth to keep the big mining ships hopping from rock to rock and other low ranked/fitted ships could test rocks to find the ones with good metal/minerals in them and point the miners to them to keep the miners efficient. Probably more trouble than it is worth, but could be a fun op to do with group mates and help the beginner players gain some cash.
Part of the problem would be splitting profits since there is no credit sharing that I know of, but there is probably some system that could work through dropping and picking up cargo perhaps? Probably more tedious than helpful in the end, but still could be fun and help some folks gain some credits that may have a harder time otherwise. I suppose it may be too hard to just have haulers too as they would have to manually scoop up processed minerals refined by the miners. I have no idea how hard that would be and if it would be flagged as contraband or not. Makes me yearn for a system similar to Eve Online for this part where sharing is easier and building assets as a group, but that causes its own problems that may not fit so well with Elite’s model.
I think stuff dropped by humans isn’t considered contraband, so there’s that.
Flying support for a mining expedition sounds fun, especially as those mining tugs look pretty vulnerable to pirates but yeah - it seems very tough to divide up the loot. A shame, since bounties are shared. But I guess not impossible.
If you have jettisoned cargo from your cargo hold cough excess limpets cough you’ll have probably noticed the option to abandon them. This strips the cargo of ownership, which allows folks who pick it up to sell it legally, without the rigamarole of having to sell it as contraband through a black market.
So yeah, you can drop a few tonnes of painite or platinum as a reasonable way to transfer credits.
Once you have friends in your friends list, the game will let you know when they’re also playing, even if you’re in solo and they’re in open or in a private group, and you can still send text messages so as to potentially co-ordinate.
Ah, good point on the friends list. Here is the old thread:
I am debating dropping one 3E Cargo Rack (8T) for a second 3A Collector Limpet Controller. This will get me another 2 collector limpets for 4 total which should really speed up my mining/collecting. Most of my time was spent waiting on my collector limpets, so this may work well. I would still have 64T cargo storage space.
Good info above too. I wondered what that second jettison option was before, conVurt. I was trying to use that so my limpets wouldn’t collect the stuff I jettisoned, but that didn’t work, heh.
Um… I could have sworn that this outpost did not have a red pirate flags and decals. But it did! What’s happening here? Some sides changed? It’s kinda cool but landing on it and poking around the services didn’t change one bit. Is it just for show?
Some times systems change hands as system factions gain and lose power. Most of the time it doesn’t really matter, but some times it does (if, for example, you docked for the night with a hold full of cargo that all of a sudden is illegal, say).