5201

Hmm? I thought there was gravity, based on the planet you were on? From one of the dev updates:

As you approach the planet surface the effect of gravity kicks in and changes the flight model and so giving you a new set of flying skills to master. And the 1:1 scale planets and moons take our fantastic simulation to a new level, allowing you to swoop though canyons and skim mountain-tops.

…

The first SRV is the Scarab that you see at the end of the teaser trailer. The Scarab is designed to cross the roughest terrain and has some very cool features, such as thrusters to help jump gulleys and surmount obstacles. The thrusters are also very useful for pushing you down onto the surface in low gravity environments, to give you grip where you need it.

And from Polygon’s interview last week:

“Each planet has its own gravity,” Frontier lead designer Sandro Sammarco told Polygon. “It’s not all the same. It does have a big impact on your driving model. The Scarab has a whole suite of thrusters; big thrusters on the back, and little wheel-based movable thrusters as well. Clearly you can do giant leaps with the big thrusters and that’s a lot of fun. If the gravity is low you can get terrifyingly high air. You can jump high enough that it becomes dangerous on the way back down.”

But not every planet is Earth-like, and those differences in gravitational pull can make for some exciting and unusual gameplay hurdles.

5202

I hadn’t read/heard anything about their decisions. I was just basing my comment on the video of Braben landing above.

Now maybe that moon had very little gravity and extremely powerful magical thrusters, but it just looks wrong. It’s like the auto-throttle/thruster system is configured such that the ship goes, at a specified velocity, wherever it’s pointed – just like it does in space. Again, I’m sure it’s planned, but it just doesn’t jive with how I expect a flight model to behave close to a significant gravity source.

Note: I’m talking about flying the spacecraft, not the little lander/rover thing.

5203

I mined for quite a while in a Cobra, you can get good mileage out of it to build the funds up. From memory, you can get a refinery with 5 or 6 bins in the 2 slot (the 6 is expensive though), or get one in a 4 slot with up to 10 bins at the expense of 16 cargo space. It depends on budget. More bins means less manual management, but less cargo means more trips.

You can also fit a limpet controller in a 2 slot (essential), and a prospector in the other 2 slot (increases yield) if you use the 4 slot refinery. I had a medium and a small mining laser, as I still wanted some offence/defence. I started off with the refinery in the 2 slot and the extra 16 cargo space in the 4 slot.

Pristine metallic rings are the best spots. Look for the low intensity resource areas in there. It used to be the case that you could mine away from those to stay safe from piracy, but I’ve found that’s no longer the case - I was hitting quality metals much more regularly in the proper mission spots.

5204

Thanks, Profanicus.

I dropped out at a metallic ring in Bhare (A3) that is supposed to be good, but I keep shooting rocks and nothing is breaking off at all. I fire off my prospector limpets, and they either crash into the asteroid or go flying off into space and end up failing.

Either I am doing something completely wrong, or I need to find a resource site. Ah! It seems there is a low intensity one nearby. I will go check that out.

5205

What kind of money you folks making at mining? I enjoyed it but it seemed the least efficient activity money wise 8 months ago, that changed?

5206

Technically you don’t need to be in a resource site to mine, so I’d suspect the former… ;)

5207

I guess I wasn’t driven by efficiency, I just enjoyed the mining and occasional fight amongst the rocks. In the Cobra, maybe 3-500k per trip or so, for an hour or two’s work? I’m sure you’d do better with a more equipped vessel.

5208

Just went to the site and it worked right away. Perhaps the rocks I was shooting weren’t the right ones. But, it is working!

I need to go help with the turkey (yeah we made another for us today, heh - wife wants leftovers), but will refine some silver, platinum and indite and see what it sells for after and let you know what I find, Rod, if others haven’t offered feedback by then.

5209

Thats actually pretty great, I think I will give it a go in my asp. Right now I have a 1 jump trading run going that gets me 100k each way. Its very efficient but also gets dull grinding away.

Cheers!

5210

You’re using your mining lasers and not whatever else you’re packing for guns, yeah? Also, you won’t see the rock break up or anything, but you should see little grey boxes fly off which show up in your contacts list. Also, yes, fire your prospector limpet at a rock, and then target it. When it crashes/attaches, it will give you composition info.

5211

I’m not sure what the numbers are exactly, but I can fill up my python with 200 tonnes of minerals and metals in about 2-3 hours. Selling that directly probably averages about 1-2M CR. Picking up a stack of mining missions first for platinum, osmium, and painite, with the occasional request for palladium and gold probably pushes that up to 3-4M CR or thereabouts. So it’s not as profitable as sitting in a CZ or HAZRES, but I find it’s also a lot less boring than the trade grind (while also increasing your trade rank).

5212

Cheers conVurt. Good insights. yeah I think I may give it another go.

5213

Excellent! I was hoping there was a way to also raise my trade rank from the absolute zero it is currently with mining. I would still like to do some mining or trade missions at times for the Veloxi faction just to mix things up some, but they normally require some rank in trading to gain access to the missions.

5214

With smaller ships and limited space you’re better off prospecting by shooting the rocks a few times to see what’s in them, and then using the prospector to boost yield when you plan to actually mine one. One thing about resource sites, is you’ll often find good rocks by looking at the contacts tab and seeing what the AI miners are blasting off, then scooting over and stealing their rock. ;)

There’s also an art to positioning, and shooting at the right angle to cluster all the fragments together in a clear space. Fast moving rocks and fragments that get caught near them mean it’s more likely your collector limpets will crash.

Making money is all about prioritising the good stuff, i.e. the higher-end metals, and ignoring the rubbish. Look for Gold, Platinum and Palladium. Silver is not worth it, though I’ll take it in a pinch if heading back. The only mineral worth anything is Painite, which is highly lucrative. Ignore Indite or any of that other rubbish. :)

edit: as conVurt says, also check the mission board before selling anything, as those mining missions always pay more than the trading value.

edit2: one thing I forgot, also pay attention to percentages in the fragments or prospector reports. If you find Painite but it’s under 10% for example, it’s not worth it either. You’d need to collect more than 10 of them for 1 tonne. Well, Painite might be worth it, but nothing else would be.

5215

Europa has 13% of the gravity that Earth does, so it’s not really a significant gravity source and it should behave similarly to the way it does in space. It’ll be interesting to see how it behaves on a world that does have a more Earth-like gravity. It could be like playing Thrust (that would be fun) or they could have the ship automatically compensate for an increased gravitational pull as it gets closer to the ground (the effect being no apparent change in the flight model, but that would be boring).

[ediot] Oh yeah, I just read the dev update part where it explains the flight model will change. Reading, always recommended.

Yes, I did just typo “edit” as “ediot”, but that seems an appropriate term for an edit that you have to make to avoid looking like an idiot. :)

5216

I just had a pretty good first run at mining. I went to Bhare (A3) (one 17.6 ly jump from Orcus) at a low end resource extraction site and found one rock with lots of gold (44% or so) and one with some painite that I got 4 refined pieces of when done. The gold was refining about 2-3 bars a minute with 2 collector limpets going which ended up being a pretty decent return at the price of 9,854 I got for gold at Tombaugh with the Veloxi station.

All told I refined 38 minerals with 3 silver, 18 gold, 4 painite and 13 palladium that netted me $518.994. I really like that each rock can have different materials and the percentages of yields per rock can very widely. There can be quite a bit of strategy I can see in which rocks to focus on and how to refine. It is quite a bit cooler than I anticipated.

One of the big mistakes I made was leaving the station with a full cargo of limpets, heh. I kept constantly running out of room since my limpets were hogging my cargo. I kept trying to jettison my minerals I didn’t want and the extra limpets, but the collector limpets kept picking them back up and throwing right back into my cargo, heh. I also couldn’t figure out why gold and some other minerals I had to keep manually clearing out of the refinery cargo while others would refine themselves without intervention.

I finally hit peddler rank and looking forward to going on mining missions and more mining runs in the near future.

5217

That’s great news. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the base game with my OR and I’m looking forward to trying Horizons.

5218

I had a beginner’s luck it seemed. My very first mission was a courier of illegal gods which required me to perform two jumps. The reward was $74K credit. I didn’t know that was a significant reward until now - since then, all the other missions I see are $10K or bounty missions at $30K. Having this much so early in the game does help me a lot.

5219

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.

5220

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-1.jpg1920×1200

Painite rock 2

Painite-rock-2.jpg1920×1200

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.