How to fix mining without bots!

[Warlander]

First my thoughts on the mining bots that are coming being a spec miner / pilot:

• No other Talent Tree / Role allows you to just buy a bot to bypass the need to fulfill a role when other roles are being further compartmentalized, yet mining is being religated and sold out.
• I and thousands of other people will use this bot and as many bots as they will allow me to buy to suppliment lower tiers of ore or to mine up as many higher tier ores as possible.
• This will destroy what is left of resources even before this game goes live on launch day with only surface rocks to mine.
• Mining bots are completely uneeded in general
• NQ does not allow full automation bots of any kind yet they want to add mining bots after trying to hyper inflate the market, add a huge content gate to industry, and then add a tool to the game that will bring in a lot more ore wholesale across the board to undo any inflation they sought to generate with destructive elements by bringing in more ore then we can reliably process, craft, and sell to deflate the market again for no reason than they dont know what to do.
• Or that by default this bot will need to bring in more mats then it costs to use the tool or it is a waste of developer time and resources

 

Its not like as a miner I can turn around and be like yeah I want to buy an industry bot that wanders around negates the need for industry and just produces me random products. While that would be nice and all im sure the industrialists would have a shitfit if all of a sudden people who didnt invest any exp or talents just got their whole purpose in the game fully automated and run without any effort whatsoever if all it took was potentially some gas to run it or credits per cycle. Im pretty sure PvPers would be likewise pissed if I could just buy a wingman drone bot that could missle lock them as soon as we get targeted in our ore hauler since we are supposed to have a Spec crew of comparmentalized roles to cover escorts, pvp, etc just stepping all over their role in the game.

 

Besides just destroying the purposed and function of roles like mining, why is this even needed in the first place?

 

I don't know about anyone else here but first off these bots just in order to justify the time and resources spend on developing this tool has to bring in more ore then you spend to opperate the auto mining bot. And even if these bots required a roving dynamic core to opperate there needs to be some kind of limit to them based on how many cores you can put down for both players as well as Orgs. Since I, and many others will use as many of these bots as they allow since this will be used to suppliment various tiers of ore with no effort or downside to using them. The problem is if you have thousands of people with potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of these auto miners.

 

You just have to ask the following questions:

• What then is the point of being a miner?
• How long will whats left of the resources hold out? Are new players supposed to only mine ground rocks when this game launches?
• How much more running processes will this add to a game that at times has lag issues already?
• What will this do to the economy? After trying to get inflation going they want to turn around and hyper saturate the market with more ore and parts then we could ever do anything with?
• NQ has been against us doing this kind of full automation on our own as it would break the game and yet they want to turn around and break the game with a less efficient version of what they would have banned people for previously?

 

Those are a handfull of ways to immedialy add more content to mining to make it more role specific and purposeful while mining that negates the need for auto mining bots.

 

But if there is some kind of need for some kind of automation then why not just use the most untapped resource(s) in the game that everyone either has 0 need for and just throws away but unless you have some kind of random teraforming project is completely discarded. All they need is a Sifter Element. There should be a sifter version for ships and another industrial version for static cores. Just an element that you can attach to a container that just takes sand, dirt, snow, etc and just processes this vast untapped resource that 99% of the game is made of that 99% of people will never use unless there is an actual purpose associated with. A sifter would again serve all the functions of an auto mining bot that does not destroy waht is left of ore nodes but uses something that is already in the game to generate a trace amount of other ores per 100L processed. It requires not roving script. You just need a container to attach it to.

 

Sifting should opperate in the following ways:

• There needs to be two variants with one type for ships and the other for Static Cores
• 5 Tiers of upgrades for each type (basic, advanced, etc)
• Talents for each type. For the ship version there should be some kind of branch in mining for sifting amounts. Another branch in industry for time, efficiency, amount, tier, etc.
• 100L every 30 mins base without talents for the ship version. 100L every 15min base for industry. Every part tier should drop 5mins @T6, Putdowns dropping it 2.5mins @ T6, and mining talents dropping it down an additional 2.5mins so that at best you can still only process 100L at 5mins at max.
• Talent for tiers of ore that can be sifted with each individual ore, tier of ore, and requiring a whole tree to make it fully viable as a potential role paralel to mining.
• Based on location so that if you go to a different moon/planet you are more likely to find the local resources when sifting with a small chance to still gain other resources from talents.

 

As time goes on mining will hit a wall where it takes more time and effort then it is worth to go out and find ore and there will be a need for a mechanic like sifting. The auto mining bot on the surface seems like a great bandaid but it will only compound the problem of depleting the ore. Even now there are moons that are pretty much swiss cheese where all the resources you came looking for are gone or what is left is like 1 small node someone missed every 10-20km apart from the next one. Sifting on ships is a necessity for mining runs where you could mine for weeks on end and still not fill up 5 boxes working with 3 people 8-10hrs a day specifically looking for it. Sifting if it were based so that if you go mining and actually collect the soil even if you dont find what you came for you could sift the soil there and still get some kind of passive gains that take a long time to process so that you will fill up a lot faster with sediments then it will process without talents. It should at max talents just about but not quite keep up with a T5 maxed miner. But still even if you find nothing on a mining run you dont have to leave completely empty handed or that even if it is still inefficient it still serves the role of mining and industry and fills the role of the bot and slows down mining further for passive resources. Either way this is a necessary feature at some point but it should still require multiple talent trees and content pre-req locked content gates to gain max efficiency.

 

And honestly what is there to the mining tree?

• Equipment Management
• Architect
• Avatar
• Teraforming
• Miner
• Inventory Manager
• Dredger
• Stock Control
• Org Construct Management

 

There is like no real mining skills in the mining tree. Sure you can make bigger holes or add bigger piles of dirt but other then container range for mining or some of the avatar skills you cant use due to mining lag everything else does not pertain to mining besides the ability to grab more. It would be nice to have additional talents that add value to mining like the crafting / industry trees which give bonuses and extras galore the further you go into the tree and needs multiple poeple or potentially years to max vs perhaps 14 mil exp to max mining with T5 everything with no real affect on mining overall per exp spent. Speed and bigger holes are nice but it would be nice to specialize in ore knowledge or things pertaining to actual mining as its own tree instead of 2-3 and at max 4 branches that do anything for mining and thats it. Sifting or ore tier specific knowledge talents would go a long way to making it a real purposeful tree.

 

The other point I would like to make that I think is completely backwards is how personal scanning and ship mounted scanning is handled in general which I think is the real issue at hand in the oversaturation of the market and the real source of market issues. Scanning in general is set to be too fast, too effective, and over too large of an area that has no real limits to its use and yet still allows a handful of players to scan massive areas to find juice tiles (or whats left of them) before anyone else has had a chance to discover or evenly distribute mega mines to a larger majority of the population.

 

For example its like if you were going to feed your dog and put a chunk of steak into the bowl. If you just put the steak into the bowl and put kibbles on top of it and put it down the dog is just going to use their nose, find the steak, eat said steak, and leave the kibhles untouched. Where if you break up the steak into tiny parts and mix it into the kibble you force the dog to eat a majority of the kibble to eat the steak. The dog wont likely eat all the kibbles more then they are forced to work to find until they are satisfied they ate all the steak in the process.

 

I think the same thing is happening here. The alpha backers and people who knew how to play the game cleaned most of that stuff out before anyone else could get the chance to get to those planets and places before they were blockaded in a sense to prevent anyone else from taking those mats. They didnt really have to work to find anything since you can strap three scanners to a ton of ships, then scan whole moons / planets in 12hrs - 48hrs to find all the best tiles then send an army of miners in to clean it all out.

 

Its not rocket science that this system is broken or that before the general public gains access to the game in a year or three from now that there will be no ore left but T1-2 rocks on the ground or spending a month mining and searching for a handful of parts the further they let it go on without limits or adjustments to how this system is fundamentally handled in addition to how it affects the market in general or that they both want to spend a lot of development time and resource both creating inflation market bots and at the same time auto mining bots to floor the market with ore and scanning to know where to drop te bots since now you can use the scan data on tiles and clean up mats just that much faster.

 

 

The first thing I think that needs to change is how scans are dealt with in general along with how the personal long range scanner works as well. I think that the long range personal scanner should only pick up on the smallest nodes first until all the 4k nodes in a 1km perhaps 2km radious are cleared before it will even begin to register 8KL mine nodes for each type of resource within a tile. And even if you tried to scan a tile it should only reliably read only the small nodes in a tile and require multiple scans after you clear out the small nodes first. This would drastically slow down scanning in general and make it so that the more a tile is worked the better it seems to gets rather than it being completely desolate of large resource nodes and all that is left is small nodes for km in all directions.

 

Resource Scanning needs the following:

• Lmit of 1 Resource Scanner to a ship
• Move the base scanning time 1 hr per tile to force people to either mine or wait a long period of time unless they have talents to make it nearly as efficient as it is now with a max of 30 mins per scan.
• Create ship classifications and a line of scanners that have core classifications. A single XS-S ship should not be flying around scanning multiple tiles vs a M-L ship with better capabilities or means and mining talents for scanning for resources to mine which should be in some kind of mining branch for prospecting.
• Require multiple scans with the bottom up approach of only being able to scan for the smaller resources first 4KL/8KL/12KL/etc as the smaller nodes are required to be cleared first before the bigger nodes can be scanned for. So you have to actually work a tile to get better results over time unless you run into the bigger nodes.

 

As it stands now Resource Scanning is broken and requires no skill, talent, or effort in prospecting and working a tile and all you need is a small group and you can just bypass all the junk tiles and steal everything of value. Unless something is done scanning should really be removed from the game. This way it stil does something but it would drastically slow down the wholesale stripmining of resources that will eventually need a full wipe to fix. Combined with sifting this would balance out for the loss of resources they were previously able to plunder and flood the market with in the first place up to this point.

[OrionSteed]

Great post.

 

I just want to interject one thing.  I've been doing a lot of mining lately and the biggest time sink for me is cleaning the node off.  If this process could be expediated a bit, it would help tremendously.  Like maybe a cleaning part of the tool?  Where I point at an area and it zaps the dirt / ground elements around it in a large area off of it?  I don't like the idea of mining bots either, but the fact of the matter is mining is straight up sickening.  I agree with you changes should be done there first before bots.

[Warlander]

You know...

 

Honestly with as much customization and boosters all other people get from their put down bonuses along with talent trees why are we stuck with basic standard issue tools everyone gets when they start the game?

 

Like seriously why is there no XS, S, M, L, XL, etc versions of the mining tool with basic, advanced, rare, rediculous, and ultra rediculous expanded versions? Why cant we strap parts to a mining tool in some micro core system thats kick ass and powerful but breaks down the more you use the high performance mining tool.

 

That would be awesome if there was like battery driven lazer mining tools that just mealt rock like nobodies business but requires some form of battery like gas for piloting to opperate. Or drill bits that target specific ore better or provide miners with put down perk talents ore size XS-XL and Basic - Ultra rediculouls expanded sifting equipment, scanners, teraforming shapes, and red tape associated with mining like some kind of container range extension transponder that all runs of batteries, gas, or hell rocket fuel perhaps.

 

It would also be awesome if there was some kind of mining exoseleton that allowed you to carry more weight or to expand your nanopack into a large or having other larger mining mech type suits that start at current size and scale up to perhaps some kind of 20ft mining mech or crawler of some sort. I would love to see large tank treads or dynamic core mount industrial mining equipment. But either mining mechs with different part impliments as well as some kind of military variant and also a moble industry versions for repair bots or field 3d fabrication machine or a suit that makes nanocrafting more efficient. Depending on the size XS, S, M, L, XL versions should allow someone to put larger containers, engines, jump jets, weapons, tools, reactors, repair drones, etc.

 

I dont know how many times I wish I had some kind of tank treds to move my ship mining after they neutered the maneuver tool. It used to be the only way to really mine with our pilot walking the ship and our miners working in tandem. But it would be nice if they had tank treds that were more efficient then hovers but allowed you to move across the ground more efficiently. Perhaps some kind of large tires or something would work too if you could just strap the tires to the side of a container with perhaps a steering tire that needs to not be obstricted with like a circle that cant be obstructed. Most instances I would rather travel by rover that is more efficient than just flying everywhere and using jet fuel super inefficiently when I could just mine all the surrounding tiles in a 15-25km area.

 

It would also be nice to have an actual boat based vehicle that just floats on the water. With teraforming we could create lakes, rivers, and all sorts of ways to more efficiently move on or within a planet. Building massive cargo ships that are bound to physics like spaceships where if it is too heavy or mis weighted it will bob or roll and I think it should go down and blow up that way or if it hits the ground with a lot of weight.

 

Or even some kind of rail system would be pretty awesome for transporting ore, parts, services around much more efficiently especially if there was a need for depots warehoouses, and getting goods safely to the market place. Especially if there was some government paying for infrastructure like that for industry at the cost of shipping. Still with a couple of friends, a couple shell orgs for cores and a lot of elbow grease you could probably get a pretty good shipping company going with multiple lines.

 

It would also be nice to be able to do more with teraforming like create roads, bridges, perhaps even some kind of logistics infrastructure or power plant networks for regional power grids that you can pay other players for power.

 

Just seems strange that industry has this nice investment that generates real money or items, pilots have a ship to invest in, PvPers likewise have something to invest in that can generate profit. Miners need a customizable tool or some kind of exclusive vehicle like a mech or industrial boring machine. Right now its pretty boring and its going to get more boring as time goes on and it gets harder to find resource

 

Right now miners are just some people who cant do much until you can multiclass into other aspects like miner/pilot or miner/industry. Until then you either are forced to spec into processing to make perhaps a couple more credits or you just work endlessly mining ore at cut rate prices so everyone else can get rich off your efforts. Miners are the fundation of what can be done in this game it would be nice if there was an actual mining talent tree like the other roles.

 

Just like inventory needs its own tree and the potential to drastically increase container range to 5km max would also really help or if you could effectively turn putdowns for containers and turn say an XS container volumer into the next step up into an S, S into M, M into L, and so on. Also being able to drastically incease your nanopack volume so that you could at least mine a standard 12kl node would work instead of 5km container range. My biggest gripe is walking just outside container range and having tomake multiple trips since base you can carry like 4kl volume and at max is still only like 6kl volume. If we could have the ability to go at least up to like 18-24kl with some kind of exoskeleton or mech addon container that adds directly to your nanopack but still allows an additional container link. I would love that.