Cleanup on asteroid 4!

[Novean-61657]

I have kinda missed mining, not the automining or the harvesting, but what is now asteroid mining. Haven't done it for at least 9+ months, maybe even (far) longer and this weekend I finally got everything ready to do some asteroid mining...

 

Then I realized mining totally sucks with low or no talents, I was able to quickly fix that. But I miss my (perfect) talents from beta for asteroid mining! I kinda forgot which talents affected which mining tools, I noticed that the DU atlas also isn't exactly clear on that. But eventually I flew a mining ship out into saves-pace found myself a 9 hour old uncommon asteroid and started doing some mining. I found some T2 Natron (30kL) and the rest T1 Quartz (350kL), still finding Quartz there in 5000L-6000L nodes. It's fine for now, as I need to get back into the mining groove and get used to the iffy asteroid gravity physics... The Natron is now long gone, the only thing left is the Quartz, no other asteroid miners show up anymore for that quartz. Hence the title of the topic... For gawds sake! Clean up your asteroids! 😉

 

I can understand why Quartz is as unpopular as it is, buy orders at Alioth Market 6 are just above 5 quanta, while Coal and Hematite are more then twice that. And no, asteroid mining any of the T1 ores isn't an efficient use of my time (quanta per hour). I'm asteroid mining because I want to experience the 'zen' of it again. But getting at just small nodes of 5000L-6000L of ore is disappointing and a bit de-motivational... I'll clean up this asteroid of all the unwanted Quartz and will see what I can get from other asteroids (outside the weekend) in the save-zone, I need to learn a bit more regarding finding new asteroids, mining speed, and speedy scanning ships before going into pvp-space...

 

So who else is asteroid mining? What do you pickup and what do you leave? Etc.

[Distinct Mint]

I've dropped almost all of my automining tiles (due to the tedium & tax required to maintain them at the expense of gameplay), and am using asteroids as my primary source of self-gathered ore. Of course I'll use the market for anything I need above this. While there is still work involved in hand mining, its very different to the terrible automining that I've been forcing myself to do since it was introduced (and now just can't tolerate any more). Asteroid mining also conveniently has no taxes, so I can do it at my own pace, and not need to produce each week to cover costs.

 

One thing that could be improved here though is the size of ore nodes, particularly of T1. Mining hundreds of kL of T1 from asteroids is fine in itself, but doing it in multiples of 5-6kl drags it out a little. It would be a QoL step to have T1 (only) have a random distribution of node sizes, say 5k, 10k (rarer), 20k (rarest), so that there's a bit of efficiency gain for T1 mining, as well as that tiny bit of anticipation when finding a new node, whether it is a bigger one or not. This was one of the fun parts of planetary underground mining - finding a node, start mining it, and then finding that it Just Keeps On Going! 🙂 This would make a really nice addition to asteroids, and limiting it to T1 wouldn't affect balance elsewhere. We don't need meganodes, but some variety would be nice.