[TESTREQUEST] Mining and Prospecting

[HeinzS]

Mining ships will decide where to mine based on which spot is the best, within the restrictions set by their parameters.
Placing probes in good spots still has an impact on mining efficiency.

Suggested improvement:
Have the miners throw out a probe before they start and collect it again when he is full.

[Ketraar]

Have the miners throw out a probe before they start and collect it again when he is full.

Might as well just not have the bonus from probes then no? I mean if they get auto added why the hassle? As mentioned before, its not required unless you want to make the extra effort and if so you get rewarded for it.

MFG

Ketraar

[Pejot]

From my part i can add that changes to mining in 5.0 greatly influence XEN population and ability to build ships. This is additional heavy punch for already weakened ZYA.

[Thurak]

Suggested improvement:
Have the miners throw out a probe before they start and collect it again when he is full.

I basically do that manually. I just equip my miners with 5 probes from the get go, and from time to time just manually drop a few of them while miners are mining. It does not interrupt any commands.

[Scoob]

The changes to mining seem to be working rather well. I mean that I'm not having to worry about it too much. Station miners, assuming there's something in range of course, just go mine stuff. They also seem to be working fairly well when I'm personally in-sector, which wasn't consistent previously - though, to be fair, that might be linked to how far away from me there in the sector.

Adding Resource Probes now appears to act as a "bonus" rather than a necessity. All in all, mining - for a station at least - seemed to provide a more consistent income or ores - I've not personally tested gas mining yet.

[Scoob]

I basically do that manually. I just equip my miners with 5 probes from the get go, and from time to time just manually drop a few of them while miners are mining. It does not interrupt any commands.

I do that too usually, just equip each miner with 5-6 Resource Probes, then deploy them where the miner thinks there's a good location to mine. I do sometime manually deploy them from other ships too, but the prior method works well.

[Thufar]

In the 4.xx patches, my mining operations worked like a charm. My HQ is in Getsu Fune and my mining operation is set up mainly in The Void. Mining worked, it just took a lot of mining ships to get the job done. With the 5b3 patch, mineral mining has improved greatly. It seems I need a fraction of the miners I used to. However, my gas mining has dropped significantly, especially methane. Methane has become in short in my trading post in The Void and HQ in Getsu Fune. My gas miners cluster in places in The Void where the gas clouds aren't. They mine horribly. Needs a serious fix, please.

My save is here.

Regards,
Thu

[Miravlix]

It seems like it mostly work well, but that a mining "field" has zones, so if I only remove the fog from some of the field, my miners can't access the entire field only the mined out parts of it.

Uncovering an entire field to get full access to a sectors mining riches, doesn't seem like good game play.

If I try to do it manually I keep getting those spawns of hostiles and it would be hours of non enjoyable gameplay.

Seems to me like miners need to be able to see the mining field in the fog or we need an order that explorers mining fields.

[wilsonlaizo]

One thing that I noticed on Beta 4 that wasn't occurring in Beta 3 is that the choice for mining location is a bit weird.

I say that because I usually create a Mining Station on Nopileos' Fortune 2 and associate a bunch of solid miners, in Beta 3, the miners would mine in Nopileos' Fortune itself, as Silicon and Ore yields are at 3.6 according the the probe, in the beta 4 instead of staying in NF, they are deciding to mine 2 maps away in Pious Mist 4, which have an yield of 1.8 and make my miners need to travel way more.

My save with this behavior is here: https://easyupload.io/6cceo7

One thing to notice is that the ability to have the station mining multiple minerals is way better than it was before, so thanks on improving that.

[wilsonlaizo]

One thing that I just noticed is that I just got a HAT quest to identify resource areas. It's asking for Hydrogen 0.10 and Ore 1.69. The probe I placed says Hydrogen 0.14 and Ore 3.6, which should be enough to complete the quest, but only the Hydrogen part is complete which makes me assume that the number on the Probe is wrong and because of that both the questline is not completing and the mining ships are going to other maps with better resources.

Although it's the same save as the previous message, I'm providing a new one with the quest and the probe in place:
https://easyupload.io/mxvhzx

[ubuntufreakdragon]

Zya really needs a safe Resource source.
A system neighbouring Zyarth's Dominion IV e.g. another subsector within the accretion disk would be eye candy.

[nflszhu]

Hi,

It seems that after updating to Beta 5, the mining problem has returned: I've about 80 L Gas miners assigned to my Family Zhin shipyard and the map shows there is plenty of Methane (433K) and Helium (323K). However, my shipyard is running out of Methane and low on Helium. When I go into logistics view, I don't see any incoming ships for methane and helium. I don't think this was an issue for Beta 4 so something might have changed.

Save: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoT6Nmg1pfdysnnKCMK ... u?e=Vrh6qL

Please advise if you need any additional information.

Thank you!

[nflszhu]

Hi,

It seems that after updating to Beta 5, the mining problem has returned: I've about 80 L Gas miners assigned to my Family Zhin shipyard and the map shows there is plenty of Methane (433K) and Helium (323K). However, my shipyard is running out of Methane and low on Helium. When I go into logistics view, I don't see any incoming ships for methane and helium. I don't think this was an issue for Beta 4 so something might have changed.

Save: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoT6Nmg1pfdysnnKCMK ... u?e=Vrh6qL

Please advise if you need any additional information.

Thank you!

Updated save link: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AoT6Nmg1pfdysnnKCMK ... u?e=u8JVpR

[Ketraar]

Please advise if you need any additional information.

As your resource probes indicate Family Zhin is not very good for mining Methane, your probes show range from almost 0 to less then 1 star for Methane, so it will be slow to mine and just adding more L Miners wont do the trick. In addition you are blocking Travel for your miners to avoid enemy owned sectors so they are trapped in Zhin to all sides except "north" to Kritt which has no gas at all. Once that blacklist was removed most of your L miners in Zhin flew off to mine "south" which I grant might be less safe as they traverse a Xenon owned sector but that is just life I guess.

Hope that helps.

MFG

Ketraar

[nflszhu]

Please advise if you need any additional information.

As your resource probes indicate Family Zhin is not very good for mining Methane, your probes show range from almost 0 to less then 1 star for Methane, so it will be slow to mine and just adding more L Miners wont do the trick. In addition you are blocking Travel for your miners to avoid enemy owned sectors so they are trapped in Zhin to all sides except "north" to Kritt which has no gas at all. Once that blacklist was removed most of your L miners in Zhin flew off to mine "south" which I grant might be less safe as they traverse a Xenon owned sector but that is just life I guess.

Hope that helps.

MFG

Ketraar

Hi MFG,

Thank you for your response! Not sure if this is relevant but it seems that my shipyard in Eighteen Billion and Pious Mists IV don't have this issue, and they are both exactly the same size. Note that those sectors all have similar amount of Methane system wise (300 - 400K as shown in sector info page) and resource probes show similar level of Methane (1 star or less, 0.005 - 0.007 / km3). It seems that apart from some Terran sectors, Family Zhin should be one of the best commonwealth sectors for Methane.

Also note that I didn't encounter this issue in Beta 4 so not sure why it appeared in Beta 5 within a day of game running.

Thank you!

[Ketraar]

Note that those sectors all have similar amount of Methane system wise (300 - 400K as shown in sector info page) and resource probes show similar level of Methane (1 star or less, 0.005 - 0.007 / km3).

This is clearly incorrect. 18 Billion has 10x as much Methane as Zhin, in fact your probes show this very clearly.

Zhin.png (40.62 KiB) Viewed 761 times

18 Billion.png (33.98 KiB) Viewed 761 times

As you can see Zhin has almost 0 stars and a max of 0.010, whereas 18 Billion has almost 2 stars and a mx noted as 0.11, which is roughly a factor of 10.

It seems that apart from some Terran sectors, Family Zhin should be one of the best commonwealth sectors for Methane.

Not even close, as mentioned above 18 Billion which has 10x as much Methane is barely in the top 10. The reason 18 Billion show lower numbers in your save is that you have mined out most of it already, as also shown in the probes info screen.

MFG

Ketraar

[nflszhu]

Hi Ketraar,

Thank you very much for your response and sorry for not making my comments clear.

This is clearly incorrect. 18 Billion has 10x as much Methane as Zhin, in fact your probes show this very clearly.

When I mentioned "similar amount of methane", I meant total available in the sector. As you can see below:
- Methane in Eighteen Billion: 198K


- Methane in Family Zhin: 476K


Also, as shown in your screenshot, even though Eighteen Billion's "max potential" Methane density is 0.11, all of the resource probes are showing current available density of 0.0042, which is lower than Family Zhin's 0.0057, again as shown in your screenshot. As a result, we should expect the same yield from gas miners in both sectors?

Last but not least, I notice that all my gas miners in Family Zhin are concentrated in corners of a cube as you can see from below, instead of spreading out to the entire sector, which should increase effeciency?



Again, thank you very much for looking into this! Really appreciate your help.

[nflszhu]

Hi Ketraar,

Thank you very much for your response and sorry for not making my comments clear.

This is clearly incorrect. 18 Billion has 10x as much Methane as Zhin, in fact your probes show this very clearly.

When I mentioned "similar amount of methane", I meant total available in the sector. As you can see below:
- Methane in Eighteen Billion: 198K


- Methane in Family Zhin: 476K


Also, as shown in your screenshot, even though Eighteen Billion's "max potential" Methane density is 0.11, all of the resource probes are showing current available density of 0.0042, which is lower than Family Zhin's 0.0057, again as shown in your screenshot. As a result, we should expect the same yield from gas miners in both sectors?

Last but not least, I notice that all my gas miners in Family Zhin are concentrated in corners of a cube as you can see from below, instead of spreading out to the entire sector, which should increase effeciency?



Again, thank you very much for looking into this! Really appreciate your help.

Not really sure why image is not showing so please see updated link below:

- Methane in Eighteen Billion: 198K
https://imgur.com/a/PKBDyW8

- Methane in Family Zhin: 476K
https://imgur.com/a/ncIUzey

Gas miners concentration:
https://imgur.com/a/sfGMqFO

[Shagrath912]

I have discovered what seems to me to be inconsistent behaviour by miners in relation to the mining of ice in Second Contact II: Flashpoint. If you look at this save here, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wnm4hA ... sp=sharing

there are two L mining ships (OYS-581 & QAC-433) in the sector mining ice for a station that is in the same sector. The determinants of the ships are as follows:
- Maximum number of ore collection drones
- Maximum number of service crew (all specialists)
- Captain has one or two stars
- Station Manager has three stars
- Ice is abundant with over 100 M and three to four stars in the Deployed Resource Probes

With all these factors in mind, ice mining is relatively slow, with 20 or 30 units being mined at any one time, which then takes a relatively long time until the mining ship is full.

In contrast, there is a similar setup in Nopileus Fortune II, where ore and silicon are mined. In my opinion, the miners there hardly differ from the setup in Second Contact. Only the manager of the station being mined for has five stars.

If you look at a miner who is mining ore and silicon there (e.g. ZHC-289 who is about to collect), it happens extremely quickly. The mining ship flies to the place where it wants to collect resources, it stays there for a short time and bang it is immediately full and flies back again.

So either something is wrong with the ice mining or the mining of the other resources is not correct. Or I have completely overlooked something - in which case I apologise for the work.

[ubuntufreakdragon]

I noticed Methane and Ice being far away of each other making terran food even more complicated to produce.
There Should be more Methane deposits anyway.
I had a Methane shortage since 1.0.
Some places where some Methane would help:
Ant Mem
2nd Contact
(without the terran DLC the hole Area is pretty much void of Methane)