Mobile Mining Confusion

[silverbanshee]

In my continued quest to understand this game, I've decided to try mobile mining. my first test case - throwing a TL and several mining TS's into Avarice worked, but left me with some questions. I'm hoping someone here can fill in the gaps, since most of the guides and threads I found were related to X3R. These questions apply to a vanilla X3TC 3.1 game

Lets say you have a TS with a mobile drilling system and all the necessary wares.

1. when you use "mine mineral" command are you mining the debris fields, or is your ship going around breaking up asteroids. or a combination of both? It seems like in X3R this command would clear a sector, but I'm not sure about it's behavior in X3TC. I'd like to know If I'm potentially destroy asteroids I might need later, even though they will eventually respawn - perhaps just not when I need them.

2. Is mobile mining continuous in the same way a mine is continuous, or are resources eventually used up? This confused me since scanning debris in Avarice sector showed an amount of silicon (lets say 900ish since the exact number isn't right in front of me). I was able to fill several TS's more then once and in total more than the value of the the scan by running the "mine minerals" command multipe times. this was without blasting an asteroid btw AFIK (at least with the player ship).

3. I'm also a little unclear on the difference between collect rocks and mine minerals. is mine minerals more of a fire-and-forget version of collect rocks without personally having to go in and blow up asteroids?

4. Am I correct in understanding that Mine and Trade minerals is continuous while mine minerals is once-and-done (unless a CLS is used to empty miners as they operate). and could mine and trade be used to send minerals to the Hub?

I'm really trying to understand exactly what these scripts do, but actual documentation on the mechanics of their operation has been harder to find than how-tos.

Thanks

[Infekted]

Basically in TC. All debris will respawn continuously. Either natural debris, or that resulting in blowing an asteroid.
So basically you can set unlimited numbers of miners to mine the same debris patch indefinately.
The only exception to this, is sometimes its possible to break the respawn by entering the sector personally. So try to avoid that.

Collect rocks will order your miner to collect from the nearest debris patch, regardless of what it is.
Mine minerals will collect from the nearest debris patch of the correct type. Silicon, Ore or Ice.

All vanilla mining commands aside from mine and trade, will stop doing anything once they fill up. Hence you use CLS to stop them ever filling up.

Mine and trade will fill up, then sell to the nearest NPC requiring that mineral. So no, it cannot be used to do the hub plot. Well not directly, you could still order CLS ships to empty them, but in that case you might as well use one of the other commands.

In TC, the sector formally known as Avarice has no natural debris. You would have to blow an asteroid. It will respawn later if you need it tho.

The main issue with finding instructions, is that the mine minerals command was added after release IIRC. Originally there was only collect rocks.

[silverbanshee]

Thanks very much for all the information. Very helpful. so basically if I pick sectors with reasonable debris, I can mine there indefinitely without wasting time personally blowing up rocks.

In TC, the sector formally known as Avarice has no natural debris. You would have to blow an asteroid. It will respawn later if you need it tho.

My bad. I misread the labels on the messages. I scanned Cho's defeat and the Unknown 8,8 at the same time and got them backward. I must have at some point blown up an asteroid in avarice and forgotten about it - since I was able to mine there. I've saved and restored a lot while trying to figure this game out