hi all, i was just thinking to myself quickly, given we’ve naturally had a shortage phase and redistribution of minerals and such, i was curious about a few things.
first of all, could we make asteroid belts in all regions of space more “dynamic” in this specific sense i actually mean in a cosmetic way.
basically in every system we warp to an asteroid belt and “oh look, rocks!” and they’re perfectly lined up in a half circle sort of shape for us, horray, we get to mine those juicy rocks.
don’t get me wrong mining is one of the simplest and purest things of the game, but i thought what if we could make this aspect visually speaking more appealing.
for example, I know there are other ores in the game which aren’t really used for anything other than the mining missions.
what i was thinking maybe visually speaking we can come to an asteroid belt which has specifically one rock in it, which we have to some how work through, when we’ve achieved that it then breaks appart into say veldspar or scordite or perhaps some other rock.
i just thought it would be a fun little visual aspect, in a sense i suppose it would be like hitting a pinata.
break the rock, an abundance of minerals fall out.
I figured that given some of these asteroid belts are very simple in appearance it would be fun to have rocks break appart and drift, there is already something for this in the moon detonations.
making the very astetic feel of asteroid belts not so easy, the idea would be the more you break appart the bigger the asteroid field becomes.
I figured this would immediately be good for nullsec and may even some how help with the issues with the rorqual
like i said this is much more of a visual asthetic aspect, rather than some kind of mechanical aspect.
naturally each asteroid belt would be pre-detmined with whats inside of it, so naturally you’d cap out the minerals and types and such, but it would mean as a miner you’d have to get right into the thick of the rocks and dig down deep to get the good stuff, a littleral wading through the mud in a sense.
visually i just think it would be cool if there were something more like that, each belt could have its own sort of unique sense and style, being a miner would be more of an art form than something you can do semi AFK.
I also figured this way, rather than looking at how many rocks are left on grid, it would become more of a race to crack a rock and soak up the useable minerals.
I feel the idea of using the “alternate ores” which need to be stripped away to get the actual “useable” ores would be an interesting improvement.
in a previous post I mentioned about having some kind of small structure as a refinery which would refine over time for a slightly better mineral yield.
perhaps these two ideas could play off of each other, you’d have to slowly refine the alternate ores because they could be “more volitile” or something like that.
this idea was mainly impulse written, but regardless of my views of mechanically changing things or refining over time, i think an asteroid belt visual improvement would simple just be something nice to see in the game. but thats just me.