Asteroids contain blends of ores rather than always being a single ore
Over-mined space will lose ore richness
New mining laser types
Mining scanner shift to complement changes
Design Goals:
Weaken infinite rorqual mining
Encourage rorquals to bring an entourage rather than being the only mining ships used
Make optimal mining require player input
Encourage mining scanner use beyond timing last cycles
As part of setting the stage for a more complex and interesting mining system:
All ores come in 1 m3 increments
Ores having different sizes has not been relevant since 2012 with the venture and does nothing but confuse new players into mining less valuable ores
Asteroids no longer are totally separate rocks of a single ore and are instead blends
These new rocks are 1-4 ores each
The rock will have the names of the two largest deposits it contains but not the exact ratio
Tertiaries in the rock will be mentioned but not identified
Low and null ores are much less likely to naturally be on their own
Drones collect an even cut of the ores in the rock
High yield ore will come from the same rocks as regular ores
The portion of high yield is controlled by richness of the ore
The quality of a rock’s ore can be seen on scans.
The richness system is controlled by:
The solar system’s overall base richness factor
This will recover over time and be lowered by mining
Mining in the same constellation will have a small effect
Each ore will have its own roll adding or reducing that ore’s richness in system
Non-repeating ore sites and moon pulls get a sizable bonus to the richness of their contents
Each rock will have some factor of randomness
Ores are not uniquely effected by what is mined in system
e.g. Mining only veld in a system will deplete all ores in system, not just veld
There is no bottom cap, systems can be mined into oblivion and take weeks to recover
Rocks in over-mined space will start to develop “dregs”.
This will replace some regular ore and in extreme cases may replace whole rocks.
Dregs are 20% of the mineral value and 50% the moon goo value of the ore it replaces
Dregs cannot be compressed
For purposes of targeted mining dregs are their own ore type with a single crystal
Mining drones are slowed by the percentage of dreg up to 20%
Excavators are slowed by 40% when mining a rock with dregs regardless of amount
I’d like excavators removed entirely but this is the next best thing
The survey scanner’s interface will be updated to account for the new amount of information
Survey scanners will get two scripts that allow them to:
Share their results with other mining ships in their fleet at a cost of greatly increased cap demand
Switch to single target scanning allowing much greater range
A new rig would be added to go along with this: The Mining Survey Snooper
Whenever a mining scan is performed on grid the rigged ship obtains the results regardless of fleet, even if the scanner is not using share
-15% scan res, 100 calibration
Is extremely niche outside mooching in HS
Light miners and the CDS have a base cycle time of 30 seconds
Heavy miners have a base cycle time of 60 seconds
New mining crystal added for dregs
Dreg crystals confer a bonus to mining amount
Mercoxit crystals still have a mining amount penalty
Mining crystal volume reduced to 3 m3 for T1, and 6 m3 for T2
Miners divided into:
Light Miner (replacing Miner)
Do not have crystal system
Cut ore evenly from rock
Light Bore Miner (replacing Modulated Deep Core Miner)
Do have crystal system
Cut ore of the crystal type
Cut evenly at reduced rate when not fitted with crystals
Can not start cycles with unmatched crystals
Strip Miners divided into:
Heavy Miner (replacing Strip Miner)
Do not have crystal system
Cut ore evenly from rocks
Heavy Bore Miner (replacing Modulated Strip Miner/Modulated Deep Core Strip Miner)
Do have crystal system
Cut ore of the crystal type
Cut evenly at reduced rate when not fitted with crystals
Can not start cycles with unmatched crystals
Core Denudation System
A new mining type that leaves hunks of isolated ore for recovery by other mining lasers
Does have crystal system
Cuts ore not of crystal type
Rapidly clears ore but only a fraction is recovered
Destroys rocks completely when not fitted with crystals
When loaded with dreg crystals destructively mines dreg types, “cleaning” the rock
Heavy Narrow Band Miner
Does not have crystal system
Can only mine rocks that only contain one ore type
Unable to handle dregs
Works quickly but reliant on native single ore rocks, exposed cores, and cherry picked leftovers
A new Venture variant will be added, the “Tenacity”. It specializes in the use of the CDS and dreg removal
Mercoxit will receive changes to fit in this new system:
Mercoxit will still not mix with other ores
Rather than a chance for damage clouds to form (currently 0% with skills) the gas is treated as another material in the mercoxit rock
When the gas would be “mined” by something it is released into a cloud that’s size and damage scale by amount freed, fading with time if more isn’t added
Deep Core Mining replaced with Volatiles Abatement giving 10% reduction per level to gas generation
When a mercoxit rock is only left with gas it sublimates putting out a greatly reduced cloud
Excavators cannot handle mercoxit
Regular mining drones can handle mercoxit but can release gas when they do so
This system would allow three basic methods to Mercoxit mining:
Bore mining the mercoxit and staying clear of rocks as they pop
This is relatively safe and predictable but mercoxit crystals slow down paper mining speed
Regular mining from quite a way off with tanked ships
How fast this method actually is depends on the gas portion in the rocks, that also will make clouds less predictable if scanners aren’t used
Throwing caution to the wind and core carving the rocks, releasing all of the gas very quickly, and returning to mine cores when it is safe.
Moon mining. This shouldn’t be impacted by the system rating or impact the richness, but by the moons independent rating since it’s so limited, also non corp/alliance members would have to go suspect to actually make fighting over the moons relevant.
NPC Mining fleets. This would result in anywhere with NPC mining fleets being zero ore in a month.
Downtime respawn. Downtime respawn massively favours certain timezones over others. This would make that even worse.
Also you’ve massively over complicated this. The first part of your proposal is all that is needed regarding blended ore types and depletion. We don’t need to utterly destroy all the current mining equipment, and massively complicate mining. If shooting guns only requires pressing F1, mining should only require pressing F1.
Fully exempting moons from the depletion system would massively increase structure spam which is why I included a bonus and not an exemption.
As things are NPC mining fleet home systems don’t have ore at all.
If the issue is that a highsec system is being cherry picked out of timezone there almost certainly isn’t actually enough mining going on to cause depletion to kick in.
If thinking about crystals and scanning really is too much for someout the rocks still have names on them and basic miners work the same way they do now. The strip miner equivalent is even slightly buffed in those numbers because it has a T2 version.
Quoting in agreement. OP’s suggestion started off wonderfully then just got wonderfully complicated.
Simplify ore volumes, mix up ore types among existing rocks, gradually deplete more valuable ores as a system gets mined more to encourage folks to move on. I could maybe also see updating ore scanners to identify ore proportions, with higher meta variants giving more accurate readings. Everything else, while interesting and creative, is just too much of a change.
Everything that I didn’t list in my reply. Specifically:
Dregs.
Renaming existing mining lasers.
Adding additional mining lasers with complicated mechanics centered around Dregs.
Adding a rig with questionable mechanics.
Adding a new ship specifically to use said new mining lasers.
Making Mercoxit mining even more complicated than it is now.
Rorqs are already nerfed too much, they are not the problem. The ability to 50 box them is the problem, make excavators use fighter UI. Just as you cant efficiently Super/Carrier rat with more than 2, you wouldn’t be able to rorq mine with more than 2.
1.) This is not Elite dangerous, if you want to play that game then go play it, do not Change EvE to be that game.
2.) Practically all of this doe not effect Rorqual or Orca mining significantly as they use drones and do not care about Ore type, putting different ores in a single rock makes it simpler to mine, not more difficult.
3.) Same with barges and exhumers, you destroy the T2 mining gear market cause it makes more sense with this change to just T1 strips and mine entire rocks completely out no matter the ore type in them.
4.) Outside of Orca and Rorq’s this change will make mining more tedious for some, and there fore less ppl that want to mine…making it more an issue of how many clients 1 person can box to get the job done.
I think everything seems more complected than it is because I listed what everything does and not what it’s for.
Dregs are meant to slow down unfocused mining in a way that simply reducing total ore volume (what belts do currently) wouldn’t. Focused mining can simply bypass them but drone mining, the bulk of total mining volume, has no way to avoid taking the hit without help from the fleet they are supposed to have. Not allowing compression means that rorquals will be unable to fit an entire belt in their ore hold like they can now.
I should have explained better how the new miners interact:
The narrow miner is very fast but needs isolated ore chunks to run. It can get those by taking apart the rest of the rock with bores (current T2 strip miners) If you really don’t care about anything else in the rock, like when mining r64s, you can also use the other new miner which will tear though the rock rapidly but throws away most of the ore in the way. It is not mechanically centered on dregs unless it has that mining crystal in.
I’ll be totally honest, the rig’s only two uses are mooching off highsec orca scans and spying on rorqual bots from cloak to know exactly when they are about to move.
Mercoxit mining is simpler than regular mining and is about on par with mining ice. With ice the player atleast picks what they will mine, and in a normal belt the player needs to change crystals. With full mining skills it is not even possible for a damage cloud to form and even when they do they are low damage and extremely short range. My idea is to make anything at all happen.
The point you don’t seem to be getting is that there is no need for most of these changes. They just utterly wreck all the current mining equipment. There is no need to make mining a vastly more complicated system than just going out and shooting some rats. F1 works for guns, F1 should work for mining.
Mixing the ores like you said and having some kind of depletion mechanic that weakens each system already does what you need.
The rest of it is just overkill & complexity for the sake of complexity which is bad.
F1 does still pull ore out of rocks, it’s just a matter of what ores. In the same way that different guns are better or worse for different rats.
The seemingly overly complicated parts are what prevents this from from making rorquals even more dominant than they are now. There is already almost no way to justify the use of a barge in a bloc.
If you want Rorquals nerfed just directly nerf them.
The need to move around more would do that already to some extent.
But trying a sly backhanded nerf rather than just putting a number on it is going to piss people off more and actually doesn’t achieve as much of a nerf.
There is no “sly nerf” there is a 40% nerf to mining speed that can be mitigated with the subcaps they are supposed to have and up to an 88% reduction to mined amount if they utterly ignore what’s happening. And they will. That pushes them out to the borders out of their super range in a way that making a number smaller won’t.
At the same time barge mining has an increased income if its actions per minute is higher than .4
