Mining UX, Phased Fields, Highsec Mining Content and New Ships

Helpful Capsuleers

On Thursday, the 23rd of October, we will be temporarily opening the doors to Singularity once again. This time we are hoping to gather your valuable feedback on some of the new mining gameplay, content and systems which are currently planned to be released in the winter expansion.

In particular, we would like some help with performance testing during the mass test and feedback around the gameplay of a new mining site we are planning to release called the “Phased Field”. This site contains a brand new special ore type, and brand new mining gameplay. Which will be talked about in more detail below. As well as the changes and improvements we’ve made to the look and feel of mining.

Check out the planned mass test on singularity here.
Also check out the news item covering this here.

Additionally, we’ve done a huge overhaul to mining UX! And there are a few other surprises in this build.

Keep in mind that features are still in active development, graphics, stats and design may not fully represent the final product. This is primarily a performance test, but we welcome any feedback, but bear in mind that some feedback may be impossible to action before the expansion launches.

Mining UX

Mining cycles for regular ore mining lasers and strip miners have been decreased by 4x, with a similar decrease in yields, capacitor, and mining crystal volatility damage, so mining will feel a lot more responsive and give you feedback more often, while still producing the same yield over time.

Mining Critical hits have been introduced into the game. All Mining lasers now have a small chance to critically hit, and get bonus ore and ice. The bonus amount from crits is not deducted from the total amount of ore inside the asteroid either! You’ll now also be able to see how full your mining hold is in space on your ship

All Corvettes and bonused mining ships will now have a built in asteroid scanner, which can be activated to scan nearby asteroids. The asteroids will glow from yellow (most valuable) to blue (least valuable) in terms of isk/m3 so you don’t have to do a bunch of maths to figure out what you should be mining. By fitting a Survey Scanner, you’ll also be able to see the total amount of ore left in asteroids, ice and gas clouds when you activate the scanner. The ORE industrial command ships will also be able to give everyone the effects of a Survey Scanner while they are in fleet and have one equipped (or a command burst effect??)

Additionally, many other UX improvements have been made such as the long requested ‘compress all ore, ice and gas in my ship’ hotkey.

Phased Asteroid Site

This is a new type of mining site we are releasing with the expansion, it is intended to be a highly rewarding site. In this site, there are 4 Phased Asteroids, as well as regular asteroids. Phased Asteroids cannot be mined normally, they can only be mined while they are inside an object in the site called the fracture, which will slowly move from one end of the site to the other end. The total duration of the site is around 40 hours. While Phased asteroids are inside the Fracture, they will activate and become mineable, however, players will only be able to mine them at 10% efficiency until they deploy and charge up a new mining deployable called the ‘Mobile Phase Anchor’

Mobile Phase Anchors are cheap structures that should cost around 5 million ISK, they can be deployed by anyone, but must be deployed within 50km of a Phased Asteroid. Once Deployed, only an Industrial Command Ship is capable of connecting to one, to provide it with energy. Once the Mobile Phase Anchor has enough energy, then it will become active and begin attempting to phase in the Phased Prismaticite. After 60 seconds, the Phased Prismaticite will be phased in, and can then be mined at 100% efficiency for the next several minutes. It will go back to being phased out again. Mobile Phase Anchors have 6 activations, and 1 activation will be consumed for each phase in attempt.

The energy required by the phase anchor can be provided by 1 Rorqual or 2 Orcas or 3 Porpoises or a combination of these ships.

The new site must be discovered with scan probes, and doesn’t appear on the overview like regular ore sites. However, after approximately 20 hours have passed since it was first discovered, the site will spawn a beacon which will appear on all players overviews, and it will also be discoverable on the world map from anywhere in new eden. The last 2 phased asteroids in the site feature the largest amounts of Prismaticite, and the fracture will not reach them to activate them until the site is visible on the world map, meaning everyone will know about a phased field site when the last 2 asteroids are active.

Prismaticite itself is especially erratic but incredibly valuable. Unlike regular asteroids, when Prismaticite is reprocessed it can randomly become any mineral in the game, and has a variable quantity rather than a fixed quantity like other ores, for example, you could refine 100 units of Prismacite and get Tritanium, and then refine 100 units of Prismaticite and get Isogen! If you want some more control on what mineral type it will become, you can perform a reaction job on Compressed Prismaticite to convert it into unrefined minerals, which will then be able to be reprocessed into a specific mineral type.

Highsec Mining Content

But wait - There’s more. While the focus of the mass test is the Phased Asteroid Field site and the new mining UX. We’ve also revamped a lot of mining sites in high security space including replacing the old asteroid belt remnants site with new managed asteroid field sites, we’re bringing back the old Omber and Kernite anomalies to highsec with a full visual overhaul, and you might find more of them around the empire shipcaster systems. We’ve also added a brand new highsec mining escalation which can be obtained from the Omber and Kernite anomalies, and we’ve also done a visual overhaul of level 1 through level 3 mining missions. We’ve also bumped up the LP and ISK rewards from level 1 and level 2 mining missions by 50%.

New Ships

Singularity will have an early preview of the 5 new ships we plan to release with the expansion, the Pioneer mining destroyer, the Outrider Command Destroyer, The Venture and Pioneer Consortium issue and the SOE Expedition Command ship. These ships will not be obtainable on Singularity and you will not be able to fly them in space. however, you will be able to simulate them and see an early version of their proposed stats and bonuses.

It should be noted that the graphics for the ships are still in active development and not representative of the final version of them. We would also like to remind everyone that this is a test server and things are actively changing and in active development.

Singularity will remain open until Monday the 27th of October, so if you can’t join us for the mass test, then we’d still love your feedback!

13 Likes

Strip miners != Ice Mining, or are ice blocks now 1/4 the volume, ala ‘Batch Ore’ of years past ?

Based off the Ore value or the Refined value ?

Ok. Flat resist profiles like SoE ships on the table at all? Those in armour tanking space have been getting the raw end of the stick for years when it comes to using precious slots for tank on mining ships.

So the new scanner is different to the old scanner, but not?

So a short cycle crits, but because the hold on mining ships is trash, most of it will be lost when ore hold is full.

Good work.

How about some kind of ore transfer array power between mining ships and command ships when in siege and move beyond the wack a mole of compressing every 4 minutes ?

Please make this gated deadspace otherwise its just another focal point like ice belts for droppers.

Global broadcast mechanics are why CRAB beacons are banned in many parts of Null. Don’t do this if you want anyone other than the established groups for it to be a viable activity.

Ok. So how does the ISK/m3 calcuation from the new scanner work for this then ?

Every mineral needs to be refined this way in the long term, its insane a whole freighter of compressed veld can be refined in a blink of an eye, just dangle a super high reprocessing rate in as a trade off.

2 Likes

Carriers are mentioned in the news post, could you share more details?

2 Likes

the one thing about the intergrated ore scanner i might have issues with is just the placement/size of the button, from the video its quite a big button and while potentially useful to newplayers i feel old players have no need to know the isk/m3 and for m3 left people tend to use 1 ship in fleet to check how much is left and inform the rest of the people there.
so can there be an option to hide the button and if not to atleast make it smaller or be allowed to moved to otherside of capacitor

1 Like

That’s a covert Battlecruiser…

This is one of those “we know what we’re doing” things again isn’t it. Just like T3 destroyer launch, bubble immune AFs etc etc.

1 Like

Can simplified operations be optimized for multiple mining vessels? For example, when I have multiple mining ships, I usually need to perform ore compression operations. At this time, I need to switch between multiple windows, and it takes 1-5 steps each time to complete the “ore compression” operation. When I use Hulk, it makes me very tired. Please consider adding shortcut keys. For example, I can use the “ore all” shortcut key and then use a certain key to directly compress it to help me reduce operations. Thank you

1 Like

Yeah broadcast everything to ******** map to kill entire hunt-whaling content…

And making another content only viable for giga blocks with super umbrellas.

4 Likes

What’s wrong with that?

It would be the second covert battlecruiser in the game, an armor ship this time rather than the shield-fit Cenotaph.

As mentioned, this is coming :slight_smile:

image

6 Likes

Yes, but it looks like he wants to compress all of his fleets holds with a single click, rather than going to each ship separately.

If that gets allowed you may as well allow botting so nobody has to put any effort into the game.

2 Likes

Miners are already basically botting. ”OH NO, I’ll have to spend more than one second per minute actually playing the game I’m ’playing’!”

hope this would never happen

1 Like

Do not change old mining scan survey!

I operating multiply hulks at once and i use scan survey window all the time, with that changes i would not even use scan survey button, but pick any asteroid manually from overview. This is so decreasing in terms of quality life change, its unbelievable.

1 Like

they don’t change it, they add a new one

i take it as they change old one

And yes, stop broadcasting content via GLOBAL map, hunters have enough tools to find their targets, but ccp doesnt even have a clue how they do it. Global map broadcast its eithr big turn of for pve guy, either just a bait from the null block

3 Likes

The Ceno is a toy, a gimmick. A BC sized Stratios with a heavy drone damage bonus AND a zero-point entangler is a menace.

2 Likes

Well I for one, thinks these are some sexy details!

/c

3 Likes

Question about the crit. Most of hulk user compressing ore each two cycles, in that case could you slighty incread its ore bay?