The Heiress & Polygypsum weirdness

[Skip_Lorry]

So my former GalMil toon was grinding level 1 Caldari Navy missions to repair standings.

I got the mission series “The Heiress”. One of the missions requires mining 20 Polygypsum from an asteroid. I fit a Civilian Miner, and went to town. Got 1 Veldspar and nothing else.

Hmmm… maybe the mission is broken. So I bought 20 Polygypsum off contracts. Agent doesn’t like it. So I filed a trouble ticket. But while I was waiting for a response, I thought I’d try to solve the problem. I bought a Miner I and fitted it, and warped to the mission. Hooray! I’m getting Polygypsum, 2 at a time.

But wait! I still had my bought Polygypsum in the cargo hold. And not only has the 2 mined Polygypsum stacked with the 20 I bought, my cargo hold isn’t large enough for 40.

So I warped back to station and dropped the stack of 22 Polygypsum in the hangar. Warped back to the mission, and continued mining. An eternity later (60 second cycle on Miner I), I had 18 Polygypsum in my cargo hold and the asteroid popped. But I had a mission complete indication, so I warped back to station.

Now, I have a stack of 18 Polygypsum that I mined in my cargo hold, and a stack of 22 Polygypsum in my hangar, only two of which I had mined. I turned in the mission, hoping for the best. The agent accepted it!

But now I have a stack of 2 Polygypsum in the hangar and a stack of 18 in my cargo hold. But… but… but…

I should go on Penn & Teller’s “Fool Us” show with this trick.

[Caterpil]

So, nothing weird actually happened here, it was all legit, just looked a little strange

Polygypsum has a volume of 16m3. The Civvy miner has a mining volume of 15m3, so it can’t actually mine the ore, which is why it wasn’t going into your cargo originally. The Miner I has a 40m3 mining volume, so as observed it can get 2 units per cycle.

I suspect you weren’t using the Venture, which would probably have let you mine the ore due to its +100% bonus to mining yield (unless the ore volume is checked first, of course!, I don’t know if this is the case).

Most (all?) mining missions in the game have 2 completion triggers which need to be satisfied before turning them in.

1. Mine out the mission-ore specific asteroid
2. Deliver said ore to the agent.

This is why the mission couldn’t be completed when you bought the ore off contract. The asteroid in the mission site still needed to be mined. The source of the Ore isn’t tracked, it just needed a stack of 20 somewhere to complete.

Might not fool Pen and Teller with this one XD

[Skip_Lorry]

Well, they probably know less than I do about mining game mechanics, so maybe I could!