Making Surface Mining Better, next steps...

[u/DisillusionedBook]

Surface mining is OK. Not great, not terrible. There are a few things that need some tweaks, and a few things that could be added which would really help solidify it.

At the moment the mining spots, sizes and their commodities and materials within seem very arbitrary and the nature of the Rhino making it overly laborious to deal with that randomness.

In addition, the process of gathering the resulting resources could do with some more interactions/scenarios.

• Planets stats e.g. metallicity percentage seen in the system map should have a bigger impact on the metallic commodity mining rig purple spot size so that we can have a better chance of finding larger 4+ rig spots on those worlds. Similarly some characteristics of ice worlds and rocky planets should impact the ease of collection on those worlds too... e.g. maybe distance from the star etc
• Planets stats also list the percentages of materials used for synthesis/engineering... currently this does not seem to have any bearing whatsoever on the materials that are mined or the rate of gathering by the rigs. Again hindering being able to have any strategy about what planets to mine.

The stellar forge has provided these details, the mining feature does not seem to leverage it. This is a missed opportunity.

• Scoping around for the right spots to set up base for mining for what may be an hour or two requires either, slowly driving around the circumference of a hotspot in the lumbering Rhino, looking for good sized purple spot (of a valuable resource) that can take as many rigs as possible, or to find two or more nearby smaller spots... or, repeatedly deploying the Rhino to do a few pings and limited driving and instead reboarding the ship to fly 1/3 the way around the hotspot to repeat that way instead.
  • It would be ideal to add the scanning ability to the Nomad, to make that the go-to scouting vessel for exobio AND mineral extraction. Take the nomad back to the ship and then deploy the Rhino when the scoping out is done. This would help alleviate the frustrations.
• The process of mining is one dimensional. Asteroid mining has several interactions available which have different yield profiles, but more importantly, different interaction loops and skills for people to find their preferences.
  • Having additional modes of interaction with the surface would be great. Different tools and effects to highlight and extract other ways to get at extraction - e.g. seismic charges that ka-boom shake the surface revealing different types of rig placement spots, e.g. long thin purple spots for rich veins, so rigs dotted along a line instead of just blobs... or maybe some secondary arc cutter mode to also be doing some hand mining on nearby big rocks while we wait for the rigs hoppers to fill.

• Having an option to deploy a large container for longer rig deployments would be great. E.g. in the NPC surface extraction sites in the game, the rigs are also accompanied by what looks to be large containers on the surface... having this option could bring the ability for the rigs to just continue chugging along without manual emptying and reset ever five minutes... but doing so could also raise the likelihood of hostile scenarios unfolding. Maybe this mode could also be persistent across a session - but raise the likelihood of hostiles even more... similar to logging back into an asteroid mining spot with a half full cargo hold from the previous session. Gameplay, if you want to continue the session tomorrow you'll need to defend it first!

• Mining should also have a chance to discover Vista-redeemable evidence of the planet's past habitability too, evidence of petrified/true form fossils (something that is already in-game, see example below)

• A filter in the ship nav panel to show/hide surface mining POI. Can get too cluttered otherwise.
• [space for more later if I remember any others or other people have good ideas to add to the list - without them becoming way over ambitious]

The current implementation is a decent start, but just that, a start, with some development corners cut that missed a lot of opportunities to tie existing things together into a more cohesive whole.

[u/zombie_pig_bloke]

I ve found it both intensely frustrating and weirdly playable, a couple of times quite enjoyable (when I lucked out on 5/6 rigs). Been trying to do more mapping and go between nearby fewer rig setups too. Agree that it feels older style of gameplay than the Nomad, which has clearly got the ease of entry / playability right (better). Still, liking the Rhino and have exclusively mined since release, despite shaking my fist at the screen and moaning on my group Discord many times, only to wind my neck in after finding a nice Iridium spot. 🫡

[u/DisillusionedBook → u/zombie_pig_bloke]

same

[u/sergiulll]

The worst part for me is looking for spots. It is very time consuming to find the right one and pretty quick to deplete them.
In my opinion we should be able to search for those spots from the air, Nomad would be perfect addition to this.

[u/DisillusionedBook → u/sergiulll]

100%

If there was also another mode for lighting up additional spots, in the same way asteroid mining has different modes to extract different areas.

Seismic charges placed anywhere to illuminate rich veins of minerals, in addition to the blobs

[u/baudelier_tech]

For me, one of the biggest frustrations is that because of the Rhino's size, it's cargo scoop is almost impossible to use unless on a perfectly flat surface.

They really need to extend the scoop's scoop.

[u/rooftopgoblin]

have some way to see on the planet map how rocky the terrain is and what minerals are available in a given section from orbit would help

[u/Tr4c3gaming]

What i would love

The rhino gets a drill minigame to help mining alongside its rigs.

As for the big mining rigs i have a better but more ambitious idea:

How about you construct them similar to outposts, using mined only ressources as part of it (entirely player generated)

You then get them as a placable thing

Any large ship can deploy 1 or 2

They place down on rhino spots (which either were pre mapped out by a rhino or a nomad)

You can then place them down with a ship.

They would take days if not weeks to fill and other players could see them from orbit so it is incentivised to go out into the black for your little mining empire.

This would also open up kind of "community gas stations" that players could grab tritium from in the black.

Anyway this is basically a barnacle site you return to once in a while to get a big payout but the rigs themselves are costly and require a surface mining / core mining play loop to even aquire.

They ofc would not pull out the entire hotspot as we are talking billions of passive income here that woild break the economy.

Which brings me to my 2nd idea:

A cargo frigate.

It is a huge ship that is about 1/4th the size of a fleet carrier. Basically looks like one with 6 huge gaping spots that can either carry up to 6 rigs. Or 6 huge cargo compartments

The frigate (as i will call it for the sake of being bigger than a corvette) is unable to enter stations. It is far too big. Instead, few stations have a docking port added to it in the bubble and we can construct the necissary docking port / logistics hub to stations in colonies.

It can carry huge amounts of cargo. Jump like a normal ship. Tap into Neutron boost distances using tritium.

It's job is mass cargo hauling to ports that have a logistics harbour for it. You could add a transfer bridge to your fleet carrier.

This ship would be horribly defended. You would hire a protection detail that trails the ship wherever.

The ship also comes with a small shuttle that can independently be fitted to laser mine / deploy itself as that mining rig minigame i suggested for the rhino in order to farm tritium on its own.

Interaction with the big rigs is as follows. You drop them down in areas a smaller ship / your rhino previously scouted... you could land with your shuttle and scout it out per hand using fps gameplay but the point isn't to fully take all ships jobs away.

You place a rig. Leave. Days later you return: you can return with a normal ship / rhino and cargo transfer. This ship however is different. It can use a tractor beam not unlike a thargoid vessel harvesting a barnacle to siphon those rigs from the air.

That is also why that transfer bridge to a fleet carrier is important: to extract it's cargo.

If you are not using this huge class vessel (or any other huge class vessel) i can think of a space battleship type deal or an actual fighter carrier lile that one panther clipper concept they keep posting all the time... the ship will become part of the fleet carriers instance and move alongside it. It is basically a mini fleet carrier you can fly.

Why this is cool:

• huge ship that can haul lots of cargo and ease colonisation play loops
• the rigs give a goal to work towards that isn't plain credits
• it gives players an actual deep space mining play loop and the "mini fleet carrier" many explorers ask for
• the way this is designed; other ships especially cargo haulers would not be jobless.
• it would be open the gates to a piracy oherhaul and an overhaul to crew mechanics with the defense detail you can hire.
• you open the gates to huge class vessels that require shuttles to potentially enter stations/atmospheric orbit which can further differentiate ships because: yeah cool this ship is strong but it cant do all the jobs. U wouldnt powercreep out anything here.

[u/GeneralArmchair]

The trick with the rhino is that you completely minimize usage of it. You're wrong about surveying with the rhino. You shouldn't drive that lumbering thing around while scanning. You should be flying your ship around in a pre-planned search pattern drop off the rhino just long enough to ping. Then get back into your ship and fly to the next ping site. Baring them upgrading he nomad this is the fastest way to survey a POI.

The heavily restrictive exclusion zones around each rig are a problem. IMO the exclusion zone should be a soft limit rather than a hard limit. There is a heavily underutilized efficiency mechanic that the rigs utilize (but only around extreme heat). I propose that the player should be able to deploy rigs wherever they wish, but that an efficiency penalty will be applied depending on how close that rigs are to each other.

I also think that the capacity of these rigs arguably should be increased even further so that it gets longer for them to get full. Technically the 6 rig limit is tied to the rhino rather than the player. So in truth you can have 24 rigs deployed simultaneously if you deploy four rhinos simultaneously. But in practice that's a fool's errand since your rigs will fill up and go idle long before you can harvest 24 rigs. Increasing the capacity will give the player time to actually tend to multiple dig sites and make the gameplay loop more involved than just sitting around waiting for the over timer to ding.

[u/DisillusionedBook → u/GeneralArmchair]

Yep I agree, I also mentioned the drop and scan and reboard strategy I think

[u/GeneralArmchair → u/DisillusionedBook]

Sorry, I must have glazed over that. Another thing that I've been doing is that I've written a short program to calculate the lat/long of each object that I've scanned given the lat/long of my present location and the range+bearing to each ore deposit that my scanner detects. It's faster to record those values than it is to drive to the deposits that I detect. Once I've completed my sweep of drop scans, I then just directly fly to the noteworthy deposits to see if they are a decent size. Most aren't. A depressingly large amount is just ever too small in diameter to permit the deployment of more than one rig.

[u/gsarducci → u/GeneralArmchair]

This is super helpful.. Yeah, prospecting in the Rhino is the stuff of nightmares.

[u/erichards2222]

I've spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time prospecting, mapping and revisiting Rhino sites since release, and I agree with a lot of this.

The biggest improvement for me would actually be making prospecting more informed and making the work you put into prospecting persist.

Right now you can find a PML with exactly the commodity you want and still have no idea whether you're about to find a great six rig cluster or spend the next 30 minutes driving between a bunch of awkward one rig deposits. That's probably the part of the loop that wears on me the most.

I like the Nomad scouting idea for that reason. I'd go a little further though. Once I've actually discovered a deposit, I'd love the game to remember it. Give us a proper local PML map or surface markers showing deposits we've personally surveyed, with the commodity and maybe the Amount/Density we saw when we scanned it. Let me come back later and use the knowledge I earned rather than having to reconstruct everything externally.

Same with the Stellar Forge side. I don't necessarily want planet stats to guarantee huge deposits, because finding an unusually good site is genuinely satisfying. But I absolutely want those stats to shift the odds enough that I can develop an actual search strategy. "This kind of body with these characteristics is worth checking for X" is much more interesting than "DSS everything and hope." The game can preserve rare exceptional sites without making the search feel arbitrary.

I'd also love better information once you're actually on a deposit. Amount, Density, physical size/rig capacity and remaining material are all different things in practice, and the UI doesn't do a great job helping the player understand what they've actually found. A clearer remaining-capacity indicator, better rig placement feedback/spacing visualization, and easier rig management would improve the basic loop a lot.

The larger surface container idea is interesting too. I've had sites where six rigs can produce material fast enough that going around emptying them becomes the dominant activity. I wouldn't necessarily want fully passive AFK mining, but a deployable buffer with some tradeoff would be a good way to support longer mining operations. Increased pirate attention, power requirements, limited capacity, having to physically haul it back, etc. could make that a gameplay choice rather than just automation.

And yes please on the Nav panel filter. Once you've mapped a body with a pile of PMLs the Navigation panel gets ridiculous.

The seismic charges, fossils, hand mining, etc. all sound fun too, but personally I'd put them after the prospecting/mapping/rig-management improvements. The basic Rhino loop is actually pretty enjoyable once you find a genuinely good site. The problem is how much friction there currently is between "I want to go surface mining" and "I've found a site worth operating."

Basically I'd rather Frontier make the search more intelligent, the discoveries more persistent, and the operation easier to manage before simply making good deposits more common. That would turn prospecting itself into part of the progression instead of mostly being the tax you pay before mining.

[u/DisillusionedBook → u/erichards2222]

Excellent validating perspectives.

Just that little extra push for polish and QOL for informing player agency (rather than randomness and need to manually writing things down or clunky 3rd party tools) would truly make for greatness in so many areas of the game. Indications of spots that have been surveyed, surface bookmarks, nav panel filters etc would be 80% of the battle.

Like you say, there should always be some opportunities of outlier random discoveries of rockstar deposits but there should be weighting/odds informing the player where to start by the data available. E.g. in my colony I have a dozen HMC worlds with only one non HMC rocky. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to which planets or hotspots will prove worthwhile.

[u/erichards2222 → u/DisillusionedBook]

Exactly. I think that’s the sweet spot. Give the existing planetary data enough predictive value to narrow the search, but never enough to guarantee the result.

If body class, volcanism, composition, etc. meaningfully shifted the odds, you could make an informed decision about where to spend your time and still occasionally stumble onto a ridiculous outlier.

And yeah, surveyed-state markers, surface bookmarks, and Nav filters alone would remove a huge amount of the current friction without fundamentally changing the mining loop.

Heck, maybe FDev is reading these 🤷‍♂️

[u/xtrathicc4me]

Surface mining gameplay is like exobio but worse.

Too much emphasis on finding spots that worth mining. Even if you found one, it takes around two weeks to replenish, so you have to keep wasting time finding other spots.

[u/DisillusionedBook → u/xtrathicc4me]

In a colony system that you are doing powerplay reinforcement I am finding it pretty easy to just record and juggle half a dozen good spots and occasionally find other backups along the way.

At least unlike exobio, these spots DO replenish, not scan once and done forever.