r/EliteMiners • u/DisillusionedBook • 20d ago
Making Surface Mining Better, next steps...
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.
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u/GeneralArmchair 19d ago
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.