Sacrificing Ore Vein Loss for Mining Speed?

[Narha]

I have a weird relationship with the mining upgrade that increase mining speed but also reduces how many ores are lost while mining.

I like the idea of emptying a planet of resources. To go "this planet has been completely mined of every single resource. I'm done with this planet." or "Time to turn it into a 100% production planet." Finding mining equipment that has completely emptied out some veins, and removing said mining equipment, is quite satisfactory.

But the upgrade for mining speed is counter to that. Trying to empty out excess copper veins is damn near impossible. I intentionally set up a Dark Fog Farming world, farming 3 dark fog bases, exclusively with auto gun turrets using copper bullets in order to use up more copper.

I'd think it'd be cool if one could sacrifice the ore loss upgrade part for improved mining speed. Even more so if it was selective.
So one could choose to have ore loss reduction on high value stuff like Silicon and speed for Copper.

[cainboy]

Considering you can just bury any nodes, veins obstructing construction plans vs mining them first is purely a self serving feeling of satisfaction.

Perhaps it feels different at extreme ore reservation levels, but even at a 270% mining speed / 37% ish ore conservation rating was still not enough for me lol. Miner MK2 fully charged and another 8+ MinerMK1s consumes nodes very fast.

Not against the idea mind you, but i've never felt restricted by the speed, only the vein lasting.

[Taleteller]

Since DSP has no real endgame, I always try to get as far as possible with vein utilization. Upscaling my build as it goes. The only thing stopping me is game speed ;-)

[Narha]

Originally posted by cainboy:

Considering you can just bury any nodes, veins obstructing construction plans vs mining them first is purely a self serving feeling of satisfaction.

Yes, that is pretty much exactly what I'm saying. I'm well aware I could just bury all the excess ores I don't need (and I kinda have to because nobody needs this much copper) but it still kinda annoys me thinking about buried ores under my construction, the few times I decide to bury. Like when doing Ray Receiver on the poles @ the main dyson sphere system.
And like I said I enjoy the idea of emptying them out. To look at a planet's info index and it states "0" across all minerals.

[Borfoid]

Originally posted by Narha:

Originally posted by cainboy:

Considering you can just bury any nodes, veins obstructing construction plans vs mining them first is purely a self serving feeling of satisfaction.

Yes, that is pretty much exactly what I'm saying. I'm well aware I could just bury all the excess ores I don't need (and I kinda have to because nobody needs this much copper)

What I did recently, as I'm kinda the same as you, is put down an advanced mining machine on the nodes I wanted to get rid of and also put down more basic machines over the nodes and fed them back in to the AMM. The planetary station sucks out the AMM to a 10k cache, the inter sucks out of both the AMM and the planetary to a 20k cache and then I switched off other node production to focus extraction on the node I wanted to get rid of.

It's a lot of micromanagement and if you start doing something else and forget you've created your own personal bottleneck it can cause issues... But you can stripmine nodes out of locations if you take the time to do it properly.

I restarted again on a harder difficulty but last game I had vein util to about level 40 and it was fairly easy to stripmine nodes if they were in the way. You've just got to remember to nurse them.

If you really want to just suck them up, just lay down a ton of large storage next to a planetary/inter station and pull it out of the station and in to the storage clusters at 2x the rate of sorters than feeds it back in to the stations. You can clear whole planets like that... If you've got the time to do it.

Only thing I've ever buried is oil and that was annoying because I had to switch off the node info. Bad placement on my part. This time around I'm not putting anything important on a planet near something that I have to bury and I only need to bury "dead" oil nodes.

[josmith7]

At the moment, since you can't decline the ore reduction, Vein Utilization level 6 is the sweet spot for maximum ore depletion.

Ore consumption had dropped 31.01% - but mining speed has gone up 60%; leading to a net increase in ore consumption/min of about 10.4% over no vein utilization. But pushing on to level 7 or above the ore reduction starts gaining ground over the increased mining speed and by level 15 ore consumption/min had dropped below the starting value.

[Narha]

Originally posted by josmith7:

At the moment, since you can't decline the ore reduction, Vein Utilization level 6 is the sweet spot for maximum ore depletion.

This causes an annoying contradiction though. Because if you want to max out ore depletion, then you can't research this, thus sacrificing mining speed which is clearly useful for all minerals but also other things such as oil and sulfur extraction.