Unipolar magnets: unlimited?

[Eldarin]

I have seen posts about unlimited resources, but it appears unipolar magnets are limited to 1.5M in the cluster. I have 1 black hole and 1 neutron star. I’m using about 1200 per minute. Looks like I have 21 hours left. Any chance they respawn?

[Coops]

I think you have to select infinite resources when you start a new seed. If you don't, things will run out. As far as I know, it will not respawn or replenish.

[JokeryEU]

just research so you waste less resources while mining

[Dirkels]

Once you get the veins utilization high enough they become practically infinite.
But before that it is probably best to use them sparingly or start a game with infinite resources levels.

[Rekal]

No resource respawning. If you run out of unipolar magnets then you're out. What people mean when they talk about unlimited resources is the Vein Utilization tech that Dirkels mentioned.

The way Vein Utilization (VU) works is like so: If you have a VU of 50% when you extract 100 ore only 50 ore is counted down from the vein's quantity. You can raise this VU value infinitely to stupidly close to 100% meaning you can get 1000s of ore and only tick down the vein by 1.

You could say that's not unlimited and you'd be right the vein is still emptying out. The reason it is "practically" infinite like Dirkels said is that the cost to increase the VU is lower than the extra resources that next level of VU allows you to extract. For example say you have 1.5M unimpolar magnets in your cluster for you to extract. It takes some number, lets say 1000 magnets to research the next level of VU. That means you've extracted 1000 from your 1.5 and you're down to 1.499. I believe VU is 3% for each level? So now every 1000 ore will only drop the vein by 970, or another way of saying it is that the 1.499M divided by 0.97 is 1.545M and your new extraction limit.

With Unipolar magnets and spiniform I'd suggest you leave them out of your primary production chain until your Vein Utilization is pretty high. Just to be sure you never run low, cause if you hit zero that's really it.

[Nekogod]

I believe VU is 3% for each level

It's actually double that at 6% and it's multiplicative and compounds!

It works by reducing consumption rather than increasing gains so it's (current resources)/0.94 rather than (current resources)*1.06

It's not immediately obvious why these are different, but consider a much bigger %, say 50%, reducing consumption by 50% means that for every 1 I mine the vein only drops by 0.5 so I get double or 100% more vs 50% more gains, which is only 50% more.

If you'd rather use multiplication then the exact formula is (current resources)*1.063829787

If you want to work out your total resources gained at a particular level then you can use the compound interest formula 1*(1.063829787)^N where N is the VU level you want to check.

Lvl 10 = 1.86x as many resources
Lvl 50 = 22x as many resources
Lvl 100 = 486x as many resource
Lvl 200 = 236,825x as many resources

By level 50 resource drain is 4.5% of what it is normally. So 1.5m would effectively be 33m, 458 hours at your current usage rate

By level 100 it's 0.2% so 1.5m is now effectively 750m, over 10,000 hours

And by 150 it's 0.009% so 1.5m would be 16.6bn over 230,000 hours

And then it just crazier from there.

As said above the reason people say infinite resources (assuming they're not playing an infinite resource game) is the cost to research veins utilisation rises linearly, it's 4,000 cubes for the first level, then 8,000 cubes then 12,000 cubes, then 16,000 cubes etc but the amount of extra resources that it gives you rises exponentially, so pretty quickly each level is getting you more than 4000 cubes worth of extra material though the exact crossover point is different for each resource as it depends on how much you started with.

So say you have 100,000,000 iron (pretty low amount, most 64 star seeds start with at least 300m+) The first level of VU gets you an extra 6.3m iron. It only takes 116,000 iron to make 4000 white cubes so iron is pretty much infinite immediately.

You can make white cubes with 0 unipolar magnets so if you just wait until VU is level 50-100 before going nuts on mining them then as long as you keep researching VU they'll pretty much never run out.