Making money early with mining

[BinaryDigit09]

I found a half-way decent way to make some money from the start of the game and wanted to share it. There may be better ways, of course, but after about 6 hours of doing this I've been able to buy a new ship for 820k and currently have 3.8 million saved up for a frigate. I'm still new to the game so please forgive me if any of this is already obvious.

There is a station on the west (left-hand) side of the map called Pallisades. It's almost exactly between the words Red Mist and Daedalus on the map. It sits in the middle of an asteroid field where you can mine and sell Plutonium (956), Diamonds (950), Uranium (932), Titanium (509), and Magnesium (220) to your heart's content.

With the default gunship (45 cargo) I made about 20k per trip. Between this and other freelance missions, I saved up 820,000 and bought the Mainz freighter from Memphis in the Crossroads (south and slightly east of Planet Trinity). With its 275 cargo, each trip would yield about 150k. And once I got a routine down, each trip easily took only about 5-10 minutes!

Tips I learned about this:

- Magnesium is the cheapest and most abundant element you'll mine here. I experimented with destroying the magnesium and filling up on the more expensive elements before returning to sell, but that only got me about 200k per trip. What's more, the trip took longer because I had to dispose of magnesium every time I collected more minerals. So I figure this doesn't make it more efficient; just collect and sell everything you get.

- There's a hostile station to the south of Pallisades, so avoid mining in that direction and you should have relatively few problems getting attacked. If you do, simply retreat close to Pallisades. It will fire at the enemies, and there are also friendly patrols around who will help. Wait for the battle to be over and then loot their stuff! (Note: I'm playing on easy difficulty for my first-time playthrough, so there may be a chance these enemies are too difficult with the beginning ship, but they're labeled as "BALANCED" for me so I assume not.)

- When you buy the Mainz freighter, don't forget to buy turret mounts for it like I did. Otherwise you can only shoot in a certain direction and if you aren't facing that direction it will seem like your weapons don't work at all.

- All ships have mining lasers by default, so unequip light and heavy weapons when mining. Its 1000x easier with mining lasers, especially hitting the small moving targets.

- When destroying the medium and smaller astroids, aim in a circular spray pattern instead of at a stationary spot. This increases the chance you'll hit and destroy the fast-moving pieces instead of losing them off the screen. The mining lasers do not appear to damage minerals floating in space.

- Press 'C' to collect all collectables within about 350. That also shows a small indicator of how full your cargo is, whether or not you actually collected anything, so that's handy when deciding whether to return to the station or start on the next big asteroid.

I hope this helps!

[fivemilesmile]

That was a very good read, thank you for sharing!

It also got me the idea of creating subpages for the wiki on how to mine, where and what, how to trade etc. If I ever get around to it, may I copy-paste your post above into the page? Sort of similar like this:
http://starpoint-gemini-2.wikia.com/wiki/Boarding

Cheers!

[Tanvaras]

The secret is out now about one of the mining hotspots :)

Mining is quite a good money maker in SPG2, something I enjoy often to just chill out

[sfcwoc]

Good read-thru! I like the Maur and the Tunguska. Decent cargo density as well. They've both got light weapons turrets solely. But the spread and location of the turrets give some great coverage for those intrepid moments of sheer terror! (Mostly when an 'Impossible' de-cloaks and starts hammering hull and shields - BIG SCOOT!)

[BinaryDigit09]

Originally posted by longstar - SG2 Wikia:

That was a very good read, thank you for sharing!

It also got me the idea of creating subpages for the wiki on how to mine, where and what, how to trade etc. If I ever get around to it, may I copy-paste your post above into the page? Sort of similar like this:
http://starpoint-gemini-2.wikia.com/wiki/Boarding

Cheers!

Thanks, and sure, please feel free to use all or part of that, original or edited, in any way you want.

[Zenoslaf]

Thank you for the sharing and tips! :)

[Augustus Gloop]

Thanks for the tips. Just curious though, have you tried using bore torpedoes to mine asteroids? They're suppose to produce a higher yield over just using mining lasers. It's how I mine and it seems to work quite well.

[fivemilesmile]

Originally posted by fremenlaw:

Thanks for the tips. Just curious though, have you tried using bore torpedoes to mine asteroids? They're suppose to produce a higher yield over just using mining lasers. It's how I mine and it seems to work quite well.

Would you please give an explanation on how to use the torpedoes, when do you consider them valuable, what is your experience/opinion about them? (gathering material for the mining page)

Cheers!

[ƎϽ∀ƎԀ]

I tried out bore torpedoes by making 10 mining loads with using torpedoes vrs 10 loads using railguns. After deducting the price of torpedoes, I made more credits using railguns.

[sfcwoc]

Yeah, but they sure 'light up the sky' when used well. At 1k credits a copy, they're probably used best in hi-value areas, ie.: uranium, plutonium, and the other rare metals asteroid fields. One may get most of the same yield using one's heavy weapons battery(s). It'll be a trade off, between buying borehole torps, or reloading one's heavy weapons after an asteroid field stroll-thru. Or, as suggested above, simply using one's mining lasers or other lite weapons of opportunity. :)

[PTCGho5t]

6hrs lol, dude edit your save file :)

[clckwrkrng]

Thanks for the tips!