Hot Spot Mining or not?

[REMZilla]

If we scan a ring and no hot spots appear, will there be any big asteroids we can blow up or not? Or, are the biggies /only/ in hot spots?

[Agony_Aunt]

As i understand hotspots indicated a higher chance of them appearing at least. I have no idea if they appear at all outside hotspots though.

I wouldn't advise wasting time outside hotspots though.

[Bishop-Six]

You can find asteroids which you can blow up everywhere, but hot spots are....hot spots for them :)

[Cman1337]

I barely find Opals outside of hotspots. In an Opal hotspot 3 out of 5 core asteroids are opals.

[Arya]

Any asteroid field will have big rocks, but there's no guarantee they'll have good minerals. With hotspots you can target the best, most valuable stuff and get it reliably. That's the value of them, knowing you'll find what you need and want.

As a tip; try to find Major or Pristine reserves if you can. That's where the really tasty stuff is.

[Cloud Breaker]

Publicado originalmente por REMZilla:

If we scan a ring and no hot spots appear, will there be any big asteroids we can blow up or not? Or, are the biggies /only/ in hot spots?

You will find asteroids containing cores you can deep mine in any ring. In a specific hotspot that mineral has higher chances of being encountered than others so if your looking for say void opals the hotspot is going to have a higher percentage of them etc.

Ive been making about 200 mil per 2 hours in void opal hotspots in pristine icy rings (Some confusion that I had to look up for myself, you tell what the reserve level is (Pristine, low etc) by selecting the planet, it wont tell you that on the ring. In a pristine icy ring void opal hotspot, your going to be encountering low temperature diamonds, grandidirite and alexanderite in addition to the void opals. I grab all these things as they all sell for excellent amounts of money and sometimes it can take up to 5-10 minutes between void opal cores so I happily mine these cores of other minerals also to break up the tedium and supplement the income.

[REMZilla]

Cool. Thanks all, for your responses. I noticed that not all rings are created equal AND that there are even Pristine Metallic rings that do not have /any/ hot spots. I searched for a bit but wasted that time, i'm afraid. So it's a hot spot mining we will go!