[Mining] What's the deal with Morning Star IV?

[Gregorovitch]

Just been nosing around Morning Star IV and I see via short range scanner it is stuffed full of whacking great ore and particularly silicon asteroids. Stuffed with them, big yields too. I drop probes and they report nothing at all, zilch. I look on the info page for the sector and it also says there is nothing at all here.

WTF?

[JPS]

Had the same thing can't rember where it was but a probe next to an Nvidium Astroid and it says only ice.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2431496257

[Gregorovitch]

Well I've explored some more of this sector, maybe 50%, and it's now reporting nearly 40,000k ore and about 4,000k silicon on the info screen. I also dropped some more probes and whereas most report <1 km^3 ore and silicon one is reporting 6.4 km^3 ore which is not bad. Info panel says these's a lot of ice here but I can't see any and no probes have reported any so far.

I guess the situation is

* some big asteroid fields have certain small patches with high concentration of resources but the rest is pants.

* what you see before your eyes means nothing beyond there is some ore somewhere in the sector but not necessarily where you are looking right now. I presume you could in theory manually mine these rocks you can see with the scanner.

Which means in a huge sector like this with a massive asteroid field it's going to very hard work and very expensive in probes to find the goods stuff.

[JPS]

I'm sure there is some kind of logic behind all this but it is really nonsense for a causal player if he sees some kind of resources with his own eyes and if he drops a probe it says no nothing here. And as u can see on my image it has also plenty of ore astroids around and the probe says no sir only Ice here.
I'll stay with my words it is nonsense!

[Gregorovitch]

I think the reason is that automated miners do not mine individual asteroids, they mine the hidden underlying resource map (which your resource probes give a pinhole view of) filling their holds at rates proportional to the ore concentrations in the patch they are mining according to this resource map. You would need a super computer to run the simulation if they were all looking for and mining actual individual asteroids, there are hundreds of miners and millions of asteroids. FPS would tank otherwise.

So the asteroids you see yourself flying about are irrelevant to what automated station and sector miners and NPC miners do.

When you are looking at them, when they are in view, they revert to mining actual asteroids and obviously you can mine individual asteroids you see in front of you yourself manually.

I think the problem here is that in this Morning Star IV sector there is wild discrepancy between what you see in terms of physical asteroids and what the hidden resource map says is there, a much bigger discrepancy than in most sectors. I would agree this discrepancy should not be so big, there should be at least a rough correlation between the resource map and the asteroids you can see.

[cwsumner]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

...
I guess the situation is

* some big asteroid fields have certain small patches with high concentration of resources but the rest is pants.

* what you see before your eyes means nothing beyond there is some ore somewhere in the sector but not necessarily where you are looking right now. I presume you could in theory manually mine these rocks you can see with the scanner.

Which means in a huge sector like this with a massive asteroid field it's going to very hard work and very expensive in probes to find the goods stuff.

That sounds reasonable and likely, to me.

The devs say there are now some fixes to the action of mining ships in the presents of resource probes. If this is now working better, then maybe marking these asteroids with resource probes will allow the mining ships to find these rich asteroids. (??)

[hurepoix]

Once I followed mining ships to see what they were doing. They simply dont select anything, and attacked about all and everything. I first didnt understood why they attacked and crushed empty asteroids.

For probes I'm dubitative. I so often saw miners ignore probes to work elsewhere. When mining in such zone I asked my miner to release a probe. Of course it was at the exact zone he was mining. Most time, probe displayed disapointing values.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by hurepoix:

For probes I'm dubitative.

Outside of Terran space (and using Terran tech) where there are multoiple reports of serious issues with probes and mining in general, in "old space" I would say probes are working very well now and miners are obeying what they say perfectly.

I set up a mining station in Trinity Sanctum to exploit certain reasonable concentration fields around the Hiwa's Twin sectors. Patches with around 4 per km^3. The miners selected the best patches I'd so far uncovered with probes.

I then found a motherload belt in a Pious Mist sector, 10-12 per km^3 for both ore and silicon, and probed it up. All eight miners immediately headed there for their next loads.

[Takichi]

Player Asteroids do nit Line up with the AI/Probe sight of Things...... not totaly at least. Its like 2 Layer, one displayed for the Player and one for Ai.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Takichi:

Player Asteroids do nit Line up with the AI/Probe sight of Things...... not totaly at least. Its like 2 Layer, one displayed for the Player and one for Ai.

I think that's sort of correct. I think they have chaged the asteroids in some of the important central sectors wher they have massively reduced resource yields. Places like Argon Prime, Secont Contact Flashpoint and Grand Exchange. There you can see far less ore bearing asteroids in your scanner than you used to.

However in this Morning Star sector it looks like they haven't changed all the asteroids to reflect the new underlying resource map. So it looks like it used to on your scanner.

I guess there are literally millions of asteroids in X4. They probably didn't have time to adjust all of them. Or they forgot a bout a couple of sectors. Or perhaps they just hoped folks didn't notice.

I think for practical purposes the moral is your scanner may be lying to you, or it may not be, but your probes however will always be telling you the truth.