Devs please, these mining changes are not fine!!

[[OTnL]Grieves Amorl]

These mining changes make the game too difficult for new and recent players like myself, with even some of the common players saying it just makes the game "Dark souls of tedium" for a game that's supposed to be "Play it how you want to play it" why are people having a difficulty rise forced upon them? Cant you make a options slider that adjusts your games difficulty so the newer players aren't punished? Hell i even heard a more experienced player say it was pointless cause all it did was "move the resources somewhere else" and for the pro's who will inevitably come and troll this post no, i hadn't set up in argon prime. Also several players reporting that the Ai's economies are too broken as a result.

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Lux Imperia:

Slightly off topic but when it comes to Hull part factories how long should I expect it to turn a profit? I built a small factory (one of each production module needed to make hull parts and a small storage module of every type) right next to the ZYA shipyard. It's been about 1 in game hour and the 'running costs' seem to break even with any profit I make. Bear in mind that I have no mineral miners working for it since there is no ore close enough to mine (I have 1 gas heavy miner and 2 light traders working for it though).

If you are not mining your own ores then your profits are going to be meagre. You want to sort that out. I would recommend identifying a decent mining ground (using resource probes as mining yields vary wildly between asteroid fields now) within four sectors of your hull parts factory. Then set up a mining station in between the selected asteroid field and the factory to convert the ore to refined metal/silicon wafer etc. 2* station manager can handle those distances from the get go. There is a guaranteed to be a suitable asteroid field within four sectors of you hull parts factory but you will probably have to take steps to protect your miners from Xenon, Khaak etc.

[Balsin]

Well, I can only suggest mining in asteroid belt. I had 12 or so miners going there with no attacks. A few in grand exchange too. Gaian prophecy and "the one next to it" would be more fringe territory. All of antigone is basically the wild west imo.

[Witski]

Originally posted by MSJ-06II-C:

Okay look, I will say that I do hate the MUH HARDCORE crowd as much as anyone else - but the amount of sheer unwillingness to learn is, quite frankly, astonishing. As well the general attitude "If you're a veteran you either have to agree with me or I'll just ignore your opinion" - like seriously, we on this level now? And yes, yes I fully admit I am a veteran palyer myself, but so what? I ALSO was once a newb, believe it or not. And guess how I made my money? Not with mining, I assure you. Coming from X³, I was still too used to mining being a station thing, consequently I got my first miners AFTER I build my first station. I still hold that trading is the go-to start, there REALLY isn't much to learn about buying wares at a low price and selling them at a high price. So, actual tutorial then:

1. Scout a few sectors, as in, literally just fly around in them and check the stations - what wares do they produce? What wares do they sell? What wares do they lack. The game helpfully shows you the latter by having those little hexagons besides the wares indicating roughly how many are sold/needed by the station, meaning you don't even need to learn the average prices but can at a glance tell if the wares you will buy are over or under priced
   
2. Do some missions or low-volume trading in whatever starter ship you have to get yourself a courier ship (that is, the S traders) or save up to get an M trader
   
3. Use the knowledge you gained in step 1 to buy a ware - literally any ware that is container based, so ANY ware other than raw ressources - at a station where there is a high supply, then move that ware to another station where there is high demand. A good starting point would be either food items or energy cells because quite literally every station needs those, so, there will ALWAYS be a demand (though, of course, the margins are lower with them as well). another ware I could recommend would be would be Claytronics/Hull Parts, the AI really likes to build stations, so, not only are Claytronics in demand, but they are alre one of the wares with a REALLY high profit margin. The same (minus the extremely high margins) goes for Hull Parts, they're always needed in construction, but ALSO always needed in wharfs and shipyards - so, it is always a nice start just ferrying those.
   
4. Profit. No seriously.

Being personally more of a builder myself, here is also a quick tip for your first station:
Just as with above, one of the best modules to get first is the Hull Part module, or, if you're feeling that you can wait longer on your first station, save up for the Claytronics module - both I should add you will need later on anyway so you can build your own stations with your own parts (saves you vast amounts of money) - and for all the time you do not build anything, you get a healthy income from NPC factions buildign stations/ships.

Also, as others have said, you can lurk around warzones, that is, sectors where warring factions meet - personally I installed a mod to make faction relations dynamic and I can't exactly remember who started out at war with whom, though if you simply check the faction info screen in game, you can find it out yourself pretty easily.

Also... if you really want an easy way to money in no time and are more combat inclined, you can board destroyers - which is way easier than it sounds.

1. Just get yourself a ship with a somewhat large-ish crew, really, 10 should more than suffice (pretty sure you could do with less if you are careful tho) and hire only marines.
   
2. Find yourself a pirate destroyer (or if you are in a game-start where some factions start as enemies one of theirs).
   
3. Most of the destroyers have blind spots in their turret coverage (the Teladi one being a particuarily egregious example, just go for the spot in between the downward facing "fins" at the rear) where you can just sit, destroy their shields and not be bothered by anything and then fire away and watch the crew slowly evacuate one by one until only a few are remaining. Mind you that since your ship is automatically "dragged along" by the larger ship as long as you are close you literally don't need to do anything. You just park your ship in the blindspot, kill the thrust and fire away until it's time to board.
   
4. Watch the enemies HP, you don't want to destroy them after all, if need be, wait for a few moments, they should slowly repair themselves or send out repair drones.
   
5. Optionally, if you want to be sure, pop up every now and then to destroy their turrets, though, for that you'd need a ship that can actually tank them, if only for a little (missile turrets are especially hard to fight like that if you aren't careful). If you want to do that, I recommend kitting your ship out with a few Thermal Disintegrators (Split weapon) as they can damage the hull through the shield, it makes things quite a bit easier, though, it's not exactly needed. If possible, also kill the engines so the ship won't be able to fly off - given as said you can just park close to it, this isn't so much to prevent it from fleeing from you and more so you don't have to fly back a long way once you capped it)
   
6. If you see that the remaining crew (it's shown in the info panel at the lower right) reaches the single digits or so, order your marines to board, the boarding dialog will show you the risk, it should be quite low at this point - if it isn't, simply cancel and continue firing until more enemy crewmen die/flee before trying again
   
7. Voila, you now have an L sized ship to either use yourself, or, in this case, sell. Personally I recommend waiting for a bit for the repair drones to get it back up to shape to maximise the profit (or to get new ones before selling it if you shot the original ones)

Do you have a place to find those destroyers?Usualy i find 1 or 2 at Neopileus fortune and ocasionally in random sectors.

[Pecheurman]

Originally posted by MSJ-06II-C:

Okay look, I will say that I do hate the MUH HARDCORE crowd as much as anyone else - but the amount of sheer unwillingness to learn is, quite frankly, astonishing. As well the general attitude "If you're a veteran you either have to agree with me or I'll just ignore your opinion" - like seriously, we on this level now? And yes, yes I fully admit I am a veteran palyer myself, but so what? I ALSO was once a newb, believe it or not. And guess how I made my money? Not with mining, I assure you. Coming from X³, I was still too used to mining being a station thing, consequently I got my first miners AFTER I build my first station. I still hold that trading is the go-to start, there REALLY isn't much to learn about buying wares at a low price and selling them at a high price. So, actual tutorial then:

1. Scout a few sectors, as in, literally just fly around in them and check the stations - what wares do they produce? What wares do they sell? What wares do they lack. The game helpfully shows you the latter by having those little hexagons besides the wares indicating roughly how many are sold/needed by the station, meaning you don't even need to learn the average prices but can at a glance tell if the wares you will buy are over or under priced
   
2. Do some missions or low-volume trading in whatever starter ship you have to get yourself a courier ship (that is, the S traders) or save up to get an M trader
   
3. Use the knowledge you gained in step 1 to buy a ware - literally any ware that is container based, so ANY ware other than raw ressources - at a station where there is a high supply, then move that ware to another station where there is high demand. A good starting point would be either food items or energy cells because quite literally every station needs those, so, there will ALWAYS be a demand (though, of course, the margins are lower with them as well). another ware I could recommend would be would be Claytronics/Hull Parts, the AI really likes to build stations, so, not only are Claytronics in demand, but they are alre one of the wares with a REALLY high profit margin. The same (minus the extremely high margins) goes for Hull Parts, they're always needed in construction, but ALSO always needed in wharfs and shipyards - so, it is always a nice start just ferrying those.
   
4. Profit. No seriously.

Being personally more of a builder myself, here is also a quick tip for your first station:
Just as with above, one of the best modules to get first is the Hull Part module, or, if you're feeling that you can wait longer on your first station, save up for the Claytronics module - both I should add you will need later on anyway so you can build your own stations with your own parts (saves you vast amounts of money) - and for all the time you do not build anything, you get a healthy income from NPC factions buildign stations/ships.

Also, as others have said, you can lurk around warzones, that is, sectors where warring factions meet - personally I installed a mod to make faction relations dynamic and I can't exactly remember who started out at war with whom, though if you simply check the faction info screen in game, you can find it out yourself pretty easily.

Also... if you really want an easy way to money in no time and are more combat inclined, you can board destroyers - which is way easier than it sounds.

1. Just get yourself a ship with a somewhat large-ish crew, really, 10 should more than suffice (pretty sure you could do with less if you are careful tho) and hire only marines.
   
2. Find yourself a pirate destroyer (or if you are in a game-start where some factions start as enemies one of theirs).
   
3. Most of the destroyers have blind spots in their turret coverage (the Teladi one being a particuarily egregious example, just go for the spot in between the downward facing "fins" at the rear) where you can just sit, destroy their shields and not be bothered by anything and then fire away and watch the crew slowly evacuate one by one until only a few are remaining. Mind you that since your ship is automatically "dragged along" by the larger ship as long as you are close you literally don't need to do anything. You just park your ship in the blindspot, kill the thrust and fire away until it's time to board.
   
4. Watch the enemies HP, you don't want to destroy them after all, if need be, wait for a few moments, they should slowly repair themselves or send out repair drones.
   
5. Optionally, if you want to be sure, pop up every now and then to destroy their turrets, though, for that you'd need a ship that can actually tank them, if only for a little (missile turrets are especially hard to fight like that if you aren't careful). If you want to do that, I recommend kitting your ship out with a few Thermal Disintegrators (Split weapon) as they can damage the hull through the shield, it makes things quite a bit easier, though, it's not exactly needed. If possible, also kill the engines so the ship won't be able to fly off - given as said you can just park close to it, this isn't so much to prevent it from fleeing from you and more so you don't have to fly back a long way once you capped it)
   
6. If you see that the remaining crew (it's shown in the info panel at the lower right) reaches the single digits or so, order your marines to board, the boarding dialog will show you the risk, it should be quite low at this point - if it isn't, simply cancel and continue firing until more enemy crewmen die/flee before trying again
   
7. Voila, you now have an L sized ship to either use yourself, or, in this case, sell. Personally I recommend waiting for a bit for the repair drones to get it back up to shape to maximise the profit (or to get new ones before selling it if you shot the original ones)

that a good answer.
the thing and problem with the "muh hardcore"
is that they spill pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on discord and here saying "muh its easy game, I get 5 billions in 3 hours gameplay"

most of those saying that are literal liar or half-story bs.
and doesn't take into account their first gameplay or such.

I did reach 100 billions in the vanilla game in around 300 hours gameplay (much of it in seta and AFK letting the game run....)

was the kind to prefer fighting over trade and mining.
my first playthrough was exclusive fighting, fight mission, piratery.
the game can be played in such many ways...
(a bunch of ways)
did a new playthrough for humanity dlc, and am (after a dozen hour) with 8 station, well placed ships(miner almost exclusively around a hundred) with a full kitted katana, and 100 millions (+plus around 100 millions of license and such)

and I know (even after long time not playing) where most ressources are.. (and there was not much change unlike what you advance here....
but definetely saw change in ressources spawn time/(regen rate...)

but that not only affecting you, it affecting other faction especially HOP and XENON that were back then steamrolling your game after couple dozen hours playing.

so even when you were advancing good, you had to fight atleast one ennemy with unlimited ressources.

for newbie it was a nightmare (atleast it was for myself.)
but for other it was not even enough of a challenge.

I think right now its in the between and I like it (till now).

and I believe they won't do "difficulty" modes because it would be problematic for venture when it goes live again...
but who knowns, they might make ressources regen change and other price/building change being able to be configurated.

there is also the issue of getting pilots to be 3 star faster, almost everyone complained about it going too slow. and the devs standed their ground and didn't made any noticeable change. (they gave reason for it tho).

[Bullpup]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

If you are not mining your own ores then your profits are going to be meagre. You want to sort that out. I would recommend identifying a decent mining ground (using resource probes as mining yields vary wildly between asteroid fields now) within four sectors of your hull parts factory. Then set up a mining station in between the selected asteroid field and the factory to convert the ore to refined metal/silicon wafer etc. 2* station manager can handle those distances from the get go. There is a guaranteed to be a suitable asteroid field within four sectors of you hull parts factory but you will probably have to take steps to protect your miners from Xenon, Khaak etc.

Ok, but the timing of this 'requirement' is wrong imo. We have new sectors and new factions and new ships and new missions and new resources to play with. Ego apparently expects us to put that on hold while we fly around *old* sectors spamming resource probes for 3 weekends before even touching the new content. I would have done it before the patch, but there was a bug when I last played in 2019 and miners automatically knew the best places without any probes so I stopped laying them.

I have hundreds of hours but no idea where to start with the Khaak problem - I've wiped every Khaak base I knew about but don't feel like re-exploring >100 sectors to see if one spawned somewhere out of bounds or in an unexplored patch.

At the moment I put one small Ares and one medium Nemesis to defend each miner in the 3 worst sectors. I ocd check each sector every 30 seconds and teleport to take control of the Nemesis and can *just barely* keep everyone alive. I have no idea how the 3 Behemoths I put in the area can be made to give a damn about a fellow faction member being murdered 10km away. They just sit there taking selfies with the wreckage of Cranes in the background so I transferred the captains to mining ships to see if they get a renewed sense of perspective.

[lnomsim]

You actually don't really need the probes since the miners ignore them, but they still help.
if you want to know which sectors are the best to mine, simply look at the information tab while in map view mode.

In the new sectors, the belt is definitely one of the bests, it has all the resources available, and what might be missing is available in the adjacent sectors.

Though, there isn't much sunlight in the Terrans sectors until you reach Venus.

I built a protein paste factory in Segaris and assigned a miner to the station. The miner went mining for ice in Antigone Memorial by itself without needing a probe there.

By the way, if you need to supply your Terrans factories with energy cells, definitely build your energy factories in the PIO sectors.

[MSJ-06II-C]

Originally posted by Witski:

Originally posted by MSJ-06II-C:

[...]

Do you have a place to find those destroyers?Usualy i find 1 or 2 at Neopileus fortune and ocasionally in random sectors.

Nopileos' Fortune is indeed a good sector given it pretty much belongs to the SCA, yeah.

As far as other sectors are concerned though, I believe the pirate factions spawn in their ships pretty randomly out of their home sectors, if there is any pattern to it I admittedly have not found it so far (though to be fair I did not really look for one either), closest thing I can come to a guess would be sectors like Silent Witness XI and XII (above Silent Witness I which is part of the ring-highway) and Hewa's Twin III/IV (reachable via a gate in Hewa's Twin I in the Hewa's Twin I/II sector which in turn can be reached via Trinity Sanctum III which also is part of the ring-highway), since the Scale Plate Pact has their docks there. Personally I try to mostly raid from them as, as said, their destroyers have the most obvious blind-spot making them a good "starting exercise" in boarding, so to speak.

[XIII]

Originally posted by Lux Imperia:

Originally posted by XIII:

My terrans are rather inept when it comes to resources though. Tons of stations are mineral starved. Theyre even running out of energy cells right now. (tbf solar plant are very limited in terran sectors; only those close to the sun work well)

Tbh I cant be sure about the TER factories in my game since they hate me lol. The PIO ones are doing great though. Just bulk ordered like 20 medium ships from them and they had 0 resource shortages in delivering them. (compared to split who have still not built me a single fighter 4 hours after I ordered them). PIO have some great resource sectors plus they are completely safe from all enemies.

Yeh mine start to somewhat work now too. Guess it took a bit longer for them to adapt. Probably has something to do with the terrible terran freighters; they cost like a million credits and got a travel speed of 1200m/s, and they gotta travel far because of the mining field being at the edge. Same for solar plants; venus and mercury are the only good places for energy cell production, the other planets are too far away from the sun.

The Pios seem to have much easier access to ressorces.

[Gassendi]

What I'm fearing over anything else is the economy dying if you don't mine.
Is it true? And if is there any mod to fix that?
I'm kinda a new player with x4, but I have luggage with the old x3.

[Wraith]

Originally posted by Gassendi:

What I'm fearing over anything else is the economy dying if you don't mine.
Is it true? And if is there any mod to fix that?
I'm kinda a new player with x4, but I have luggage with the old x3.

if you don't mine the economy will be fine base on how well the game start places stations and the AI ship route.
you just got to wait longer the AI might not have enough miners if a certain robot species kill them all in certain location.
COUGH COUGH XENON AT HATIKVAH
Guard your AI trade/miners and they should get standing on their own.
Though they will use their resources for themselves :P

[Gassendi]

Originally posted by Wraith:

Originally posted by Gassendi:

What I'm fearing over anything else is the economy dying if you don't mine.
Is it true? And if is there any mod to fix that?
I'm kinda a new player with x4, but I have luggage with the old x3.

if you don't mine the economy will be fine base on how well the game start places stations and the AI ship route.
you just got to wait longer the AI might not have enough miners if a certain robot species kill them all in certain location.
COUGH COUGH XENON AT HATIKVAH
Guard your AI trade/miners and they should get standing on their own.
Though they will use their resources for themselves :P

yeah but let's say you want a full trading only run.
Does it mean that it's impossible to do since the factions economies are dying due to the player not mining?
Basically are you forced to mine to maintain the economy afloat?

[Wraith]

if your doing only full trading then it should be fine your just distributing the material from one location to another.
Now if you skip mining and start a hull part factory :P that a different story.

[Math Tonight]

Yes, ♥♥♥♥ you and your stupid "just make it harder" updates, Egosoft. The Terran mission **SPOILER ALERT** takes your ship away from you (which you might spend lots of money upgrading with no warning) and throws you into Teladi space with nothing, and forces you to rebuild the stupid player HQ - and guess what? DAYS of mining WORTHLESS Bandanite for the player dock! WORST MISSION DESIGN EVER. I think Egosoft has hired a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over the years to save money...

[Wraith]

Originally posted by Math Tonight:

Yes, ♥♥♥♥ you and your stupid "just make it harder" updates, Egosoft. The Terran mission **SPOILER ALERT** takes your ship away from you (which you might spend lots of money upgrading with no warning) and throws you into Teladi space with nothing, and forces you to rebuild the stupid player HQ - and guess what? DAYS of mining WORTHLESS Bandanite for the player dock! WORST MISSION DESIGN EVER. I think Egosoft has hired a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over the years to save money...

um you know you can tell it to come to you?
I literally did that with my gladius.

[Gassendi]

Originally posted by Wraith:

if your doing only full trading then it should be fine your just distributing the material from one location to another.
Now if you skip mining and start a hull part factory :P that a different story.

So the factions actually mine without being obliterated by the new update spike in difficulty?