Station miner - 5-Star Manager sending ships way too far away?

[Tech Enthusiast]

So I finally got a 5-star manager. Max range: 15 sectors. Station mining going well, but I also have 30+ Miners for my HQ.

After a while I started to double check where they go for mining. And it seems like they always go for the most dense field they can find. Basically I set up shop in The Void. All ressources are right there in abundance actually. But if they find silicone 15 sectors away with just a tiny little bit more density, they just go there,... with all the travel time, they could do 3 or 4 runs in the void and get much, much more ore.

Can Iadjust this somehow? Maybe a hidden slider for the manager, that I can make them go a max of 3 sectors away? Maybe even on a "per resource" basis? Or blacklists to disallow them to cross certain systems, basically locking them in, in a narrower area of space?

Can afford to just do 30+ miners per station, but it feels wasted to have taken the Void and turning all the ANT into space dust.

[Dopeh]

yeah there's a blacklist rules set/ option somewhere where u can decide if its for miners traders or all , haven't played a few weeks so cant remember exactly where , im sure someone else here can tell you :)

[Tech Enthusiast]

Just double checked. Seems like they are now locked to a max distance of 5 sectors,... I could swear it was 15 before. Hmm. May imagine things.

They still seem to wander off to max distance, rather than mining the PLENTIFUL resources in "The Void - Graveyard of Antigone". Quite strange how that logic works out of the box.

Will try to come up with a form of blacklist to try and force them to stay close to the station. Just unsure how that would work if I actually do manage to mine the sector dry. Unlikely in The Void, but not imposible. It does have really huge stacks of stuff, but not limitless.

[Dopeh]

oki i checked it for you , when you open the map you go to player information tab on top , then to the left tab global orders then it says blacklist there create new blacklist :)

[Oddible]

You won't mine the sector dry, asteroids respawn. If there is contention for asteroids they will go farther otherwise they'll be queuing in an area. Distance ALWAYS depends on manager's stars, one jump per star.

[Tech Enthusiast]

I could just fire the manager and hire one with 1 star again, but they level up so quickly. :-(
Kinda strange that a 1 star manager does a better job in this szenario.

[Oddible]

Originally posted by Tech Enthusiast:

I could just fire the manager and hire one with 1 star again, but they level up so quickly. :-(
Kinda strange that a 1 star manager does a better job in this szenario.

Or you could use your in-game tools to get the miners to do what you want. You're basically making a suggestion like a 1-star player and that can't figure out how to use the game effectively so you're going to use a 1-star solution. Or you could use the 3-star player solution and set up blacklists, repeat orders, local autominers with self-only trade rules, any of the variety of solutions available to you.

[Tech Enthusiast]

That is possibloe and I suggested that myself, if you look up a few postings.
I just ponder why the station has a "mine for station" feature, that seems to work worse the better the manager gets.

Yeah, I can do it all myself, but I wanted to check if I was missing how this station feature is working. Seems like I don't miss anything, it is just not working well. So the workaround is not using it and doing blacklist stuff.

Followup question:
I like the station miner stuff primarily for the fact that my property list gets cleaned up and they all show up unter the station tab, rather than in a long list of random ships (I know I can rename them and give them a fitting name and numbering).

So, can I do a mining fleet? Like they all follow ONE miner and follow the same orders the primary miner does? So a fleet of mineral miner, one for gas, one for ice... whatever? Would that work, or would I need to give each and every ship the same orders and blacklists, along with a naming scheme to sort them in the property tab?

[BurlsoL]

Easiest and most temporary solution is to make a trade station somewhere (since you want the extra range), and move your 5 star manager to that trade station, hire a 1 star manager to replace them. Unless you have a mod that increases skills more frequently, it should be several hours before the manager would need to be swapped out. By then you are likely mining that sector directly.

[Oddible]

Originally posted by Tech Enthusiast:

just ponder why the station has a "mine for station" feature, that seems to work worse the better the manager gets.

Because it doesn't. You're just missing some key information that makes you think that it is worse. Like I said - lots of factors here. Contention for asteroids, waiting, star level of the pilot. Being able to fill the ship as fast as possible without moving around a lot, etc. Time it. Put a ship on Repeat Orders in the location that you think should be the most advantageous and set it to start right when you see a station miner leave the station. See which one fills up and returns fastest. Make sure both ship captains have the same stars for all their attributes. And the same crew stars too (easiest is just to get two brand new ships).

[Tech Enthusiast]

I actually did that before and it was not even close. The sector miner is hauling in more than 5 times the stuff per hour.
That was exactly the reason I started this topic, after I investigated why the station miner was doing so much worse. They simply ignore 3 stars resource beacons in the same sector, if they find a 3,1 star beacon 5 sectors away.

[Tatsuyo]

Originally posted by Oddible:

Originally posted by Tech Enthusiast:

I could just fire the manager and hire one with 1 star again, but they level up so quickly. :-(
Kinda strange that a 1 star manager does a better job in this szenario.

Or you could use your in-game tools to get the miners to do what you want. You're basically making a suggestion like a 1-star player and that can't figure out how to use the game effectively so you're going to use a 1-star solution. Or you could use the 3-star player solution and set up blacklists, repeat orders, local autominers with self-only trade rules, any of the variety of solutions available to you.

I never used blacklist because they are trashy and hard to understand what are you doing, it needs a better layout.

[blackphoenixx]

Originally posted by Kellogg's:

that blacklist are the correct way to solve that problem, I don't think so, it doesn't make sense, why should you have to do the managers job?

You should use blacklists because the managers are terrible at choosing mining locations without it. I think that should be obvious. Unless you have a better suggestion?

You can cry and ♥♥♥♥♥ about "having to do the managers work" all you want, but that's not going to make your miners efficient. And if you're hoping for the issue to be fixed in a patch you better get settled in for the long haul, because it's far from new.

If you want your miners to work properly it's either station miners with activity/travel blacklists or sector automine with a trade blacklist to only sell to your own faction.

It may not be good game design but that's the reality of the game as it is. Complaining about how things should be won't solve OP's miner problem.

[roy2x]

Blacklists are the way to go. I had the same problem with a mining station set up in Eighteen Billion. It was always low on reources despite having over 10 miners and only 4 traders. The manager was sending its miners all the way to Pious Mists IV. Set up a simple blacklist for sector activities that blacklisted all sectors and chose to exempt Eighteen Billion and Silent Witness 1. An hour later it was half full with ores. The station was trading the ores away too so I had to give the blacklist individually to the miners so the station could still send its traders at normal range.

[Asmosis]

I'd only ever use blacklists to keep ships out of harms way.

In just about every other circumstance your hindering the NPC's ability to do their job unless you're trying to manage resource consumption on a galaxy wide level (e.g. mining all sectors dry, so no point to them going outside home sector).

[blackphoenixx]

Originally posted by Asmosis:

I'd only ever use blacklists to keep ships out of harms way.

In just about every other circumstance your hindering the NPC's ability to do their job unless you're trying to manage resource consumption on a galaxy wide level (e.g. mining all sectors dry, so no point to them going outside home sector).

There is no circumstance where a miner traveling 2 or more jumps is efficient when there are resources closer by.
Even if the further sector has double the yields you still come nowhere close to breaking even, let alone getting ahead. And that's with M miners, with L miners it's even worse.

The scripts that determine where a manager sends his miners either don't account for travel time at all or don't do so effectively.
Either way using blacklists properly can easily halve the number of mining ships you need, if not more.