are mining field limited ?

[Ombrero]

is the mining field in secotrs limited or does it respawn ?
i put a lot of miners in asteroid belt to build a shipyard, but i fear to decrease the field, is there a risk ?

[Bozz 💀]

It will respawn.

[DaBa]

If you put a lot of miners in sector that doesn't have a lot of resoruces, it will slowly dry out the fields. But the fields constantly replenish over time. Depending on the sector, the replenishment might be fast enough to completely counteract the depletion, good enough to mostly mitigate it, or not fast enough to make for long term supply source. That last one is really only for sectors that already have next to no resources in the first place.

In practice it works like this: unless the sector has a very low density of minerals, it will last you for dozens, if not hundreds of hours of mining. And the ones that are most plentiful are virtually inexhaustible. You can check how many resources there are in the system and monitor their depletion by the sector overviews screen, it will show you the total number of each resource and update it in real time. I just make sure have good resource probe coverage to keep this data accurate (unless it only needs vision for that, not sure).

[DaBa]

If you want more specific data, you'll need to look up outside resources. For example this list is pretty good: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/resources, mind you this isn't 100% accurate data (at least from my experience) and you should make sure you understand how to interpret it first, but it's consistent enough to help you make informed decisions.

[Ombrero]

Originally posted by DaBa:

If you want more specific data, you'll need to look up outside resources. For example this list is pretty good: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/resources, mind you this isn't 100% accurate data (at least from my experience) and you should make sure you understand how to interpret it first, but it's consistent enough to help you make informed decisions.

i'm not sure about how i should read those number,
what the score mean ?
the number is how many ressources we can "exploit" each hour for a sector ? without drying it ?

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Ombrero:

Originally posted by DaBa:

If you want more specific data, you'll need to look up outside resources. For example this list is pretty good: https://www.qsna.eu/x4/resources, mind you this isn't 100% accurate data (at least from my experience) and you should make sure you understand how to interpret it first, but it's consistent enough to help you make informed decisions.

i'm not sure about how i should read those number,
what the score mean ?
the number is how many ressources we can "exploit" each hour for a sector ? without drying it ?

You know what, as I said don't bother with it. Unless you have a really advanced playthrough and are operating huge mining fleets of hundreds of ships, none of this is actually useful for you. It will just serve to further confuse you. Unless you have hundreds of mining ships you won't need to worry about depleting any sector's resources unless it has very little of them to begin with.

Here's the bottom line: Check sector information in game to see how many resources are there. Then check after an hour or two of your mining to see how fast the resources are depleting to see if you have anything to worry about. Unless you've picked a really poor sector, it will be dozens, maybe even hundreds of hours before you have to worry about anything running out. And if you're not using a lot of mining ships, even a poor sector should be able top keep you going for a while.

And if you ever run out, you just change the sector and do it again, the old one will slowly replenish on it's own.

[ArcticISAF]

I agree with DaBa. Just to add I’ve got 1200+ hours and those numbers on the site still don’t make sense to me. Could be just me though lol. I mostly use that site just to get a general sense of where the good sites are, and then kind of look at the in-game encyclopedia reading for the sector. With a decent explore of the sector (as that affects the numbers), if it’s like under 100k, or even floating around there I think of it as meh or unreliable. Going from there once it hits the millions it’s pretty decent. You can look at a few different sectors to give yourself an internal comparison. Look at black hole sun and see how it’s pretty bad. Argon prime looks like it could have a bunch of resources on the map because of the long asteroid fields - nope terrible. Asteroid belt or something for a good source of mostly everything. Don’t have to do the galaxy, just a few as you need them.

[Ombrero]

Originally posted by ArcticISAF:

I agree with DaBa. Just to add I’ve got 1200+ hours and those numbers on the site still don’t make sense to me. Could be just me though lol. I mostly use that site just to get a general sense of where the good sites are, and then kind of look at the in-game encyclopedia reading for the sector. With a decent explore of the sector (as that affects the numbers), if it’s like under 100k, or even floating around there I think of it as meh or unreliable. Going from there once it hits the millions it’s pretty decent. You can look at a few different sectors to give yourself an internal comparison. Look at black hole sun and see how it’s pretty bad. Argon prime looks like it could have a bunch of resources on the map because of the long asteroid fields - nope terrible. Asteroid belt or something for a good source of mostly everything. Don’t have to do the galaxy, just a few as you need them.

asteroid belt is knowed for being a really good sector, but on that site, the "score" are bad", so it doesn't make sense for me idk

[DaBa]

Originally posted by ArcticISAF:

I agree with DaBa. Just to add I’ve got 1200+ hours and those numbers on the site still don’t make sense to me. Could be just me though lol. I mostly use that site just to get a general sense of where the good sites are, and then kind of look at the in-game encyclopedia reading for the sector. With a decent explore of the sector (as that affects the numbers), if it’s like under 100k, or even floating around there I think of it as meh or unreliable. Going from there once it hits the millions it’s pretty decent. You can look at a few different sectors to give yourself an internal comparison. Look at black hole sun and see how it’s pretty bad. Argon prime looks like it could have a bunch of resources on the map because of the long asteroid fields - nope terrible. Asteroid belt or something for a good source of mostly everything. Don’t have to do the galaxy, just a few as you need them.

The numbers on the sites are supposed to represent a theoretical long term viability of the resource patches based mostly on their replenishment rate with small adjustment for the initial size.

Thing is... that initial patch of resources will be the only thing a vast majority of the players will see. That website would take a sector that has 2 million initial ore and silicon fields and give it a very low just because it has low respawn rate. But, how likely are most of the players to ever get through those 2 million of resources? Keeping in mind that, even if the respawn rate is qualified as small it IS STILL respawning all the time. The answer is: almost none of them ever will. It would take as I said dozens of miners to mine there for dozens of hours to even make this a possibility.

Those numbers only make sense if you are considering a truly large scale operation and hundreds of hours long playthroughs. 99.9% of players will never do anything like that. That's why I said it's important to know how to interpret the information on this page: you really should mostly look at how big those initial patches are, because that's what matters most.

To put this into a perspective of how rich most sectors are: out of all the sectors with ore in this game, only about 10 of them have less than 500k initial ore patches. Only 10. And half of them have more than 5 million initial ore, only getting more ridiculous from there. Conclusion: you will be VERY hard pressed to run out of resources in any situation.

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Ombrero:

Originally posted by ArcticISAF:

I agree with DaBa. Just to add I’ve got 1200+ hours and those numbers on the site still don’t make sense to me. Could be just me though lol. I mostly use that site just to get a general sense of where the good sites are, and then kind of look at the in-game encyclopedia reading for the sector. With a decent explore of the sector (as that affects the numbers), if it’s like under 100k, or even floating around there I think of it as meh or unreliable. Going from there once it hits the millions it’s pretty decent. You can look at a few different sectors to give yourself an internal comparison. Look at black hole sun and see how it’s pretty bad. Argon prime looks like it could have a bunch of resources on the map because of the long asteroid fields - nope terrible. Asteroid belt or something for a good source of mostly everything. Don’t have to do the galaxy, just a few as you need them.

asteroid belt is knowed for being a really good sector, but on that site, the "score" are bad", so it doesn't make sense for me idk

As I explained the score isn't "bad" per se, it's low because of two reasons: there are other sectors that have such ridiculous number of resources that they completely skew the metrics. Again, don't look at the numbers, they only make sense if you are planning truly massive and long term operations. Otherwise, you're not really going to run out of around 8 million ore and silicon Asteroid Belt has. It's all in how you look at those numbers. The guy who made the numbers was obviously a real power gamer and looked at them through his own lens.

And you shouldn't. Remember when I said it's not useful to you in your current situation and will only confuse you? That's what it's doing right now Really, don't worry about it. Just avoid sectors that have really low and unsustainable resource numbers, like 50 thousand or something like that, there are not many of those anyway.

[db48x]

You can partly get this information in game. Click on any sector on the map, and the first tab will show you the resource amounts. Note that the number you see is at least partly dependent on exploration.