Best Mining Fleet Set-up?

[Lord Soddy]

I have three vessels with 36 mining lasers each (half Tritanium, half Naonite Double Mining Lasers). Now I plan to switch to Double Xanion Mining Lasers, as I hope to hit the Ogonite areas soon as well. Yet I am not sure whether it would be more profitable to switch to smaller but more mining vessels, instead of fewer but larger. What does the experienced audience think about that? How do you set up your remote mining fleet?

Also, how often do ore asteroids respawn?

Thanks a lot for your insights.

P.S.: Also recommendations for an according ship would be highly appreciated.

[Ohm is Futile]

I wouldn't upgrade the whole fleet to Xanion, just one maybe to get you started on Ogonite. Once you have Ogonite mining equipment you can get all the ores.

As for the number of ships, I'd personally favour quality over quantity just because I prefer to have fewer sectors active.

Ores respawn roughly 30 minutes after you leave the sector alone I think. When there's a lot of asteroids, you can generally queue up 2 to 3 sectors to mine and between the time it takes to mine and refine, the first sector should reset in time so you can loop it.

[EzRyder]

i use 3-4 miners, each in a different zone that cover all the ores

i start with any small starter ship then go to a smallish r-miner as soon as possible
credit plug: to AnubitFire for everything, its his ship and cargo container i just pasted them together and tweaked some things
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2068488815
i drop 2-3 of these outside the barrier as i progress inward

i replace them with a highly customized version of this trader ship
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2077459292
it works ok with turrets but also has a hanger for when i want to add drones

one more inside the barrier and everything is covered

by the time you get to ships big enough for lots of turrets i think drones are better
good drones will slurp up most asteroids before the carrier even gets within range
and large ships can have trouble navigating in thick asteroid fields

[Lord Soddy]

Thanks for all your feedback. I will check into that and mostly stay with only a few mining ships as well.

[Onkel Weezy]

Originally posted by Ohm is Futile:

I wouldn't upgrade the whole fleet to Xanion, just one maybe to get you started on Ogonite. Once you have Ogonite mining equipment you can get all the ores.

As for the number of ships, I'd personally favour quality over quantity just because I prefer to have fewer sectors active.

Ores respawn roughly 30 minutes after you leave the sector alone I think. When there's a lot of asteroids, you can generally queue up 2 to 3 sectors to mine and between the time it takes to mine and refine, the first sector should reset in time so you can loop it.

Fantastic info.

One other question here.. is this 30 minutes game time.. or 30 minutes in real life? I'm assuming game time.. but I know some games process things like this in real life time (you can stop the game, come back an hour later, restart the game and respawns/etc. will have happened).

Thanks again for the info so far.. useful indeed!

[Fritz]

My setup so far (after 3 games) and a few observations.

1. I find bigger ships with more turrets a problem, unless they are all mounted in the same spot, and if you actually watch half of them, only half the turrets often fire.

2. Smaller ships are hardly worth it in the long run. They are ok at the start with 1 or 2 mining lasers each. When starting out the first thing I do after mining the ore myself in a drone is to build a smallish mining ship to automate it. Then build a few more.

When I have some moderate income, I will usually get any ship with a cargo hold, usually off steam if I can't be bothered building it and equipping it with 2 - 4 (R) mining lasers. Cargo hold is usually about 5-10K.

I find the best setup is 3-5 medium size mining ships with R lasers, on a constant mine/refine loop. I did lot's of experimentation and found this worked the best for me. I didn't need a HUGE amount of resources coming in at once, but if you are different maybe going slightly larger hulls with 4-6 R lasers could be the way to go as well.

I wasn't a fan of carrier/mining fighters yet but maybe that will change.

[Gespenst Gaming]

Once I reached Xanion stage I found mining lasers vastly inferior to mining drones. Sometimes the ai gets dumb and can't hit the target with their lasers cause it's just out of range, but drones are so numerous they'll eventually hit a small target that's causing a mining ship to get stuck.

Also drone's don't take up valuable system slots.

Mining/salvaging ships still need a mining/salvaging laser equiped to "attempt" to mine the appropriate resource and resource level.

Also R- Lasers are the only things worth using.

Ship design, you can go really basic and make a "bread loaf" type ship that is compact and then just cover it with a thin layer of armor pieces.

Transporter software is super great too, saves a lot of time not spent docking.

[aragorn.86]

t would be good if the asteroid belts ended forever - this would encourage players to explore other parts of space. Look for other ways - for example, dismantling enemy ships. About long ships for mining. They will easily pass between asteroids, but it will be very difficult to turn around on such a ship and it becomes an easy target for enemies. I myself am fond of mining resources and dig myself, but also explore space playing at the maximum level of complexity-this adds to the life of sharpness. Especially like to watch how two factions are fighting each other in the same sector - you just fly and collect loot from them, without spoiling the relationship and dismantle the hull. But the new factions are also more interested in their types of ships. I think the game is too easy - even at the maximum level of difficulty.

[lammaer]

My recent experience that while mining carriers seems to be great alternatives (because fighters can be cheaply manufactured once you buy a good one - contrary to turrets which are difficult to acquire/manufacture), mining with fighter is bugged as hell.

I had 8 carriers with 16 mining fighters in diferent sectors, and while they produced fair amounts of materials, the game became laggy, fighters bugged away randomly, mining carriers often stuck in "jumping" state ...

So right now Im refitting all my miners to R turrets....

[mikestewart395]

AI mining is really off atm in my opinion. I use them in early game, just simple small ships, r-type always, and mine in a sector with resource depot. Just loop it. But with bigger ships it gets useless. I have run my main ship with 4 squads of r-type fighters and a few turrets. I took a nap yesterday for 2 hours, it only collected 1400 cargo in a thick xanion area. I jumped in the ship and collected twice that in 5 min. So in my personal experience it isn't worth it past titanium stage.

[Ohm is Futile]

Originally posted by mikestewart395:

AI mining is really off atm in my opinion. I use them in early game, just simple small ships, r-type always, and mine in a sector with resource depot. Just loop it. But with bigger ships it gets useless. I have run my main ship with 4 squads of r-type fighters and a few turrets. I took a nap yesterday for 2 hours, it only collected 1400 cargo in a thick xanion area. I jumped in the ship and collected twice that in 5 min. So in my personal experience it isn't worth it past titanium stage.

That's insanity. I've been using increasingly larger automated ships with R-mining lasers basically from the moment I could afford it all the way to the core of the galaxy. I mined manually for 5 minutes at the start of the game and 5 more minutes when I breached the barrier to get a bit of avorion. I have all the minerals I need.