Crafting and Refined Ore

[ganderthoth]

I have some questions about how to get enough refined ore to craft.

1. Do I have to mine and refine the ore manually if I want to use it? Or, can drones do it for me, or can I buy it? I guess this is a moot point, as I assume you have to mine for rare earth ores and can't buy them. Is there a way to tell drones to not sell the ore?

2. Is it better to mine in higher level systems?

3. Do I need any stats for my crew other than int. to gain skill in mining faster?

4. How viable is it to have a ship that fights and has some mining potential? How big of a cargo hold do I really need to mine and refine ore?

Thanks.

Rob

[Zod Rau]

1. Raw ore can be mined or bought on the trade net and then refined in one's ship refinery. You've got to have the cargo space though to contain the ore. With a base rank refinery, that's 30 ore to 1 refined. Rare earth can also be mined or bought on the trade net. In order to buy either, you'll want an extensive net of beaconed systems, as the wide variety of ores and earths are not sold in every system.

2. There is no difference system to system for mining. Higher quality nodes do yield more ore though.

3. Nope. Mining skill raises most quickly manually mining asteroid fields. The amount of ore mined in this way is the main factor, though refining the ore and even using mining drones on planetary nodes also raises the skill, though much more slowly. Heavy mining lasers do so twice as fast as light mining lasers do.

4. Entirely viable, if you change up the question some. It is entirely viable to have a cargo ship with great mining potential that is also good in a fight. This is partially because the ships you face in incursions is are based on the ship you're flying at the time. The starter ship, an interceptor, faces other interceptors, light and medium fighters, light merchants, and explorers. A medium cargo ship will face all that plus other medium cargo ships. You've got to be flying a heavy fighter to get heavy fighter bogeys on incursions, or maybe the one heavy merchant. (dunno - I don't have the Fortune)

Fighters on the other hand, even though you can stick a refinery into them, are simply not meant to be great at industrial applications.

The makers of the Basilisk medium cargo ship should be paying me because I talk it up so much. I just love mine. With legendary everything, I can kill up to and including all heavy fighters except the Exetor, which I might be able to take, but i'd have to repair armor if I tried. 20k cargo hold to start - enough to pick up a full load of fully loaded drones, though without wiggle room you'd pick up 19 and start refining before calling that last one. 27.5k with a legendary expansion.

So in answer to the 2nd part of this question, I'll say how large of a cargo hold you need is mostly dependent on how much micromanagement you can tolerate. With a 5k hold, you could process 20 fully loaded mining drones if you call them back 4 at a time, refining between each set. Too much fiddling for me, so I saved my credits for the Basilisk.

As for buying materials on the trade net, I have resorted to that for tungsten and iron, and the occasional rare earth. I can't afford to do much of that though, so mostly my drones mine and I refine. I store everything (unrefinable amounts of ore, refined ore, rare earths, and mining lasers) at the base I where I do my crafting.

[ganderthoth]

Thank you for your long, detailed answer. It is must appreciated!

Followup questions. Does perception affect targeting and firing weapons? I assume dex affects repair of my ship. Does int. affect how fast I gain ship skill levels? I will hire mercs and dump points into int. if this is so.

Thanks.

Rob

[Zod Rau]

As I don't change up my crew assignments, I couldn't tell you if attributes have any effect on ship combat skills. I do know that the better quality systems affect them, or rather they affect to-hit, damage, etc,. As for Dexterity, it's described as being good for crafting, but as of now has no such effect. I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds for repair. Can't really help you on Intelligence either, as I don't change crew assignments and besides which, they all have the same 70 intelligence. I do know that targeting and weaponry ship skills raise based entirely on XP gained from blowing up enemy ships. Piloting from driving a ship around, scanning (forget what skill that correlates to) from scanning stuff. Mining from mining. These last 3 I suspect work the same way first aid does, in that more uses than the last are required for every level up.

A perhaps better ship crew merc hiring strategy might be to hunt for mercs that already have the ship skills you're looking for. Available mercs are always your level when you hire them, so it's possible to find ones that are better even than the crew you've been using for ship skills.

[ganderthoth]

Thanks for the reply. It is much appreciated.

Rob

[skiiwa]

Not to HiJack this great thread but where do I find other crew members? How do you know the quality of a node and where to find them? Exetor<<I was able to Defeat and board one of these in my Heron med Freighter. Took forever. First time running into one.

[Zod Rau]

I expect I could board an Exetor in just about anything, as their shield isn't the main problem - It's the massive quantity of armor/structure that needs chewing through to make it 'slpode while it's constantly throwing missiles at you and carving you up with heavy lasers. This was prior to the individual systems targeting and ship boarding patch, by the way.

To the questions.

Mercenaries can be found at stations. Mining nodes are found on planets when those planets are scanned, and when they're scanned they show as numbered. with 10 being best quality and 1 being worst. 9 however is the best I've ever found, so maybe 9 is the limit.

[skiiwa]

Yea, My Bad. My Heron is a light Freighter. (Turns out I should have waited to buy a med.) I'm about 50hrs into my game and my toon is still lvl13 and I was in the starter ship until yesterday. I will probably give up on the game WAY before I get to my lvl3 perks. Its just to slow! I have no idea what i'm doing wrong. The Pace for me seems WAY off or I'm just not playing right?

[Zod Rau]

Character leveling XP bar (top) is filled by doing ground combat damage at present. Also filling the lower bar with 5 skill rank ups per level. Ship skills won't fill this. So if you want to level up your team, less ship stuff and more agent missions.