Getting started mining wrecks

[Talien]

First thing you need is a ship with a large cargo hold, because wrecks will give you A LOT of ore before they blow up. Early on your best option is going to be the Raven CG-2 as it has a ridiculous 14,000 cargo and costs less than some of the other tier 1 merchants, around 6.5 mil. Blow up ships in your starter ship and sell the loot or board ships and sell them, either way you should be able to afford it before too long. DO NOT TRADE IN YOUR STARTER SHIP though, merchant ships are terrible at combat and are not a replacement for the Mace, which is hands down the best Interceptor.

No matter what ship you are using though you will want rare or legendary mining lasers so it goes quicker and you will need a rare or legendary refinery with bare minimum 75% efficiency. Refining ore and selling it is more profitable than selling the raw ore, and refining also gives mining exp. Save at a ship equipment dealer and save/reload until you find what you need.

Save up until you can afford a Basilisk and trade in your Raven, but if you plan on doing crafting make sure you buy basic mining lasers and refinery so you can equip them and salvage the rare/legendary gear before trading it in. The Basilisk has 2 heavy and 1 light turrets and will serve you well until you decide to upgrade to one of the top end cargo carriers like an Atlas or Behemoth.

Some of the ore is very rare (Iron, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Titanium) and you may want to refine and store it instead of selling, unless you don't plan on doing any crafting at all. Crafted equipment is much better than what you will loot, but if you have ground combat set on normal or easy difficulty then you can easily get by with what you find as drops or buy from merchants.

Mining wrecks will also occasionally give you ship repair components that you can use to repair systems inside ships you board, but you will need to do A LOT of wreck mining to get a decent amount so don't count on being able to start repairing stuff for quite a while.

[zuehli_2003]

Nice guide. I wouldn't say a refinery with at least 75% is necessary, though. The efficiency of the refinery only determines the amount of ore wasted during the refining process. Of course, it's better to have less waste, but it's not mandatory. 50% refinery efficiency means 3-5 wasted raw ore. 100% means 0 wasted raw ore, so 75% is at approx. 2-3 wasted raw ore.
I.e. without any active mining perks the total amount of raw ore needed per unit of refined ore is 28-30 with 50% refinery efficiency and with 75% efficiency it's 27-28, so the difference is not that significant.
So I just want to say it's not absolutely necessary to wait until you have a 75% refinery, even with 50% it's okay to mine ship wrecks (or mine in general) ;) This especially applies to when you want to use the refined ore for crafting.
Like I said, apart from that the guide is a good starting point for new players. Well done!

[outerheavenops]

Wrecks hold about 5k storage worth of loot. just fyi

[Goddess Ilias]

Love the wreck mining , loads of mining exp, enter a system target a planet and scan pulse and look for green circles in 3d space and fly towards it
depending on your mining skills you can get even more ore out of it, had one wreck with almost 7k ore with mining around 40