Is there any way to mod this so you can have just the drones but for combat applications? Basically a new ship that is cheaper to make but of course weaker.

I’m gonna try this in 3.11 cause this is super cool

3.10?

@Q13214 are you sure you consider the Construction Ship to be OP? I always felt like it wasn't enticing enough to use for Alloy generation. Usually by the time you get the tech to do that your planetary ones are far more productive for lower cost, the only advantage I thought it held was that it didn't use population, letting you free up workers, but then you had the problem of needing to spit out dozens of construction ships.

the new construction ship does kind of ruin this for me. It is way too overpowered for alloy generation. other than that this would be DLC worthy content and I love it.

I love this very much, a fairly simple mod with straightforward functionality that adds megastructures. Unlike gigas which is incredibly feature bloated

@jowe01 Let me know if you run into any problems or have any suggestions, I'll throw them in to the next update when it goes live.

Thank you!

@jowe01 It should still be in working order, the only notable hiccup will be some of the mining attachment options won't be available to Frigates. I've been holding off updating this mod because I'm still working on rebalancing the weapons of the main mod, but I might do this one separately just to clear up the version number.

Does this still work with 3.6? Any experiences?

@Godofchaos I am considering moving the mining barge corvette section into its own ship class as an offshoot of constructors, allowing them to build mining stations as well as produce resources. As for the other mining ships, sadly I can't find a way to make them usable in multi-section ship classes, as the other sections will still be rendered as your graphical culture when you mix them together and they would be too powerful as a mere corvette section.

In the future of this mod, will there be more different mining ships and megastructures, and will it be possible to get the ships without them being simple sections?

@Faber Roze To be honest I should put it in the mod description, it's kind of common sense for a mod, I'll do it shortly.

If I do think of some things worth adding then I definitely will do so, but keeping the scope to Mining Drone related vanilla content makes it difficult to come up with ideas.

@Robinxen Thank you and I should have read the previous messages below me first. :skull:

For curiosity's sake, would there be further additions to this mod? New techs and structures in the near future?

@Faber Roze To get the Ore Grinder you must have either destroyed the Ore Grinder station in the base system of the mining drones, or make a federation / make a subject out of an empire that has it researched.

What are the requirements for the ore grinder? I already have the mining drone station unlocked, but no luck in getting anything to research the ore grinder.

The small mining drone station adds some nice flavour to spice up a solar system.

@Knight.R Only the Ore Grinder megastructure itself needs you to have destroyed the base, it can also be obtained by subjugating or federating with someone else that has the technology (in theory) meaning it is possible to get it other ways too. It will become lost technology again if the empires with the tech are wiped out however.

All the other techs merely require the mining drone laser from researching their debris.

If i may ask do i need to destroy both the mining drones and the ancient hub in order to build either?
I ask because most often not
(for me at least)
the ancient mining hub tends to be somewhere out of my reach and taken down by someone else.

@Lesovikk Yeah, I made a few changes so that both compatible, any techs that'd be duplicated hide themselves if the original mod is installed.

Is it safe to run this with your SciFi Series Tech mod?

I personally really like the vanilla-balancing. Doesn't throw off the pacing at all.

@minecon2 Haha well I did say it was vanilla-style for that reason. The only restrictions for both are that they must be on asteroids. If I set things up properly it should be possible to build one Mining Drone Station in every system (asteroids permitting) but the Ore Grinder follows standard Megastructure rules.

Compared to what I can get in mineral production using mods like Gigastructures, 750 seems like child play.

Still, it looks like a nice early-mid game method of getting lots of minerals and alloys. Do either structures have specific requirements for their placement?

@jht_89 The ore grinder is a multistage project with each stage increasing its output. The values you see in the screenshot are the cost to build the first phase which produces nothing and the final stage which is max output. Between that there are two more stages with less production.

The megastructure also has the highest upkeep of all the megastructures in the game, so you have to manage pops to balance your economy out each phase.

All in all it shouldn't stand out too much in game.

I very much like the idea, my only comment would be that given the cost of the Ore Grinder, the amount of alloys it produces appears very high (in that you pay off the alloy cost of the Ore Grinder in two months).

This is really really cool

It's a good idea you had when creating this mod, I can imagine the possibilities you could create such as: making more ships of this type, unique structures, etc.