Miners assigned to stations

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builder680
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Miners assigned to stations

Post by builder680 » Sat, 16. Oct 21, 23:55

I was going through a list of my assigned miners for a fairly large wharf I recently constructed in Company Regard. This sector doesn't get the amount of traffic that some sectors see, so I'm more reliant on my miners to bring in the resources for all the production facilities that are also a part of the wharf. I noticed that the station filled up with Ice very quickly, but the incoming Silicon and Ore miners were small loads. I went through each miner's inventory and noticed that they almost all had a bunch of Ice clogging up their inventory making them unable to procure full loads of Ore and Silicon, as they couldn't sell the Ice they had mined, and never would (unless I dramatically increase my need for Ice, which I don't plan to do any time soon). Then I checked another station I've had for a while, and which has a 5-star manager, and it was the same with its miners. Almost every miner had a crap ton of Ice it would never be able to sell.

So, I went through all my miners and dumped all their Ice manually. This will increase my Silicon and Ore income for a while, but eventually they'll clog their cargo with unsellable Ice again. Can this behavior be looked at and possibly improved in the future? Or, give a menu option to a group assigned to a station to drop all cargo of a certain type?

BlackRain
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Re: Miners assigned to stations

Post by BlackRain » Sun, 17. Oct 21, 00:20

builder680 wrote:
Sat, 16. Oct 21, 23:55
I was going through a list of my assigned miners for a fairly large wharf I recently constructed in Company Regard. This sector doesn't get the amount of traffic that some sectors see, so I'm more reliant on my miners to bring in the resources for all the production facilities that are also a part of the wharf. I noticed that the station filled up with Ice very quickly, but the incoming Silicon and Ore miners were small loads. I went through each miner's inventory and noticed that they almost all had a bunch of Ice clogging up their inventory making them unable to procure full loads of Ore and Silicon, as they couldn't sell the Ice they had mined, and never would (unless I dramatically increase my need for Ice, which I don't plan to do any time soon). Then I checked another station I've had for a while, and which has a 5-star manager, and it was the same with its miners. Almost every miner had a crap ton of Ice it would never be able to sell.

So, I went through all my miners and dumped all their Ice manually. This will increase my Silicon and Ore income for a while, but eventually they'll clog their cargo with unsellable Ice again. Can this behavior be looked at and possibly improved in the future? Or, give a menu option to a group assigned to a station to drop all cargo of a certain type?
This has been a problem for a while, unfortunately the best option is to separate stations that use different minerals for better efficiency.

GCU Grey Area
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Re: Miners assigned to stations

Post by GCU Grey Area » Sun, 17. Oct 21, 00:27

This problem can be avoided by using dedicated mining stations. They're fairly cheap to build, at it's most basic each one consists of 2 L storage modules (1 solid, 1 gas) & lots of docks. Each station is configured to only store 2 resources (e.g. ore + hydrogen), so there's no issues whatsoever with miners filling up on the wrong type of stuff. I generally build them in sets of 3, so all the mined resources used for manufacturing are covered. I don't bother with nividium because it doesn't have a productive use. I use L miners to do the mining (because they're immune to Khaak attacks) & M's to transport resources from the mining stations to my production stations - they're almost always moving at full speed, so at much less of a risk of attack than if used for mining. I also like being able to easily differentiate between miners & mineral transports due to them having different icons on the map.

builder680
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Re: Miners assigned to stations

Post by builder680 » Sun, 17. Oct 21, 01:00

Ah, yeah that's a good idea. Thanks guys.

Edit: The issue still needs looked at, though. It's a pretty basic thing.

joe2020
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Re: Miners assigned to stations

Post by joe2020 » Mon, 18. Oct 21, 14:10

Related to that, I noticed that miners assigned to a station keep mining resources that are no longer used if you remove modules from station.
For example if your station processes ice and ore and then you remove ore processing plant miners keep mining ore even though you don't need it anymore.
I have to remove miner assignment from station and assign it again, then miner mines only ice, not ice and ore (in this example).
I think it would be nice to have the option to tell station assigned miners which resources they should mine, like in auto-mine rules. That would solve both problems, the original one listed in this thread and the one I mentioned. That way players could control which resources and mined and in what quantities, so if you need less resources of one kind you could tell station miners to mine other things.

Imperial Good
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Re: Miners assigned to stations

Post by Imperial Good » Mon, 18. Oct 21, 22:44

The issue comes from filling up the storage. Once the storage is full then a little missing ice triggers miners to mine it. Unless the ice has comparable usage to the other resources, the miners might end up holding onto the ice when other resources are needed since they cannot unload it. The reservation mechanic used to prevent this but it was removed somewhere between 3.00 and 4.00.

This is one of the reasons why I think it is best to separate your stations for optimal efficiency.

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