Mining Operations and Transport

[aurelcourt]

Hello,

For RP and efficiency, I wish I could set up Remote Mining Ops in areas rich in minerals/gases, have my miners staying there mining 24/7 and ferry the extracted goods back to a production center/a warehouse.

Several issues are encountered when trying to do that :

1/ The resource probes are... very difficult and inefficient to use... any improvements coming on that ? Like a better radius, an automated command for explorers (like the X3 "scan asteroids") and a better map view of the densities? And some actual nice "spots" for mining that we'd need to find first ("we" being my fleet of explorers of course^^)

2/ How to force the miners to stay in one location? They just go... in whatever direction they like... I'd like to have them "anchored" at a specific location ==> "X km" radius around a resource probe for example !

3/ How to avoid all the trips the miners do to unload their cargo? I'd like a remote ops base, something like the TL we had in X3. Could that be done with a very small station with only docking and containers? Then how to make miners unload there without a factory "buying" the ware ?

4/ How to ship the collected minerals back somewhere else? The game lacks some actuel "Transport" ships, only the miners themselves can carry ore/gas... to me Miners and Transporters are not the same thing !

All in all, i'm looking both for workaround for the current state of the game, and hopefully additions to the game that allow this sort of feature, very common for 4X space games


Have a great day!
Aurélien

[aurelcourt]

Up

Apparently with 2.6 we can set custom buy orders in any stations so I guess my point 3/ can be addressed with a station that would buy the ore from my own sector miners ?

Still looking for some thoughts for points 1/ 2/ and 4/ though!

[MarvinTheMartian]

1/ I don't believe miners pay any heed to resource probes anyway. I say this because my gas miners have travelled to another sector in which I've never placed a resource probe.
However, if you want to place them for RP reasons then you can order any ship loaded with resource probes to deploy them. To do this, click on the ship in the map and then right-click the point in space you want them deployed and then in the context menu go down to "Civilian" and there's the option to deploy resource probe by clicking on "Resource Probe", you then just repeat with the next point in space.

2/ There's no option to do this with station auto-mine, sadly. It doesn't appear possible to alter the max gate distance either but you may be able to apply a blacklist that will stop them leaving the sector.
Please Egosoft, give us the ability to configure the gate range on independent and subordinate trading/mining ships.

3/ As you've pointed out, in 2.6 (currently Beta 5) you can now configure a station as a warehouse by adding at least 1 of that ware and setting options as to whether it's traded or not. You then just set the miners to mine for that station by clicking the mining ship and right-click the station and select "mine for".
Unfortunately, we are also unable to assign a miner to a specific resource i.e. if you assign a gas miner to a station it will decide for itself whether it goes for Hydrogen, Helium or Methane and (it seems) not always based on demand at the station.

4/ Just buy another L miner and use it to transport the minerals/gas to wherever, a Magnetar has only slightly less storage than a Shuyaku; don't give it a mining laser or mining/collecting drones and it's a transporter . I would suggest, however, that instead of building just a warehouse - build a refined goods complex to turn:
- ore into refined metal/teladianium
- silicon into silicon wafers
- methane into graphine
- hydrogen in antimatter cells
- helium into superfluid coolant
the raw materials can only be used in the production of these refined goods and by shipping these in their refined form the transportation is an order of magnitude more efficient. Up to you though.

At the moment, I have not found any command for a ship to transfer wares between only player stations automatically as a default behaviour. There may be a way of fudging this with blacklists and ware trade restrictions but either I'm missing something really obvious or there's a massive hole in trader behaviour.

[Imperial Good]

1/ The resource probes are... very difficult and inefficient to use... any improvements coming on that ? Like a better radius, an automated command for explorers (like the X3 "scan asteroids") and a better map view of the densities? And some actual nice "spots" for mining that we'd need to find first ("we" being my fleet of explorers of course^^)

Auto miners do not care about resource probes. They just know where to mine. They spread out to prevent localized depletion as well.

2/ How to force the miners to stay in one location? They just go... in whatever direction they like... I'd like to have them "anchored" at a specific location ==> "X km" radius around a resource probe for example !

This will decrease mining efficiency due to local depletion of mineable material from the zone. Eventually you will hit the replenishment rate for the Zone at which stage miners will become increasingly less efficient and not yield any more material.

3/ How to avoid all the trips the miners do to unload their cargo? I'd like a remote ops base, something like the TL we had in X3. Could that be done with a very small station with only docking and containers? Then how to make miners unload there without a factory "buying" the ware ?

There is practically no benefit to be gained here since there are no specialized "mine hauler" ships. The same ships that will do the hauling back can mine so in practice having them mine and then haul their load back is at least as efficient as mining and transferring their wares to another of the same ship to haul back.

With a dedicated "mine hauler" things would look different. Such ship would be unable to mine but instead hold more liquid/solid and a considerably faster travel mode. With such a ship having them move the wares back would save considerable wasted mining time for the miners and overall be more cost effective. Of course for this to make sense the maximum travel speeds of miners would need to be lowered, to encourage use of this approach as currently the gains would be very small for the effort applied.

4/ How to ship the collected minerals back somewhere else? The game lacks some actuel "Transport" ships, only the miners themselves can carry ore/gas... to me Miners and Transporters are not the same thing !

They are not needed as miners do that already. See my answer to 3. If they were added the current miners would be nerfed and the net result might be just a more complex game to achieve the same as we get currently.

Apparently with 2.6 we can set custom buy orders in any stations so I guess my point 3/ can be addressed with a station that would buy the ore from my own sector miners ?

No it is not addressed. One cannot assign miners to trade for a station and hence although one can buy and sell ore like a warehouse, one cannot automatically buy and sell ore with traders.

In the end it still might not justify the extra complexity since one could just place refinery modules on that station and have normal traders haul the much more compact refined products to destinations rather than raw materials.

[MarvinTheMartian]

There is practically no benefit to be gained here since there are no specialized "mine hauler" ships.

Hmm, just checked and you're right. It's not possible to assign a mining ship trade tasks for a station, only "mine" or "defence" An oversight if you ask me. Still more efficient to haul refined goods though.

[aurelcourt]

Thank you for your answers !

I hope we'll soon get an incentive to search the universe for lucrative mining spots instead of the autominer that knows more than the player...

[MarvinTheMartian]

I hope we'll soon get an incentive to search the universe for lucrative mining spots instead of the autominer that knows more than the player...

There's a limited range for miners and transporters for automation (4 sectors I think for a 3* pilot and above) so you still need to choose location wisely. I've set up a refined materials complex 2 sectors away from my Wharf which was more luck than exploration so it's good to do some exploring and look at the range your miners/transporters will need to travel and ensure supply.

There are some sectors with good connections but no resources in them directly so I'll be relocating at some point I expect.

[Eyeklops]

No it is not addressed. One cannot assign miners to trade for a station and hence although one can buy and sell ore like a warehouse, one cannot automatically buy and sell ore with traders.

I'm confused by this statement. Miners can be assigned to trade for a station and will autotrade with player and NPC faction stations like other wares. The only difference I've noticed is NPC miners will sell to, but not buy from a station (Is this the drawback your referring to?). Maybe I'm not understanding the context here.

[Imperial Good]

I'm confused by this statement. Miners can be assigned to trade for a station and will autotrade with player and NPC faction stations like other wares. The only difference I've noticed is NPC miners will sell to, but not buy from a station (Is this the drawback your referring to?). Maybe I'm not understanding the context here.

Past me from ~4.5 years ago could not see into the future so did not know that a future patch would add support to assign mining ships as trade ships when he made that post. Now in X4, to facilitate mining trade stations, you can assign mining ships as trade ships to haul mined wares mined by other mining ships assigned as mining ships.

Much of what I wrote back then does not apply anymore.

Auto miners do not care about resource probes. They just know where to mine. They spread out to prevent localized depletion as well.

Auto miners do care about resource probes. Having resource probes nearby silicon miners can nearly double the mining speed of silicon. Although they still seem to just know where to mine, they only know so within discovered space, so do not know about undiscovered mining fields. Discovered space is space that the player has revealed the hexes for on the map. I do not know if there is a Y component to discovery, or it is just the XZ hexes.

This will decrease mining efficiency due to local depletion of mineable material from the zone. Eventually you will hit the replenishment rate for the Zone at which stage miners will become increasingly less efficient and not yield any more material.

This is especially important now as a lot of resource fields have had their yield and replenishment rate nerfed so cannot support many mining ships per unit volume. Big mining facilities can deplete large chunks of even dense mining fields.

In retrospect I recall there was a bug back then that caused mining ships to not care about mining field depletion much. This was fixed around the time between 3.00 and 4.00 patches.

There is practically no benefit to be gained here since there are no specialized "mine hauler" ships. The same ships that will do the hauling back can mine so in practice having them mine and then haul their load back is at least as efficient as mining and transferring their wares to another of the same ship to haul back.

There is benefit to having dedicated haulers now, especially for Silicon. You can put higher skilled crew on your miners so that they mine silicon a lot faster. You can then use low skilled haulers to move the silicon around. This allows the silicon miners to spend more time mining and less time flying, getting more value for the same skilled crew, which are micro intensive to setup. Originally in X4, crew skill did not affect mining speed much but now for silicon you really want skilled mining crews to avoid having to spam hundreds of ships.

That said placing the factory inside the silicon resource field will still be a more efficient solution, minimising travel time and not needing any haulers.

They are not needed as miners do that already. See my answer to 3. If they were added the current miners would be nerfed and the net result might be just a more complex game to achieve the same as we get currently.

Now you use a mining trade station. Place inside the resource field, assigning miners to mine, assign miners to trade. Then setup the station prices as appropriate. Such stations have a lot of value early game as they are now needed to supply NPC factions efficiently, allowing the classic "miner spam start" to still be viable.

No it is not addressed. One cannot assign miners to trade for a station and hence although one can buy and sell ore like a warehouse, one cannot automatically buy and sell ore with traders.

In the end it still might not justify the extra complexity since one could just place refinery modules on that station and have normal traders haul the much more compact refined products to destinations rather than raw materials.

Mining is a lot more difficult now after auto miner nerfs and silicon requiring skilled crew to mine efficiently. As such using a mining trade station does offer significant value.

There are still no dedicated solid/liquid haulers though. Which would be a nice add for people investing heavily into the miner play style.

[Eyeklops]

Past me from ~4.5 years ago could not see into the future...

Holy cow. I had no idea this thread was that old. I rarely necro, not sure how I ended up reviving it. Please accept my humble apologies.