How do miners determine where to get resources from?

[Novvak]

Hi,

I'm starting this thread due to being confused as to how miners determine which sector is better to mine in.
I've got a station in Heretic's End, requesting Ice. The buy request is set up, I've got space for the cargo and miners assigned as subortinates to the station.
I know there are rich deposits of ice in Wretched Skies X, two jumps away. I've deployed a network of advanced sats and resource beacons in the sector, and when I manually send miners there to mine ice, they do that just fine.

The problem starts when I expect them to do that on their own. My station has a travel and activity blacklist to only operate in and around Heretic's End. Wretched Skies X and V are NOT on the blacklist, so there should be nothing preventing my ships from doing their job. Sadly, with a setup like this, miners are just flying around the station in Heretic's End and do nothing (I'm not seeing "Resource not found" behaviour error).

When I disable the sector travel and activity restrictions from the miners, they fly to mine Ice in Hatikvah's Choice III - not only is it much further, crosses dangerous Xenon infested territory, but also the Ice deposits there are miniscule!
Ships mining different resources and scrap (assigned to different stations) seem to adhere to blacklists properly, so I'm not sure what the problem is here...

Can someone explain what am I doing wrong? Should I put miners on repeat orders instead?

[xrogaan]

Density plays a major role. The asteroid belt, near the terran, is always full of stuff. But if left alone, the stations will send their miners 3 jumps away because the area there is denser in resources.

There may be other reasons in your case though.

[H34Dru5H]

You could try an autominer anchored between your stations and the ice deposits, set distance, ice only, my stations only, etc and see how that goes. If it works out, you could set other autominers to mimic the first one and you have a mining fleet which you can fine tune as you go along by just changing orders for the commander.

[PersonyPerson]

Station subordinate miners should always attempt to mine at the densest asteroid field within the range of your station unless there are blacklist restrictions, where they'll then go to the next best option.

The range is determined by the station commander's skill, but I doubt that's the source of your problem if you can get to HC III.

Try turning off or easing travel restrictions (except to deadly sectors), but keep activity restrictions on.

If that doesn't work, then it would be handy to see your blacklists via screenshots so we can diagnose the problem further.