Can someone explain, why do we have this option? I mean mining the ore manually takes a minute or two max. Why bother with autominers if they deplete ore nodes the same way, but so much slower+using energy. I feel something is wrong here. I also dislike project eden changed all nodes, so they deplete whatever you choose, because of vanilla bug, but i understand I should ask them in their own thread.
Well, more options in a game like this is always better than less, I suppose. I always play with autominer depletion off as well. Manual mining for fast, once-off resources and autominers for slow but steady resource income. And because my autominers are permanent, I also build proper mines for them to call home... Having proper, permanent BA mines may seem like a pointless waste of resources but, it is more immersive IMO.
Yeah, these winers lol So, having 10 sq.m. ore deposits isnt immersion braking, but having long-term automated ore income is.
Wow, great looking, sir! That is what I call immersion. And of course it is not a waste o resources, this game demands huge amount of time, so every ore nod with autominer will return 100x more resources by the time you do other things.
I must admit I dont get the point of auto miners at all if you have depletion on. It is so quick to mine out even a large deposit with an suitable SV or even HV that setting them up, and having to come back later is just more trouble than it is worth. OTOH, with it off,, then TBH I wish they had never added the auto miner in their current form and instead made them BA only things, or at least made them a priority must destroy immediately kind of thing for your enemies (Zirax etc or whoever). Setting up a mining base in a hostile territory should eventually invoke a PV level response This is also the reason I dont bother with project eden - everything else about that is great, but I hate those nuggets and given the amount of time we have to spend mining, then I consider them to be massively game breaking because of the simplistic way vehicle drills work (dig sphere around point of impact instead of cylinder along drill axis - nasty hack!).
I personally like the nuggets. Makes the ore scanner you get actually useful. The other kind just cause me to throw the thing out and only ever build to sell for money.
Nuggets are bugged, even with autominers ore depletion option set to off, they still deplete. About the scanner, it should highlight all ore, not only nuggets, and it is useful again. So all issues are because of different vanilla bugs.
Nuggets are only good for people who cant build and/or pilot a decent mining HV or SV for that matter judging by the historic posts about people claiming it was quicker to hand mine with the laser drill - bollox, far quicker with a decent mining vehicle!
Well I guess the whole point of auto miners is to use them on high gravity hell hole planets. I know Project Eden has a ton of those, and they usually spawn with the rare type resources. These are the type of worlds were mining with an HV is nearly impossible due to the lack of lift. Much easier to use a CV with better thrusters, touch down, place the auto miner down, and come back later. Of course rare resources can also spawn on non hellish planets if you travel far enough. And considering the galaxy is huge, then most likely you'll find them there, thus eliminating auto miners even still.
Indeed. Same with water generators. To quote myself from the most wanted QoL feature thread: Enemies do like to target my mining BAs, it's the reason why I armed and armoured them up, and added shields. Although this is most likely because my mines surround my HQ so, enemies have to go through them.
Back in A12 they said they were thinking of making them into BA structure in the now abandoned A13/14 or whatever. I guess all that is out of the window and long forgotten now that it is 'released' Reminds me - a while ago I started adapting one of my sheds to house an auto miner - I should dig it out and finish the job some time.
I don't think I'd go quite so far as to say it's because we can't build them or pilot them. It's mainly because, IMO, in vanilla it just isn't worth the bother when hand drilling works just as well. Plus the vanilla games I had with nuggets never depleted via automining so I just found it more convenient to make a hauler SV with a ton of space to go around the planet to pick up ore. I've much more recently began playing with Reforged Eden and in that scenario, it's definitely worth building a hover miner because short of the Voidium Drill, hand drilling is not worth the time. I've also done the whole stick a base on the autominer thing, but that doesn't help with anything and you then have the burden of defending that new structure as well, even if you only jump out long enough to empty the miner.
I run my own mod and use SVs for mining - the drills however remain vanilla except that you can stick them on SVs. Of course hugely improved drills will be better, but even the vanilla drills are much better than hand mining especially with harder (higher tier) ores. No it doesnt really help with anything - people mostly (I guess) do it for cosmetic/RP reasons. Normally I stick an ore collection outpost on the planet with an SV transport for the collection runs and teleport to it now and then and leave the miners to themselves (I dig down a little first to hide them in case drones see them and shoot them when I come back to collect). As I will mostly be putting the resource in the factory - dont even need to visit in a CV to cart it away.
Yeah, I always do that and, as I said in a previous post, it is rather pointless indeed. I just do it for RP. I wouldn't say it feels more "realistic" to have actual mines, it's just more immersive. Every empire (one man empire or not) should have a mining network that feeds it. Mines should actually be a very strategic thing, like in an RTS game, for everyone. As Khazul said in a post above, it would be great if building a mine close to enemy territory provokes a PV-level response. But then it would also be great if I could delay "construction" of new PVs if I destroy their mines.
Actually now that I mention mines as a strategic thing, that's why I would like proper shipyards to build ships instead of the pocket factory we have now as well. Which should also apply to AI factions. Factions have one shipyard in a star system, take out their shipyard and their OPVs will no longer respawn in that system until they "rebuild" their shipyard. In other words, using respawn mechanics in a dynamic manner to make the galaxy feel alive.
I feel auto miners should be made to double the amount of raw ore that is extracted from deposits to make them worthwhile with depletion on. The same goes for the furnace, its pretty useless. It should be made to double the ingot output for each ore smelt. If Eleon made these changes plus required auto miners to also be attached to a base, then I think a proper mining network would be possible.
Great ideas guys! So to sum it up: 1. Autominers + ore depletion is absolutely useless, with a single exception of high-gravity planets. 2. If ore depletion option left as is - autominers should give some bonus to the regular ore yield. 3. More opinions are about making them a part of the base, which makes it a little complicated, but gives more benefits. I have another crazy idea, why we need ore depletion at all? lol We have godsent meteorites anyway. Isnt it better to make all ore nodes infinite? (yeah I know it will turn this game to Satisfactory )
I dont agree that the furnace is useless (at least not when you mod to allow it to be placed on a CV too). It is probably the most convenient as quick way to get ingot from ore. Actually THE best place for a furnace is on a mining CV so that it can process ore into ingot as it is mined. If auto-miner where also base constructs, then we could have this for auto-mining as well.
Infinate - no, but I do think they should be much richer and much larger and also more rare, but in geologically predictable zones (for eg like in eco if anyone knows that). That way - you could mine them as we do now by hand/hv/sv but later, you build a big mine on it - with several drills - not one poxy slow drill. However, they would deplete, but last longer enough and provide enough resource for them to be worth investing the time, effort and resource in building an actual mine head base. TBH - I kind of play this game a little like an RTS in so far as I typcially have lots of specialized building instead of a single base and wish that such an approach was supported directly via the wifi (or better - with some kind of physical transfer pipes like SE has) so that constructors could directly access any store in wifi range. This would be great for a mine head building to feed the ore to furnaces. In SE we sometimes built like this as well, but in that we could use the conveyor pipes and docking connector to connect buildings together so that refineries (for eg) could access ore pulled by drills etc. Let face it, the combat and looting side of this game get old quick (well the looting does at least) and what this game really has is building. I wish they would embrace that aspect more and give us more interesting stuff to build instead of the samey bases over and over. I think they should fully embrace separate buildings to house specific function too and allow them to be functionally connected to central fuel, power, o2, storage, shield generator etc as I think that would be so much more immersive in many ways. Think old command and conquer (or whatever RTS) style bases.
