Elite Dangerous: Sunny Goes Mining

I tried mining.  I’m enjoying it.   it is somewhat lucrative.. it is more variable (never know what the next asteroid will bring).. it has some interesting parameters.

In order to mine with ease, you need: 

  • A Prospecting Limpet Controller
  • A Collection Limpet Controller
  • A Refinery.

They made it so that both the Refinery and the Collection controllers want a larger-sized bay – this is where they make you choose.    You can go with a smaller collector, you’ll just have to slow down the mining so the collectors can catch up. 

They also made it so that the limpets (ammo) for prospecting and collecting take up cargo space  – 1 ton per limpet.   So you have to choose your balance of how many limpets to take vs the amount of ore you bring back.

The build I’m going with for now:

[Type-6 Transporter]
S: 1D/F Mining Laser
S: 1D/F Mining Laser
5: 5E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 32)
5: 5E Cargo Rack (Capacity: 32)
4: 4B Refinery  (9 Bins) 
4: 3A Collector Limpet Controller (2 Collectors, 1300 seconds or something ridiculous like that)
3: 3B Shield Generator
2: 1A Prospector Limpet Controller (1)
2: 1E Standard Docking Computer
Cargo : 64 T

I chose to keep a Shield Generator and Docking Computer this time. I tried without them on my Cobra, and it can get scary when you bump into the asteroid.

How it works out:

  • Playing for 45 minutes or so?   Some of it was outfitting and travelling.
  • I used 2 collector drones  … they last me for 2 asteroids.
  • I used 2 prospector drones .. one for each asteroid.
  • I netted 33 tons of ore: 2 Bertrandite, 10 Gallite, 7 Gold, 9 Osmium, 4 Silver.

Given my 64 tons of cargo space, means I could probably go through 4 asteroids or so and then return home with a full hold.   If so I would need to leave with 8 limpets, maybe 10 limpets total to have a little bit extra.

I had a bit of trouble trying to flush out useless materials – the collectors kept grabbing it and bringing it back.  I think I need to fly away, disable the collector in the modules panel, dump them, fly back, re-enable the collector. 

It seems like asteroid sizes and yields are fairly consistent, so far.  All about the same size, all about the same yield.  Might change in the future.

I suspect in the future with a bigger ship and a bigger prospector controller, I could control several limpets – so I could sample several asteroids before going back to a previous one.

The Chart of Money

image

  • One of the mining tutorial videos I watched named “Bertie” as being worthless.     I think for me my line starts at Coltan or so.
  • This was generated using data from eddb.io, sucked over to Excel.   Prices differ from station to station.
  • Some of them – the 3 P’s, and Osmyium, can be used to fulfill missions, and thus can be upwards of $100k / ton.

Where to go Mining

There’s a wiki page listing pristine metallic reserves.  I galactic mapped each of them till I found one near my home system (near Lembava).

Well done, Frontier.    Enjoyed this so far.

Author: sunnywiz

Me.

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