Guide to Mining

Written by RandomTyrant, transferred by Blukey.

More than half the people I see who go into the mines end up dead in a ditch underneath a Goliath somewhere and I usually end up dragging their dead body back to medbay. I'm honestly tired of doing it. This is for all the people who perish in the silent abyss of the mining asteroid due to being inexperienced and unprepared. With this guide, and a little practice, anyone should be able to be the one dragging scrubs back to get cloned! Yaaay!

Mining 101: You Probably Haven't Played This Game Before

Shaft Miner is a popular profession of choice for new and developing players. There's many reasons for this: You don't have to deal with the crap that goes on all over the station, you get to work at your own pace and learn the ropes of the game, and it's one of the most rewarding jobs in the game when you get good at it. Unfortunately, most of the skills you learn as a miner don't translate to the other jobs, but it is at the very least fun.

So if you get slotted in as a Shaft Miner at the start of the shift, you'll spawn in the mining portion of the cargo bay. You'll most likely be next to two or three or four other folks who won't say a word to you and will promptly go space themselves because this is literally their first time playing the game. That's fine, that's normal. Leave their corpses for the Paramedics to find. If someone tries to talk to you, ignore them. You have more important things to focus on right now. Concentrate on getting your sea legs.

The Hard Part

Now, before you do anything, there's three things you should do:

First, hit the tab key. This will activate hotkey mode. Normally you can only move around with the arrow keys, which is an uncomfortable setup for anyone using a right-handed mouse. This allows you to use WASD to move around instead, a far superior setup, though at a price. In order to speak or type in commands in the command bar, you have to first click on that bar in order to select it now. When it's selected, the keyboard will only type into it. To deselect it, simply click in the game window, and the hotkeys will be active again. Alternatively, you can tap the tab key again to disable hotkey mode, type whatever you need to type, then tap it again to re-enable it.

Second, click on the ID in your ID slot on the terrible user interface. Yes, it's atrocious. This will put it in your hand. Then, click on the PDA in your belt slot. This will insert your ID into your PDA. Click on the PDA again to take it off of your belt, then click on your ID slot to put your PDA into your ID slot. This is a lot of hassle, but it frees up a valuable inventory slot which we will use to carry the most important tool of all miners later. You can use this trick in many professions too, but keep in mind that if your ID or your PDA with your ID inserted in it aren't on your ID slot, you will appear to be "unknown" to other people, which is very suspicious and could get you in trouble.

Next, click on the backpack icon. This will open it up and reveal several slots in which items can be contained above the backpack icon. There will be a few things here: a crowbar, a box, a mining satchel, and a mining voucher. Ignore the other three things and click on the box to take it out of your bag. Then, click on the 'switch hand' button just above your hand icons, or press the x key if you have hotkey mode enabled. Click on the box again to open a new set of item slots which the box contains. Click on the extended-capacity oxygen tank to pull it out, the click on one of your pocket slots, which are to the right of your hand slots.

Then, move the mouse all the way to the bottom left corner and click on the body icon to open up your apparel menu. Click on the breath mask, then click on the face icon in the apparel menu to put the breath mask on. That's the hard way to do it. You can also simply tap the e key while holding the breath mask in your active hand to automatically equip it. Then, click on the drop button on the screen to drop the box, or if you feel grumpy, click throw and then click in a direction around your character to throw the box elsewhere. You have cleared out a little bit of space in your backpack, and also set yourself up with internals. I'll go over internals more later.

Side note: you can use the e key for most equipable items unless there is already something in that slot, in which case it will fail. You'll have to first drop the item you want to equip, then click on the item in the apparel slot you want to take off, drop that, then pick the original item back up and press e or click on the appropriate slot to put it on. Whew, what an unintuitive, time-wasting mess!

The Vital Stuff

As I mentioned before, most new players get themselves killed almost immediately the first time they play. You, on the other hand, are using this guide, so you know that you must first acquire the essential gear of any miner before going and spacing yourself, which consists of the following:

-Optical Meson Scanner -Lantern -Pickaxe -Shovel -Mining Scanner

These are all held in the brown lockers to your right and below you if you're using the boxstation map. If there are no lockers in those directions, you're probably on a different map, in which case you should seek out the nearest brown locker. Once you are beside one, simply click on it to unlock it, then click on it again to open it. Inside will be a huge pile of crap, but you only want a few things from it. Press alt, then click on the stack of items to make a list of all the items in it appear in the upper right hand panel. Then, click on each of the items listed above.

Put on the optical meson scanners (they go in your eyewear slot). Put the lantern in your other pocket slot. Put the pickaxe in your belt slot where the PDA used to be. The belt slot is the only slot that can carry pickaxes, mining drills, sonic jackhammers, and et cetera aside from your back slot, but you want your backpack on your back slot as that is the only slot that can carry a backpack. Gee, what a mess. Put the shovel in your backpack by holding it in your active hand, then simply clicking on your backpack. Do the same with the mining scanner.

Getting to the Mining Asteroid

Congratulations! If you've made it this far, you have taken your first step on the road to understanding the godawful user interface and how to play the game. You should be able to mess around with it for a while and slowly develop a sense for the weird logic behind how it all works. Now, let's see if we can get you suited up and actually out into the mining asteroid!

Run your mouse over the things around you to read their names. If you're curious about them, don't hesitate to press shift and then click on them to quickly examine them and see what they're about. Right now, you should take an interest in the mining shuttle console which is normally to your left after you spawn on the boxstation map. If you've taken your time following the prior instructions, the other miners that know what they're doing might have already left on the mining shuttle. The shuttle is a small structure with white walls and blue floors that is always through a set of two airlocks to your left.

If it's gone, simply walk up to the mining shuttle console and click on it to open a menu. Click "call shuttle" to send it back to the station, then close out of the menu as you no longer need it. Wait for a few seconds, and eventually the shuttle will appear.

If the shuttle is there, walk into the airlocks and they will open for you. Walk through both of the red airlocks and the white shuttle doors, then walk onto the frontmost chair which is just below another mining shuttle console.

All ships in this game move at such incredible speeds that you must be buckled into a chair if you wish to not topple to the ground. To buckle yourself in, click on your character and drag the cursor onto the chair. If you do it right, the text logs will say "______ has buckled themselves in!" You can also buckle other people into chairs by clicking them and dragging the mouse onto said chair.

If you had to call the shuttle the first time, you know how to do this next part. Click on the console in front of you, click "send shuttle", and it will wait for a few seconds before basically teleporting to a different location. Pretty fast, huh? If you buckled in, you'll be just fine right now. If you didn't, you'll be laying on the ground for a few seconds before you get back up. To unbuckle yourself in the former case, simply click on the chair and you will be free again.

The Other Vital Stuff

Now that you're on the mining station, exit the shuttle and head to the right. The big green square things with the blinking lights are what you want. They're the mining vendor machines, and you have a voucher for them. Open you bag, take out the voucher, and click on one of the vendors with it in your hand. A menu will pop up with three options:

-Resonator -Proto-Kinetic Accelerator -Mining Bot

Now, all three of these are useful in their own ways to a miner, but we'll go over that later. Just know that the resonator is a melee weapon, the kinetic accelerator is a ranged weapon, and the mining bot is a simple helper. Choose whichever one you want, because you'll get a lot of chances to try out the other things in later shifts. After you've gotten it, either place the item in your backpack or in the case of the drone, press ctrl and click on it to pull it behind you. It is not intelligent enough to follow you on its own, unfortunately.

Go north to a room with several lockers (if you're on Yogstation) or simply racks with things called hardsuits on them, if you're on a different server. By now, a few of them have already been ransacked most likely. Walk up to one and either open it and click on the mining hardsuit buttons in the menu, or if it's just a rack, simply pick up the hardsuit helmet and the mining hardsuit. Use your apparel menu again. Put the hardsuit on in the middle armor icon, and put the helmet on in your head icon above your face icon where the breath mask is. Or, like before, simply tap e for both.

This suit is lightly armored and designed to protect you from the dangers of vacuums - I.E., space. Which is where you're going. With that, a breath mask, and an oxygen tank, you are fully prepared to go on space walks. Now, you'll notice you already have an emergency oxygen tank in your pocket, but these things do not hold nearly as much oxygen as a real tank does. Thankfully, there is an oxygen tank dispenser in that very same room. It has blue tanks on it. Walk to it, click on it, and in the menu that appears, click oxygen tank to dispense one. One will appear over the dispenser. Pick it up and put it on with the e button, and notice which slot it goes to. This is your suit storage slot. If you are wearing anything in the suit slot, which is where your hardsuit is, you will be able to add certain items to the suit storage slot. As a miner you will only use it for carrying oxygen tanks.

Now you're fully equipped as a miner!

My First Spacedig

Now, if you glance at the right side of the game screen, you'll see an icon that says 'internals'. Click it, and it will light up green and say 'on'. Now you are breathing directly from the oxygen tank in your suit. The red airlocks beside the oxygen tank dispenser are your next destination. Walk through them, and after passing through the second one, click the airlock to close it behind you and prevent too much air from escaping the mining station. You are now standing on dirt. You are in the mining asteroid proper, and there is red rock all around you.

This is a good time to learn how to mine. Click on the pickaxe in your belt slot to take it out, then walk up to the red rock and click on it. The text log will tell you that you're now mining, and after a handful of seconds, one tile worth of the rock will disappear, leaving only dirt beneath it. Click on another tile of red rock and it will also vanish in a few seconds. If you switch your active hand or move at any time during this, your progress digging will be lost.

Now, while this seems very slow at first, there's a trick you can use to greatly speed up your mining. With your trusty pick in hand, click on multiple red tiles adjacent to you. You can click on any tile of rock that is adjacent to you and not blocked by other rocks. You will mine through all of the tiles you click on. This means that, for the most part, you can clear out three tiles of rock at once before needing to scoot forward and repeat the process. This allows you to basically dig three tile wide tunnels in the rock. Get into the habit of clicking on as many tiles around you as possible while mining - the open space is invaluable and it saves you time later.

There's one other thing you can do to mine, and you do this with the shovel. Put the pick back on your belt and pull your shovel from your backpack. Click on any tile of dirt, and you will promptly dig up several piles of sand. Sand is used to make glass in the furnace. It's not worth very much, but sometimes there will be shortages of glass on the station and you will be asked to bring some sand back with you.

Striking Gold

Now, you might have seen a few tiles of rock by now that have a bunch of grey things in them. These are iron deposits, and if you mine them, they drop three bits of iron ore. Iron is refined into metal in the furnace, and is, like sand, not very valuable. The station rarely if ever runs low on metal, and iron ore deposits are extremely common in the mining asteroid. You can mine a bunch of it if you want, but you won't earn many points doing so.

Instead, what miners are really after are valuable and rare ore deposits. These are often hidden deep in the asteroid's bowels, and trying to find them by simply digging around aimlessly is simply not feasible. Instead, Nanotrassen has supplied its miners with a viable alternative: the mining scanner. Take the mining scanner out of your backpack and click on it while it's in your active hand. It will ping everything you can see on the screen for rare ores. If you are wearing an optical meson scanner, which you should be, and you are near anything valuable, you will be able to see flashes of green, gold, silver, purple, or tiny white specks deep in the rock around you.

These are valuable ore deposits. In order from least to most valuable: silver, gold, uranium, diamond, and plasma. Your goal is to dig to them, mine them, and recover the ores so that you can redeem them on the station for mucho points on your ID which you can use to purchase various rewards. The station always needs more of these for research and creation of new and advanced technologies. You won't always be able to find them by using the mining scanner - you usually have to dig into the asteroid for a little while, then use it, before finding some deposits. It's a game of patience, but it can be quite rewarding.

Now, ores all take up a single inventory space. This is pretty inconvenient for you since you have about four free spaces in your backpack, and you won't make many points at all for redeeming four ores. This is where ore boxes and mining satchels come in. You start off with a mining satchel in your backpack. Put it in your hand by clicking on it, then click on any tile with ores or sand on it to instantly pick up all of it and store it in the satchel. Easy, right? Your satchel has a storage space limit of 50 ores. That's a decent amount. If you only mine rare and valuable minerals, you can earn around 1000 points from a single satchel.

However, sometimes you just keep finding more and more ores, and what happens if you run out of space in your satchel? You can totally go back to the station, drop off the ores you have, and come back to finish the job, but it's not optimal. To be more efficient, you can take one of the ore boxes (boxes just outside the mining station that say 'ore' on them) with you. They have infinite space for ores. Press ctrl, then click on an ore box to begin pulling it behind you. You can drag it with you wherever you go and put the ores in it. To collect ores as quickly as possible, use your mining satchel to pick up all the ores in the area, then click on the ore box with it in your hand to put all the ores in the satchel into the box. Now you don't have to stop for anything! Just keep mining until you feel like you've gotten as much as you want and then head back.

Side note: if you're using an ore box, feel free to dump iron ore and sand into it for a little extra profit. It won't massively increase the amount you earn, but it won't hurt, either.

Danger, Will Robinson!

Being a miner isn't all that easy even after getting the hang of the process, unfortunately. There are two primary threats to a miner on the asteroid: gibtonite, a highly explosive ore, and monsters.

Gibtonite is a crystalline substance that can be found using the mining scanner. It is blue with a orange-ish core. If you attempt to mine a tile with gibtonite in it, it will react to the kinetic energy of your swings and begin to detonate. At this point, you have two options: run the hell away, or click on it with your mining scanner to disarm it. Running away is just fine. Disarming it is fine too, but there's some advantages to letting it detonate on its own, which will be covered in Mining 201. Either way, it is not much of a threat to you unless there are multiple gibtonite deposits in close proximity and they chain react before you can evade them.

As for the monsters - the mining asteroid is full of plasma, which is a mysterious substance which mutates and corrupts lifeforms. What may have once been innocuous, gentle alien lifeforms have become true, territorial monsters that will stop at nothing to kill any who tread on their domain. If you are digging and find a tunnel about two tiles wide that turns diagonally at random intervals, you have most likely found a monster tunnel and you should be ready to either fight or flight as necessary. Thankfully, an experienced miner can defeat these monsters and even profit from them. There are four monsters common to the asteroid:

• Hivelords

These weird things are all swirly and stuff. They can detach parts of themselves to attack you at a distance, and always try to stay several tiles away from you. You can catch up with them, however, by smashing all of the hivelord broods that block your way or trapping them in a corner. They do not deal significant damage to you, so you can basically ignore the broods and go straight for the hivelord itself. Killing it drops a hivelord heart on the ground, which you can pick up and eat by clicking on yourself with it in your active hand. It fully heals you and removes all hunger and various other side effects.

To experienced miners, these guys are basically walking medikits. Your pickaxe is actually the best weapon for dealing with these guys, as the accelerator and resonator simply do not attack as quickly and you have to chase them around.

• Basilisks

Nasty pieces of work. They're big walking crystal things. They are not particularly fast, but they have icy stares that slow you down to a crawl and cause freezing damage to you. They hit harder than a full pack of hivelord broods, and combined with their stare, they are quite dangerous. However, perhaps counter-intuitively, the easiest and safest way to fight them is to use your pickaxe or resonator and fight them in melee. They will take off most of your health if you fight them toe-to-toe, but if you start with full health you can definitely defeat one. On death they drop two or three diamond ores.

The real secret to dealing with them is that they have a very small aggro range. Staying out of that range is wise, as they always hurt you more than its worth fighting them for. If you absolutely must fight them, teamwork will make short work of them and the cost in health will be miniscule.

• Goliaths

The worst thing you can meet in the tunnels. These assholes are big, mean, killing machines and are the number one cause of miner deaths. They hit harder than any other monster on the asteroid, able to send someone into critical status within six or seven hits. They're slow, but they don't need to be fast. Every ten or so seconds, they will dig their tentacles under the ground and they will appear underneath you in a partial cross with one missing tile. If you do not move, or if you move into one of the tiles with a tentacle on it, you will be tripped and stunned for several seconds while the Goliath can beat the tar out of you. You must move into a tile unoccupied by any tentacles to avoid the tripping attack, or you will definitely die.

On some servers, you can avoid the initial tentacle attack, then engage them and spam attacks with your pickaxe until they die. On more advanced servers, like Yogstation, there is a cooldown timer on attacks against all of the mining monsters. If you try to fight a Goliath with a pickaxe directly, with no backup, you will die. There is no chance involved. It's a certainty. This is where your resonator, kinetic accelerator, or mining bot shines.

You must create energy bubbles with the resonator and let the Goliath move into them before they pop, dealing minor damage. Or, you must stay roughly two tiles away from the Goliath at all times and slowly plink him to death with the kinetic accelerator. If you set your minebot to combat mode, and you both attack it, you may be able to kill it but at significant cost of health (need to do more research). My personal preferred method is using the kinetic accelerator. It's easier to handle than the resonator and you can kill a Goliath without taking any hits if you're robust.

Killing a Goliath nets you one set of Goliath hide plates. If you pick these up and click on either your mining hardsuit or hardsuit helmet, you will upgrade it slightly. Each upgrade gives you 18% damage reduction against brute damage - which is most forms of melee damage, including the kind the mining monsters dish out. You can upgrade both your helmet and your suit up to five times, to a maximum of 90% brute damage reduction, which means you become a goddamn tank. This is by and far the best reward any monster can drop, and experienced miners will sometimes go Goliath hunting solely to get as many hide plates as they can.

In short, Goliaths will kill you many times until you figure out the art of how to fight them, and even then, they'll still kill you every now and then. Because they are such a problem, there will be an extensive section on them in Mining 201.

• Gold Grubs

These are the only non-threatening monsters on the asteroid. They eat ores and burrow around. They are cowardly and flee if they see you. If you catch one, and kill it, it may drop some ores that it ate. Usually they just aren't worth your time, though. They do not attack you.

And Knowing Is Half the Battle!

Now that you have a basic understanding of the mining part, there is only one more thing to learn - how to redeem your ores for points. First of all, return to the mining station and board the mining shuttle and go to the main station. Feel free to turn off your internals once you get indoors, it saves oxygen. Make sure you bring your ore box with you, too. Once you're back at the station, go back into the mining room and head north into the main cargo foyer. There's usually some loser sitting at the desk there doing paperwork. Ignore him because he's a loser and walk past him and head through the door just north of him.

This is the disposals room. You will see a furnace in the bottom right corner. Push the ore box into the dotted square behind it and let it sit there for a while until you click on the box and see that it is empty. All the ores have been loaded into the machine. If you have ores in a satchel as well, click the satchel while standing in the dotted square to dump all the ores out and watch them all get sucked up by the machine.

Now that that is done, take out your PDA, click on it to open the PDA menu, click on your underlined ID to pull it into your other hand, select the hand holding the ID, and click on the furnace to insert the ID. A new menu will pop up showing all the ores in the machine. Click on redeem points to add all the points you've earned to your ID. You can also select the ores in the menu to dump them out, but you should usually just leave them alone - someone else will get them sooner or later.

REMEMBER TO CLICK 'EJECT ID' BEFORE YOU LEAVE THE FURNACE AND PUT IT BACK INTO YOUR PDA. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE YOUR ID OR PDA ON, YOU WILL BE SEEN AS UNKNOWN BY OTHERS AND NONE OF THE DOORS WILL OPEN FOR YOU BECAUSE THEY CAN'T RECOGNIZE YOUR CARGO ACCESS.

Now that you have a bunch of points, go back to the mining station and go to a vendor machine. Click on one with your ID in hand to insert your ID and open a menu of things you can purchase with your points. There is no particularly useful or valuable reward there, so you can mess around and buy things you think might be cool. The alien toy is a favorite of most miners - just take it back to the main station and throw it at someone and run away.

Now, you have finally learned the basics of being a miner. You definitely could have figured it all out on your own, like I did - but where's the fun in that? After playing a few shifts as miner, if you feel confident enough, feel free to look at Mining 201 for advanced mining tips and tricks.