Guide to Mining: Difference between revisions

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!

-Lantern

-Pickaxe

-Shovel

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!

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:

-Proto-Kinetic Accelerator

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.

== 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

*Basilisks