Guide to Mining: Difference between revisions

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; and aside from being incredibly handsome, you also know you need to grab basic mining gear from a mining locker, which consists of the following:

-Optical Meson Scanner (These let you see tiles you normally wouldn't be able to (obstructed or too dark), but not their contents)

-Seclite (The planet is dark. Really dark.)

A mining locker (brown locker with a purple pickaxe on it) can be found to your right and below you if you're on 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). Use the seclite in hand (click it or press Z while it's in your active hand) to turn it on and put it either in a pocket slot or on your kinetic accelerator. Put the kinetic accelerator in your backpack or on your belt if you've put the seclite on it. 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. Luckily the kinetic accelerator makes pickaxes (mostly) obsolete. Put the mining satchel in one of your pockets. Use the mining scanner in hand (click it or press Z while it's in your active hand) and put it in your backpack or internals box.

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 entering bluespace for a few seconds, then landing at the mining outpost. Do NOT leave the mining shuttle before it exits bluespace if you like being alive. 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.

-Proto-kinetic Crusher (High risk/reward substitute weapon for the kinetic accelerator, still breaks rocks just as good. Requires two hands to carry. Comes with a pocket fire extinguisher)

 

-Miner's Webbing (Belt slot storage item for useful mining items, comes with a survival capsule)

 

-Resonator (Drops delayed traps that can be used to break rocks, comes with a pocket fire extinguisher)

 

-Fulton Extraction set (Comes with a fulton beacon and fulton kit, the beacon can be used in hand to deploy it after a few seconds, and the kit can be used in hand to link it to the beacon, hitting anything with the kit will send it to the beacon after a short delay)

-Mining Bot (Automatic ore box that has a kinetic accelerator that can be upgraded, comes with a minebot passthrough upgrade, a large welder, and a welding helmet for repairs)

Go east to a room with three suit storage units (if you're on Yogstation). By now, a few of them have already been ransacked most likely. Walk up to one and either open it and click on the explorer suit buttons in the menu. Use your apparel menu again. Put the suit on in the middle armor icon, and put the gasmask on your face icon. Or, like before, simply tap e for both.

This suit is lightly armored and will help protect against burning, which is common on Lavaland. With that, a gas mask, and an oxygen tank, you are fully prepared to go on walks. Now while you already have an emergency oxygen tank in your internals box (the box in your backpack), emergency tanks generally last only a few minutes and you'll be outside breathable atmosphere far longer than that. 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 suit is, you will be able to add certain items to the suit storage slot. As a miner you will mainly use it for carrying oxygen tanks. A full sized oxygen tank will last you the whole round.

You can use a pickaxe, kinetic accelerator, kinetic crusher, or resonator to break rocks. Certain rocks will have ores in them, and breaking them will drop the ores.

There's one other thing you can do to mine, and that is sand. To dig up sand, use a pickaxe or shovel (the shovel is faster) on the planet surface, and you will promptly dig up several piles of ash (sand). Sand is used to make glass in the ORM. 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 ash back with you.

Being able to break rocks is great and all, but what you really want to find is ores. If you've activated your automatic mining scanner (screen is green instead of black), you'll see rocks flash with different colored icons every few seconds. These rocks contain ores (or gibonite, which will be discussed shortly). Generally, you'll want to collect some of everything as new mining tools require a variety of ores, but diamonds and bluespace crystals are the rarest and most valuable materials you can collect. Ores are an item and can be stored anywhere, but your mining satchel is a fast way to pick them up. Walking over ores while a mining satchel is in your pocket or on your belt will automatically place it in the satchel. Thing is, the satchel has limited space.

This is where ore boxes come in handy, an ore box can hold unlimited ores, but you'll need to pull it around to use it effectively. Either hit the ore box with your satchel to unload any ores in the satchel into the ore box, or drag the box behind you when picking up ores to automatically dump them into the satchel.

Being a miner isn't all that easy even after getting the hang of the process, unfortunately. There are three primary threats to a miner on the lavaland: gibtonite, a highly explosive ore often found alongside other ores, the monsters, and lava.

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 or some fauna decides to smash into the gibonite and detonate it.

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.

Getting hit is unavoidable, and you will eventually need to heal yourself in the field. Luckily, there are several easy ways to regain health, to list a few:

 

- Legion cores will regenerate 25 brute/burn and remove damage slowdown for a minute, good for if you need to top off on health and have a spare unstable core lying around or need to run at full speed while at orange health or below.

- Survival medipens will heal you over time and are injected instantly, you'll start with one and can purchase more for 500 mining points each. They are however much slower acting than legion cores and you can overdose if you take too many in short order.

- Medical kits from the station contain several items that can heal you quickly, but patches, basic mesh and sutures take time to administer. You can also buy a brute medical kit for 600 mining points.

- Cacti and leafy mushrooms contain vitrium froth, a chemical that will slowly heal you when ingested. Eating too much will cause you to get fat and slow you down, however.

- Donk pockets contain omnizine when heated in a microwave, which can also slowly heal you.

The kinetic accelerator is the bread and butter of mining on lavaland, it's roughly as fast as a pickaxe and its projectiles have a range of three tiles. The damage it deals out of atmosphere is heavy enough to make it competitive with the fauna's health, if you're careful, you can kill basically anything planetside without taking a single point of damage.

 

Each shot from one of these in a vacuum deals 40 damage, and the kinetic accelerator can be upgraded with modkits, which each take up a % of its mod capacity:

 

 

Cooldown: Reduces the kinetic accelerator's cooldown time, uses 30% mod capacity

 

Range: Increases the kinetic accelerator's range by 1 tile, uses 25% mod capacity

 

AoE: Gives the kinetic accelerator's blasts a 3x3 area of effect attack, with a variant for mining, for damaging, and a rare variant that does both, uses 30% mod capacity

There are some other special modkits that can be found from destroying necropolis tendrils which have unique effects but aren't as all around applicable as the basics

An automatic mining scanner similar to the one you start with except it has a much larger range and pulses much more often. Buy it if you want to find ores better.

These can cut massive lines of rocks and cut off limbs, but have very weak damage output. The default one can destroy a line of up to 7 rocks, while the advanced one can destroy lines of 10. Advanced cutters also use less plasma per shot, fire faster, and deal slightly more damage. They can also function as a fast welder, but using them as such will eat a decent amount of charge.

-Grab a GPS and turn on your suit sensors. The paramedics and [[Chief Medical Officer|CMO]] can see your location and vitals on their crew monitoring console if they're activated, as long as you are on the station. The GPS is useful because if something were to happen to you, your GPS would point them directly to your corpse.