Guide to Mining: Difference between revisions

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.

Instead, what miners are really after are valuable and rare ore deposits. These are often hidden deep in the lavaland'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.

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.

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.

On many occasions you may find yourself at brown or worse health and no hivelords in sight. At this point your movement speed has decreased dramatically. This would be the time to call for a mining medic, or if you are a mining medic, to patch yourself up. Sometimes there are no mining medics, however, or they're all dead and they wouldn't have been of any use anyways. In these situations, there are a few options you may take to recover your health and not have to go all the way back to medbay for a doctor to spend five minutes trying to patch you up.

The second, less powerful, less time-efficient, but more team-oriented option is to drag yourself back to the nearest mining station (the northern station if you are in the north, or the southwestern station if you are in the south, or the main mining station if you are close to that one) and eat something. All of the mining stations are equipped with food items. Donk pockets are available in the secondary stations, and a full vending machine plus donk pockets is available in the main station. Eating, especially if you are hungry (which is indicated by a burger icon on the right end of the screen and a yellow or brown tab above it), heals you a bit because of the small amount of nutriment in food. It will not fully heal you by any means, but it can turn your health from brown to a pale green, or from red to a darker yellow. This option does not cut into the medical supplies of the other miners, too, so team players will prefer to do this.

Remember to put a donk pocket in the microwave and heat it up to increase the healing value. Do not add more than one at a time.

And, lastly, of course, you can simply keep digging in the hopes of finding a hivelord that you can murder and eat its heart out. This will fully replenish your health and hunger, but it is risky as you could run into many other kinds of monsters instead. Do note that you cannot kill a hivelord and carry its heart in your inventory for just when you need it - the heart will expire and go bad quickly, leaving you with nothing. It is better to use it as soon as you can.

 

Resonators do create little energy bubbles when you swing them, and said bubbles last for a few seconds before popping. When they pop, they deal a little bit of damage. It is possible to kill goliaths by luring them into the bubbles, but it is a feat of timing and patience that I do not personally care for as the bubbles last far too long to be practical in battle, unless you are just brawling it out with a basilisk or hivelord.

This, this is how you kill Goliaths solo and without taking damage. It has a range of two tiles in any direction, and it can destroy tiles of rock just like the resonator can, but it is much slower at doing so. It deals heavy damage per hit, but it takes around eight to bring down a goliath. It does not deal much damage at all in an area with an atmosphere, it is only practical in the vacuum of space. It does not have a limited amount of ammunition, the only limitation is that you must cock it each time you fire. If you master this weapon, you will be able to bring down ten or more goliaths in a single shift without healing. I have done so (record is ten goliaths in a row without heals, with an eleventh goliath killed after healing). To fire it at things adjacent to you, you must click past the thing you're trying to hit, or else it won't fire. It is less efficient in a fight against basilisks and hivelords than melee weaponry. Keep your pickaxe near, it will suffice for those.

=== Mining Drone ===

These are straight upgrades of the pickaxe, greatly reducing the time it takes to dig through a single tile of rock in order from most time to least time spent digging. Mining drills and diamond drills require rare ores, so it is in your interests to deliver them to science so that they'll have the materials to make such things. Sonic Jackhammers can be purchased from mining vendor machines for 500 points and they are superior to standard mining drills but still inferior to diamond drills in terms of how quickly they dig. All of these deal the same amount of damage as a pickaxe. With a diamond drill, digging is almost instantaneous. You have a chance of finding sonic jackhammers and diamond drills laying in randomized rooms on the asteroid by a corpse, usually with an oxygen tank nearby as well to prove that they were once miners. There will be more on artifacts later.

Now that you've killed a goliath, you can take their hide plates and put them on your armor. This increases your brute damage reduction by 10% each time and your helmet and your hardsuit can each be upgraded five times.

The profession is somewhat limited by the quality of its earnings with mining points and the time limit on shifts. Some shifts don't even last thirty minutes, not even enough time to fill up a single mining satchel (~1000 points). Blob shifts in particular are egregious for this. It's not bad, but it's not as good as it could be.