Astro Galaxy - a realistic space exploration game

So I just realized my advance miners getting 51m3 per hour is losing out as they are maxed well before 6 hours with only a 100 m3 cap. I am being told however its suppose to have a 300 m3 cap? But the advance miner shows only 100. This really limits how far to research miners since they cap very easy before it can auto unload.

So I purpose in the research to allow the capacity to increase per tech level. This will make researching higher level miners not pointless. As atm, its kinda broken that a mk lv65 is really not doing me any good from a lower level tech..

[unload] Fill rate 41.56/100 m3
Adv Mining facility Mk LXV   750/750   100%   51 m3/hr

Doesn't take long to hit 100 lol. Auto unload once every 6 hours = losing out on those hours it stays maxed :(

You realize that the specialized mining module has a much higher capacity than the normal and adv mining facility right?

This is however one of the reasons why mining is pretty much a waste of time if you are looking to make money idk why SirEmi never bothered to really address it and instead went around the issue by creating those new mining and harvesting modules with higher caps. Sure they have higher caps but they still don't increase as you upgrade them so you still end up hitting a cap where there is no point in advancing the technology any further.

The other reason of course being that Sol has infinite resources (though the story completely contradicts this) therefore there isn't even any point in bothering to mine for resources since you can just buy them if you need them and if you were looking to sell them you won't really get that much for them. If there was a true player driven economy then that would be a completely different story and I suspect we would have a great deal more conflict over planets and mining rights.

Do the specialized miners mine rare stuff at the speed of 10m3 base or say if its upgraded and said 100m3 / h .. Will they mine at 100% on a rare mineral? I wasn't sure since it says it mines common stuff at 10x the speed. But Yes I now see mining is basically useless. I found a 43mil prospector and was excited.. But its not any help when your mine speed is capped so low! So After I finished mining the 111k Cadmium.. which is down to 90k now lol. I won't really bother much with mining unless Emi addresses this. Atm its a broken system :(

The 'specialized mines/harvesters' can only mine common material.  They cannot mine uncommon or rare substances.  They are good for iron or hydrogen but worthless for gold or radon.

What I would like to see implemented are stations that can unload from the surface modules whenever they are full instead of waiting 6 hours.  My mines can fill 2 or 3 times in that 6 hour schedule.

What the Emperor said  :)

Oh right I forgot the game actually splits things into common, uncommon and rare. Been so long since I actually considered mining as a profession in this game that I didn't think about it much.

Yea I think that would be the best solution probably to just have a module that auto-unloads as soon as it's full, actually now that I think about it that shouldn't be very hard to do really, SirEmi would just have to modify the script for unloading every six hours to unloading whenever a module is full and use the script that turns a mining unit off when it's full to detect when it's full.

The only reason I can think of for SirEmi keeping it as it is now is so that mining maniacs like Sargas doesn't strip mine the whole galaxy in a month lol.

Once I decided to try mining. I build myself plenty of miner and harvester with a capacity of 100m3/hr. I forgot that I had to go there every hour to manually empty each modules to the station. I agree that the system is broken. At that time, I suggested that the capacity of the module should grow with the MK level. Instead we got modules with bigger capacity but that did not mine everything. It is crap.

But the solution that Sargas propose is very good and simple to implement.

Unloading when full is by far the best idea! Actually I thought thats how it worked before I realized it said every 6 hours lol. Sir emi, would you be kind and allow this kind of change to please fix the broken mining we currently have. Autounload when full is perfect idea.

I mean really, what's another couple of hours (lol) added to the small upgrades we are getting now.

and now, this little piece of libel put to rest:


I do NOT 'strip mine'.

I only take the best and leave the rest.

(edit because it is expected and to say - Happy New Year)

Lol well I didn't mean just you, I meant all of the people into mining in the game as a whole. I mean sooner or later you will mine all the valuable resources there are and that will be all you have left lol. Besides, if the game changed and your modules unloaded when full and you have modules that could mine like 400 m3 of material an hour would you really pass up all those planets with smaller deposits of like 300-700- m3 of material? Seems like pretty easy pickings if you ask me, sure they might not be diamonds or anything else worth like $1,000+ per m3 but I still see stacks of material worth 200k or so on planets when I actually bother to look at the surface. If I could mine those out in an hour or two I would probably take it.

Also I have a somewhat related question. Do resources respawn on planets on their own or do they respawn when people accept those SoS missions that are like "Hey we found a Xenon deposit worth 10 mil, will you pay us to tell you the location?". Or to rephrase it, can someone actually start mining those deposits before anybody even finds the SoS mission that points out the deposit?

I have noticed both earth and sky material will regenerate.

When PMI controlled Jupiter, all it had to mine was hydrogen, now look at it (if SSS allows it, of course). Earth itself regenerated both dirt and atmos, as well.

I mined Europa. and once the one mineral got low a New deposit popped up. Same thing happen when this mineral got low.

However SoS prospectors are constantly coming and going. The galaxy SOL would never run out of rare minerals to mine lol. Either new pops up when low then you got the never ending SoS prospectors. When you accept one.. another SoS pops up somewhere. Mining should be allowed to be an occupation and not broken :)

Id also like to add. my one find of Cadmium was 111k deposit worth 43 million. My highest prospector I found was 85 million! But I never accepted due to being new and not realizing how good of a prospector that was. Lots of huge prospectors out there.

we don't like to be rushed...

Yea I would really enjoy mining as a profession it just needs to be improved greatly before I can be bothered. I would love to accept all those prospector missions and what not and then mine up the resources but the mining system is just very clunky and ineffective. I hadn't looked at many of the prospectors and what the value of their finds were, getting up towards the 70-100 mil range is very interesting and makes me want to try mining again but then I remember that there isn't any point in mining more than 100m3 over a 6 hour period because that is all that will fit on it. Finding a deposit of 100k or greater would be awesome but at the same time it would take 250 days to mine out at that rate, of course you could use multiple modules but planetary slots limit your ability to do that as well.

I want it to be good so badly but it's just bleh... SirEmi, plea make mining not a total pain in the arse and make it not take forever.

Lol yea, that is why when I was still mining I color coded the advanced facilities on my spreadsheet so that I could see how high of a level would get me 100m3 per 6 hours depending on the % efficiency of the mineral and the depth it is at. From what I remember (I have since deleted those modules because I felt it wasn't worth the effort) there honestly isn't any point in creating anything higher than like a mk 33 advanced facility because even that will give you 100m3 per 6 hours even when only mining at like 50% efficiency. Seeing as how I've only ever seen like maybe 39% efficiency at the lowest there isn't much point in going beyond that because it just shuts down after it's full and waits for the auto-unload.

I mean seriously, since the game effectively limits you to 100m3 per 6 hours then even if you are mining diamonds your income maxes out at 840,000 solars per day. I can make that much money from 2 refugee pods that I find in like 40 minutes. Don't even talk to me about the less valuable minerals that are far more common. On the other hand if we could just auto-unload when full we could create mining modules that would mine 100m3 in like an hour and if the diamond deposit was big enough would generate 5,040,000 solars per day. That is a lot closer to what I would expect from mining the most valuable mineral in the game. Of course creating such a mining module would probably cost like a million solars or more so it's not like it's super easy cash, plus you have to find the deposits themselves so it would be far from game breaking. I just see no reason for SirEmi not to do this, especially if resources do automatically respawn in new places as they get harvested. It's not like the older players in the game will prevent all the new players from ever mining the good stuff as I orginally suspected might be the reason why he limited it to every 6 hours.

First off, let me say that I agree with most of what's been said here. We really need auto-unload to happen when a module is full. Also, it would be pretty helpful to have auto-unload for ships as well as stations, so a mining ship can park in orbit, auto-unload overnight, and then move on the next day.

I wouldn't mind the capacity of advanced miners going up with further research... although if we implement my idea of doing xp for different tasks, that could be a place for improvement too... for instance, when a mining ship with the appropriate promotion deploys a mining module, that module has a capacity of 110 or 150 instead of 100.

I think an easy fix that wouldn't require any programming changes would be a severe reduction in the QP costs of the pledge mining modules. A Universal Harvester would solve most of the issues, but at 200 QPs per, why would I want to pay 50 million solars for one? To get it up to 40 m3/hour you'd have to pay 1000 QPs. 250 million solars for something that can harvest as quickly as a mk L advanced miner, which I can build for just a few million solars? Please. It might also be a viable strategy to set up some probes and build a more permanent mining base, but again, a 200 QP price tag means those are out of reach for all but like 20 players, and the potential for the module to ever pay for itself is very low.

I DO think that the MOST IMPORTANT change would be to fix auto-unload to happen whenever a module is full, or every 6 hours, whichever happens first. Also to add it to ships. This is really important for the miners of the galaxy... if we want to be able to scale our productivity up with our technology as we grow in the same way that players do with COM ships fighting pirates, this is an absolute must-change.

I agree completely with you guys, and believe me I was a stubborn a$$ when it came to defend my love of mining. But if we have yet to receive the super nova update I feel it may be sometime till Sir Emi can fully revamp and improve the mining mechanic of the game. Still however because I still enjoy the art of mining no matter how many people tell me im a fool  :P I always keep one mining ship just for the pure joy of it.

If I recall right you can unload miners manually if there's a station in orbit. If you have a lot of stations then you could do a lot of unloading now and then. I know this won't solve the problem of miners which don't have stations and the expense of stations themselves. And of course if you have to unload so many miners for so many stations it'll be time consuming.

I'm not even using stations yet. I just used one a long time ago when I was first starting out. Just doing it the old fashioned way right now. So it's kind of hard to understand what everybody is saying here. In my mind, stations would help me a lot. I think ya'll have so much wealth and so many things you don't remember what it's like to play at the bottom :0

I mean, to me 100,000 solars is a lot. A million or two million is a very large haul for me which takes many days. Yet I'm having fun. I imagine if I had much more wealth and research then I might understand hte complaints here.

I do think this game doesn't scale well as players get wealthy. Too many ships/miners/modules/stations to manage. For more wealthy players there needs to be more automatic functions. If the automatic functions are too extensive then players like myself won't have anything to do. The automatic functions need to kick in as more ships/modules/miners/etc are owned.

The problem is that SirEmi never think we could reach so high in tech levels. I remember at around MK 1024 in research lab, it was completely broken. SirEmi fixed it very fast and give me back the RP I had lost. I say this not to complain but only to prove my point. In consequence, the game need adjustment and I am certain SirEmi wish us to help him solve the problems as we find them and make suggestions.

The mining system is not balance right now, but I am sure it will be fixed.

By the way, I mined a 70 millions deposit when they came available, I had 20 MK400 (100m2/hr) and it took me 3-4 days to empty it. I had to visit every hour when I was awake but it is possible.

You're right Mata and Antilak, if you manually unload regularly, you can circumvent these problems. But the reason mining income is lower than COM and SOS income on average is that it is supposed to be PASSIVE income. IE, you should be able to profit from it in the background while you actively pursue other things, like missions. If I have to click through to each of my 13 different mining stations every single hour, I should make at least as much per station as I do on COMs or SOS... otherwise I would have invested those millions of solars on more ships instead of stations and advanced miners.

Agreed, too, that we won't probably see a mining overhaul any time soon. But we don't really need one... all we need is an adjustment to the auto-unload feature, which could easily be included in the final round of patches!

In the meantime, I will be hoping the supernova project never comes to fruition  :12:

Indeed, the whole point of mining is that all of those activities are supposed to happen automatically, we hire personnel for the modules so that they handle the mining and unloading of minerals. There should be no need to manually unload them at all and yet if you wish to mine out a planet in a reasonable time you have to get on like once per hour to unload your mining modules as Mata mentioned. That is just plain unrealistic, you can't expect people to be on that much just so they can mine a deposit that doesn't even make them that much money considering the time and expense they have to invest just to mine the deposit.

As for the last thing you mentioned Antilak, regardless of the automation we want (which is just having the mining modules auto-unload when full rather than every 6 hours as they can now) you would still have a number of things to do. You still have to check your modules to make sure they haven't mined out the deposit and are doing nothing in which case you would change them to mine a different mineral or pick them up and send them somewhere else. Plus you still would have to move around and look for more deposits, in fact if modules could auto-unload when full thus allowing us to mine out deposits much faster that would actually vastly increase the need to go around and look for new deposits. We would spend far more time looking for something to mine rather than waiting for weeks to finish mining something and then moving on if we don't forget that we even have stuff there.

Like I mentioned before if you are using a single module to mine diamonds and are using auto-unload then you max out at 840,000 solars per day, and that is the highest value mineral in the game, and it's the buy price so it's actually less than that even. We have the capability of making modules that could easily mine 100m3 per hour and yet since auto-unload only happens every 6 hours so there is absolutely no point in doing so. The auto-unload feature was made to make mining easier and less demanding and yet it is a feature that really just limits us to either making so little money that it's not worth our time or completely ignoring it and spending our every waking moment on this game just unloading stuff from our modules to our stations just so they can keep mining.

Even if I had 4 modules mining diamonds at 100 m3 per hour I can still make more money by collecting refugees from SoS missions in the fourth ring. So even actively unloading modules manually isn't going to make you that much money, it's more worth your time to do the SoS and COM missions while you are logged in. The only way to make mining an effective form of income that can compete with the SoS and COM missions is to remove the 100 m3 per 6 hours restraint on mining while logged out. It can be done either by making auto-unload happen every time the module is full or by increasing the capacity of the mining modules from 100 m3 to something like 1,000 m3. Considering SirEmi created new modules with higher capacities but left the old ones the same I'm inclined to believe that he isn't going to increase their capacity so I'd rather see him just make auto-unload work when the modules are full.