Mining Guide: So you wanna do a phoron bounty in 30 minues: a guide.

[CourierBravo]

This guide is can be useful as a starters guide to mining, but this is intended as a supplement to the wiki or someone teaching you. This specifically goes over my own methods, but is also an open thread for other people to talk about theirs. Your best results are going to be on higher pop hours, which is from about 2pm PST to 8pm PST, as thats when the science mains are around.

Roundstart: what do
First things first, pick the drill technician alt title if you haven't done that already. It gives you a free drill dropper and some tools, which is invaluable and key to this. Also, if you use the duffle bag, ditch it. The space really isn't needed. Now you can spawn in, head down to your mining cave and get your gear sorted. Set up your suit, grab the beacons under the suit, and grab from the locker: the Kinetic Accelerator (KA for short), GPS, Ore Detector, and the ore bag. Put everything in your backpack. You wont be going too far away from the mining airlock at first, so you dont need to take the pickaxe, but if you like the comfort of having a good melee weapon, take it and put it on your belt slot.

Drills Tending: How to do it at first
How many drills should someone have? The answer normally is "however many you can reasonably tend to without massive downtime." For this strat, the answer is 4. You will only need to use two droppers. If there's other drill tecks, just ask if you can tend theirs for them, usually they just want to go shaft mine anyways. Now, for placements. I haven't empirically tested it, but from limited trial and error, I've found that spacing out the drill heads 8 apart works best. 6 spaces between them. You should be able to stand in the place where a drill head is, and be able to see the other drill head at the edge of the screen.
You can reasonably fit 4 drills in the big space south of mining, just dig out the rock usually present at the top of the open space, and you'll be fine.

The Strat: Part one
Clear an area in the south for four drills, plan out beacons for them. When drills are done, just push them south 7 blocks and start them again. I recommend doing three rows of beacons. Get them set to start drilling like normal. After a little practice, you should be able to get all your gear, cycled out, and drills set up by minute 5 of the round. Grab a box, theres spare boxes next to the mine cart tracks. Go strip mining for 10 minutes, and set your Ore Detector to Phoron Only. I cannot stress that enough, I swear to god I find and collect more ore than if I turn on a bunch of ores to detect. After 10 minutes, walk back and empty the content of the drills into the box. Go mine for another couple minutes until the mineral field depletes. Move them down the column to the second row of beacons. Now take yourself to the airlock and cycle back in, you should have enough points to buy everything you need for Part 2.

Intermission: Smelting, Gear, and Science.
So, you're back inside. Run over and grab the label maker, then put your ore box on the right hand side of the unloading belt. Label it "teleporter crate: do not move." While its unloading, set up the smelter. Just set it up normally, except dont alloy platinum. Theres no good reason to make plasteel, it just makes things more complicated; and looses credits for the quartermaster to dick around with.
What to buy? Buy 3 ore bags, 5 Item Warp Packs, 1 Item Warp Beacon, 1 Explorers Belt, 1 Orbital Drill Dropper, and 1 Ore Summoner. If you have the points and want the close quarters weapon, grab a diamond pick as well.
To move to the next step we need everything smelted and processed, so go ahead and set up the item warp packs and beacon, and put all your new items into the belt.
Science time. Take all the materials, and eject any non full stacks. Pull out the platinum/tritium and slap it into a corner for the cargo techs to handle. Go to science, and divide the materials evenly between R&D and Robotics. Or just hand them all to R&D and let them sort it out. While there, ask for a custom KA to be made. It should be around minute 20-25 so if science is using the current meta for research or doing it by hand, they should have enough unlocks by now.
The KA: Ask for a Vented Frame, Meteor Core, Kinetic Cell, and Firedelay Upgrade. This KA is amazing, its basically the one you spawn with, but it holds 40 shots and pumping it once gives it 40 shots. I'll credit the player who told me about that KA here if they choose to come forward. What if they cant/wont make it or theres no science? Just run with the KA you got at round start, its really good as is, but expect closer to about 80 phoron per hour.

The Strat: Part Two and Actually making 100-200 Phoron per hour.
Now that you have your new gear, and your KA, head back out. Drop the drills from your new dropper, and set them up. Also, before turning them on, attach the ore bags that you got with the warp packs! You can attach the ore bag to the drill, and it will teleport any ore it digs up to the crate so its automatically processed. Do the same for your first two, and start them up again because they will have filled up. All of the ore it filled up with while you were inside will be teleported to the crate.
Now, head up to the upper level, set a 20 minute timer, and get to work strip mining! The one ore bag with a warp pack in it left should go in your other pocket, so your pockets should have a bag and a ore detector. Keeping it in the pocket will let it auto collect ore you walk over. Still keep your ore detector to phoron crystals only, and just spam your new KA all over. Occasionally pause though, sometimes the ore detector wont update if you're moving too fast and you'll miss phoron. Utilize the Ore Summoner to make collecting large amounts of ore on the ground way quicker.
Once the 20 minutes is up, go tend to your drills, rinse and repeat.



This is what I managed in one round by myself, mining for the whole round. Do post your feedback and mining yields! I'd love to be able to change my strat and get bigger numbers.

The above will be edited over time, this is not the final draft.

Edited January 6, 2022 by Bejewledpot
Changing wording/grammer

[KingOfThePing]

Just so you know, the big space South of mining is the Skipjack landing site. So if you use that, it can happen that your drills get crushed. 

 

As for drill placement - use the deep ore scanner to detect what tiles have good stuff in it to drill out. But I found it all more or less the same, except maybe the odd one out super rich tile. But those are random, I think 

[Tristan63]

One thing I like to do is make sure you have an aid kit of any type in your bag, in addition to some tape. You can also fit a hatchet in an engineering belt for self defense if needed, in addition to the sweet tools you might use to break in to places. In that belt you can also fit a station bound radio, incase telecommunications ever loses power you will have the ability to communicate with your peers, or if you're going on an away mission. Great guide!

Edited January 8, 2022 by Tristan63
adding a compliment

[CourierBravo]

On 07/01/2022 at 01:29, KingOfThePing said:

Just so you know, the big space South of mining is the Skipjack landing site. So if you use that, it can happen that your drills get crushed. 

 

As for drill placement - use the deep ore scanner to detect what tiles have good stuff in it to drill out. But I found it all more or less the same, except maybe the odd one out super rich tile. But those are random, I think 

1. fuck them kids that is true, it is a site that the raiders can land at. But I've put a LOT of time into both mining and raiders, and i've never had issues. thats not a guarantee someone else wont.

2. Unless it got buffed, its only a 1x1 area, so its largely useless since its way faster and more efficient to do a volume approach to mining drills instead of a handful of good placements. Unless you're like, full drill tending the whole time, then i can see it being useful.