Your one-stop shop for all your Star Citizen mining knowledge.
If you're in scanning mode and use the mouse wheel, it will "zoom" the scan. x1 is 360° (aka all around you), x2 is 180° (so everything in front of you), x4 is 90° (cone) and from there on out you can basically see the covered area on your hud. the higher the "zoom", the farther it will go. I'd usually recommend scanning at x2 or x4 if you wanna go in one direction.
Scanning in an asteroid field is a bit different: the scanner pings go a lot farther as they don't have to travel over "useless" terrain. When you get closer to the target, you should keep spamming the ping. at x2 or x4 you with 50% scan you get around 8-10k range and then when the target gets closer you can reduce the charge even more and spam even faster. This way you'll always have overlapping boxes and make sure you are actually getting closer to your target and don't lose it.
IF however you lose it anway, that's an oddity in the scan system as it will try to "combine" multiple seperate clusters of minables by putting the cube in the middle of them - in which case it's possible there aren't any minables in the area of the cube itself. So if the cube suddenly jumps by quite a lot, it usually means you have multiple different deposits near you. I usually stop the ship and then either spam a x2 scan in different directions or just do a 50-70% x1 scan which should pick up anything nearby.
Also be vigilant as sometimes you happen to randomly fly by one of the deposits and it'll just show up only as a small rock icon on the side of your screen.
For visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp7C84llrEA
Thanks to Mojiko for the video!
Turn on your ship / engines at P.O. and lift off, turning towards the end with the solar panel wings of the station which always points towards Yela
Wait for the nice lady to tell you "Systems On"
Press B to spool and calibrate to Yela without using the star map
Initiate Quantum Drive by holding B
After you've arrived, spool again and look for an Orbital Marker (OM-#) to the left/top of you
Jump to it, then spool again and calibrate towards Crusader or the Comm-Array next to it
Initiate the jump and count to 5, then cancel the jump by holding B again or using I to kill the engines
You should now be in the middle of the belt
If you continue in the general direction of Crusader, you should be able to very quickly jump back to Port Olisar (just left below the planet) after your cargo is full
Negative
When mining Quantainium you can lose up to roughly 75% of your cargo after the run. Your ship will just show a vastly reduced SCU amount rather than 32 (or 96 with the mole).
Negative
30k errors. Welp.
Positive / Negative
You sometimes have much higher (or lower) percentage of Quantainium than you should have.
Higher often happens if the first chunk(s) you pick up is/are 100% Quantanium, lower often happens if you pick up other materials first.
Positive
You can sometimes sell your cargo multiple times at the terminal. Often happens together with the bug 1) and is possibly related.
Negative (has workaround)
Some rocks can't be scanned or mined even though they show as scannable / minable.
New Workaround: Initiate a quantum jump to any nearby location and immediately cancel it in order to make the rocks scannable again.
Negative
Asteroids can vanish. Haven't experienced this around Yela but others tell me it's a thing.
Negative
Scanner is bugged sometimes and the ping doesn't go off, although cooldown is still on.
Workaround: Press left mouse button to try to reset.
Neutral/Negative
Sometimes when you return to sell and then go on another mining run, the ship will still think there's volatile cargo loaded. This might result in the jettison warning lights going on at some point. If you haven't loaded any other mineral yet, it's safe to just jettison (possibly multiple times), otherwise your ship might explode at some point. If you already do have cargo loaded and none of it is Quantainium, you should be safe, even if the warning lights go into the red at some point. (No guarantees though! :))
Get a Helix laser if you don't already have one
- Just do it. Trust me.
Quantainium
- Realize that it's pretty much only worth going for rocks containing Q with some rare exceptions for Laranite (or Agricium / Taranite if those exist at the place you're mining). Borase and Bexalite and everything below Agricium usually break into terrible chunks that aren't worth picking up.
- Always break all rocks first before you actually extract the first bit of Q. You'll have much more time to fly back to base. Also if you start with 100% chunks you might trigger the positive part of bug 3).
Handmining isn't worth it if you have a Helix
- Getting out of the ship and using your time on some measly chunks of rocks is just way below the average profit over time for Q or even Laranite/Agricium
I've never come across a rock I couldn't break with a Helix
- Some rocks are quite stubborn but if you fly in pretty much touching distance (the laser loses energy over distance) and then pan the laser (or strafe your ship) to slowly "paint" the rock will result in the rock energy level going up, if ever so slowly. Try to see which spot works best and laser over it a couple of times.
- If you're doing a "nose touch operation": always, always strafe backwards from the rock before the fracturing sensor reaches 100%, even if there's no overcharge.
- You can get a bit more power on the front shields when pressing numpad 8 up to three times (I recommend once or twice). This way you're better protected if things actually do blow up.
The scanner is shit
- You can learn to fly "on sight" but it only works well on planet and moon surfaces
- See Tips for scanning above
Pick a point of reference
- Pick a point of reference for orientation and generally try to fly in that direction. E.g. the planet Crusader when in the Yela belt. Or the rings when on Yela surface.
- After scanning or mining a rock or rock cluster, turn towards your point of reference again. This way it's easy to avoid wasting time by flying to already scanned minables.
The amount of Quantainium seems to vary strongly in the Yela belt. At first I thought it's server dependant but now I think there might be some "zones" inside the belt.
So far experienced: Good zones are when you can find Laranite too.
Bad zones when you mostly find Corundum and Gold.
It seems to depend on Yela's rotation. There's a possibility that it's better, the farther away from GrimHex you are which rotates around the moon together with the asteroids.
If you have your own observations on this, let me know by @-ing Montis in the cargo-and-mining channel on the official SC discord.
See here for a list of all minerals and what they're worth along with some comparative figures. Mined ore prices are the same everywhere, no matter where you sell.
The same list is also present in my spreadsheet below but copy/pastable instead of being a static image.
In case you're wondering how much dough you can rake in with mining if you do it right (or at least half-decently), let me point you towards my list of mining runs with my own Prospector:
Feel free to copy the sheet and adapt it for your purposes :)
Some explanations:
Timer is started when I spawn the ship or start walking towards the ship from the terminals in case the ship is already spawned
Timer is stopped when I sell the minerals at the refinery terminal
All percentages are the percentages that are listed when selling at the refinery terminal i.e. they are relative to the amount of SCU present in the ship
If you have any questions, see the footer on how to contact me
activate scanning mode with tab, then hold left click to scan a specific object / rock and hold right click to charge up the ping - ping can be released earlier for lower range but faster recharge pings
asteroids are more normalized and are usually between 4.5k and 5.5k mass while rocks on surfaces fluctuate from 2k to 8k
this section is even more WIP than the others, don't @ me
Quantainium is an unstable and volatile material that can make your ship explode. The following are rough times for each stage after pickup up for first chunk of Quantanium (which is why you want to split all rocks first, then pick up the Quantainium all at once):
Some of these times might not be accurate as I haven't done thorough testing on them myself!
Stage 1 (no indicator): ~8 minutes 30 seconds
Stage 2 (slow yellow alarm): ~5 minutes
Stage 3 (faster orange alarm): ~2 minutes and 30 seconds
Stage 4 (fast red alarm): ~10 seconds
Stage 5: you dead
So all in all you have roughly 16 minutes to get rid of your Quantainium or to store your ship as soon as you pick up a chunk. Storing your ship seems to halt the Quantainium deterioration.
Also keep in mind these times are somewhat arbitrary as they depend on multiple factor. E.g. bumping against a rock or having a rock explode in front of you can shake up the Q and cause a faster explosion. Just be careful out there, will ya? :)