Some Mining-Related Feedback/Suggestions

[Hecter94]

I recently finished a mining-focused run, stretching from the beginning of the game to the end of FW. I have minimal experience with mining gameplay even before the recent rebalance, so consider this the perspective of a player new to the mechanic.
My ship progression was as follows:
Sparrow -> Fury -> Sunder -> Argosy -> Bastion -> Behemoth -> Bactrian.

I had a hard time getting started with mining. Initially, I couldn't afford any mining equipment and didn't know where to find valuable ores, so I mainly mined low-value ores like silicon or iron. I had to collect the flotsam manually and then sell only 15t at a time, barely covering my mortgage expenses. This early stage of the game was quite a slog and not very enjoyable.

However, after paying off my loan and acquiring some mining-related equipment, such as an asteroid scanner, a cargo expansion, and a few mining lasers, I found mining extremely profitable. With my Fury, I was making around $300,000 per trip, and with my Behemoth, I was making around $3,000,000. Mining proved far more profitable than straight trading or running jobs and missions.

Strangely, I never needed more than a single tractor beam, from the tiny Sunder to the massive Bactrian. Even with a full complement of nine mining lasers, one tractor beam was sufficient to cover all of them.

Mining seemed like a very safe method of generating income since I could bribe pirates and stay safely in dangerous systems for as long as necessary to mine a full cargo hold.

However, it was also very static since I was always mining in Orbana and selling in Tania Australis. I never found a reason to mine or sell anywhere else. This was unlike doing jobs or running trade routes which encourage you to move around the galaxy, finding the best trade routes, or going wherever the job board takes you.

Some things that I think would improve it:

• I think the mining lasers could use some more range. They are not very effective as weapons, so extending their range would not make them overpowered. However, their current range is so short that you can't even get all of your mining lasers to focus on a single asteroid on certain ships with widely spaced hardpoints. Even with smaller, agile ships, getting into the right range to use the mining lasers effectively can be challenging.

• I also found it odd that the mining laser turret was only a single laser. It would be better as a dual laser turret. That does take away some of its ability to function on very small ships but allows it to scale better onto large ships and helps ships with a lot of weapon space use more of it on mining lasers.

• There should be some method of pushing the player to change where they are mining/selling. Could minable asteroids take random amounts of time to respawn? Or could repeatedly selling ore at the same location decrease its price, similar to commodities?

• In a similar vein, mining-related jobs would be neat, such as "source x units of ore and deliver them to y" or "Protect NPC ships while they mine in y," The tutorial did tutorialize a "mine x ore and deliver to y." mission, so it was odd that it never came up again.

• Currently, less valuable minables tend to break apart into more pieces of flotsam than more valuable minables. Could we reverse this relationship? Having cheap minables break apart into one or two pieces of flotsam would make them much easier to collect manually, reducing some of the early game slog that you need to go through in a mining-focused playthrough while having more valuable minables break apart into large groups of flotsam would incentivize adding more tractor beams as you start upgrading your ships and start venturing out further into unsafe territory while hunting for valuable minables. For example, silicon might break apart into 1-2 chunks of 5-10 silicon, whereas Platinum might break apart into five chunks of 1 platinum.

[MasterOfGrey]

Could we reverse this relationship? Having cheap minables break apart into one or two pieces of flotsam would make them much easier to collect manually, reducing some of the early game slog that you need to go through in a mining-focused playthrough while having more valuable minables break apart into large groups of flotsam would incentivize adding more tractor beams as you start upgrading your ships and start venturing out further into unsafe territory while hunting for valuable minables. For example, silicon might break apart into 1-2 chunks of 5-10 silicon, whereas Platinum might break apart into five chunks of 1 platinum.

This feels like the most valuable/actionable insight here I'd say. Sounds like it'd be a good gameplay change for an extremely minimal effort.