Topic: Mining on alpha - no future?
Dear community, dear DEV team,
As mentioned in some other topics and on the test server forum, the problem with depletable ore fields slowly starts to rise over the alphas. Not even a week after the gamma patch, the issue already taking its place, and will get much worse in the future:
Ore field fragmentation. Today I randomly tracked two different ore fields with a directional scanner charge on Shinjalar. My accuracy is above 100%. In both cases the scanner led me to a field with only ONE BLACK tile. I returned back with some mining lasers, mined it out (1.5k stermonit in first case) and the scanner traced for the next field.
That will get even worse, when you look in the future. Mining on alpha will become only viable for big corps where someone is scanning and once found a reasonable field, a mining op will melt it down in no time. Casual miner which would like to mine for an hour or two in the evening, will have no chance.
And then there for sure will be people/corps that leave the field with only one tile, just to let others bump into empty fields.
A self defragmentation mechanic needs to be setup, when we dont want to loose mining as a complete profession on alphas.