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More orefields would be nice. All the "Asteroid" navs should have orefeilds. VC has plenty of belters, who happen to be miner mobs, but nothing for explorers to mine. It shouldn't go to the extreme of roidballs, but ultimately a miner should have just as much work as a warrior. BBW and Paramis could use some love in the orefield department. Might be nice to have Menorb open again, there were some mid level orefields there when it was last opened.
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Well, the tale is that grail water for example, is hard to find.

Not sure what the field mechanics are now so this is speculation - if a miner cherry picks the IX ores then the field won't replenish those ores until the field is cleared and may be this explains why grail water is hard to find.
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I seen that the ore field's that I have mined long ago are smaller now and the response is slow.
But that just make's me warp around and find more and try to find hidden belts.

At least we have ore now .... back in ST1 ore was lets just say hmmmmm ........

I think that a few more large "Hidden" belt's should be placed in a few systems for the "low Level" players so they can "enjoy" the game better .

Also I did find a few hidden nav's due to CTDing and that was fun.

On the side note I think we need a few game wide events to spice up the game . like a few lvl 50 mobs attacking Net-7 .

I know the Devs and GM's has there hands full now .. and they are doing an awesome job.
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I notice two big differences in ore fields in the current version vs live. I include only a few examples that I have run across that appeared very apparent to me:

1) Ore is not very diverse nor very plentiful
* almost all of the ore fields/gas fields in live had a diversity of asteroid types (not just 4 of one type, then 5 of another, then 4 of another.....the different types were mixed together) and had a decent supply. This meant that if you really wanted to clear a field you needed to have plenty of space in your hold as you were gonna pull a lot of ore (gas fields were not often mixed with ore fields). It would generally take my max level JE a good 10-20 minutes to clear a field barring mobs or competition. Except for the current gas fields in Glenn it appears that all the ore fields I run across can be cleared by a single miner in about 5-10 minutes. Generally if a miner couldn't find an ore they needed they could clear a field, head to another, clear it, head to another. By the time they cleared the 3rd field the first one was popping back up with new 'roids. Currently I can clear three fields in less than 30 minutes (only level 113) and not see any ore re-spawns there for quite a while

2) lots of missing ore fields (just listing a few of the ones that I loved to mine in live)
* Zweinhander had some huge 'hidden' level 6-9 fields south of the TE station and circling below the planet
* Swooping eagle and Xipe totec had a ton of ore (level 4-6 and 5-9) all over the place. Most of the Xipe stuff was beyond the 'line' and with the walking space ghosts and other high level mobs it was a challenge to mine.....but a ton of fun especially with the reactor drain areas out there. SE's fields were all around nav points throughout the sector. Right now they just appear to be a few south of the xipe gate and a few north of the glenn gate.
* Freya had a large chunk of level 4-6 ore fields south east of Akeron's Gate and a few other decent fields scattered around the sector. Right now it feels empty with so little ore.
* VT had some great ore fields along the navs close to the sun. Level 7-9 and many of the rarer ore types could be found here. Lowbies would have a tough time with their shields burning off and the sun divers but it was a fun place to mine especially if you had a skill that protected against the solar radiation.
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Freya: freya field 1,2,3 were just that..fields of ore, 3 was primarily gas, with mobs also spawning there..2 had the mist runners 10-12, 1 had some runners and abrax types 8-12, 3 had gas bags 21-25 (I think that was the range), brising area had ores and 25-28 gas bags in pairs. Folkvang area had NO ores but fields of zen drones. Falk had a small amount of ores west of it..but VAST amounts of ore progressivly higher in level going east continuing past niff navs. The hidden asteroid navs in east freya had medium ore field extending a little ways out from that circle, the ore was 7-9 radioactives. The hidden asteroid navs in middle freya had mid-lvl ore/gases in clumps throughout.

Cooper: all the southern navs had ore 6-8 around them, with an additional hidden field south of that with 7-9, these 2 bands extended from the tengu navs to just shy of the moon in the southeast. The moon just south of cooper had a VAST field starting just east of the ring navs and extending almost to the eastern ring navs, these were primarily 6-8 with a sprinkling of 9 throughout. Just north of the southeast moon were gas fields extending to near the wreck in the north east, these were 5-8, the wreck had 2 fields..one at the wreck extending a bit south was 7-8 and the one north of the wreck extending to eastern ring navs was 6-9 with a sprinkling of 9 throughout both. A note: the vast southern fields lvl 9 ores were predominately weapon ores (baldarium, asmo, grail etc)

Grissom: all the field navs had ores and gases (along with mobs :() as did nav path ends. 6-8 with a rare 9 now and then. (side note, the center nav had a ammo vendor circling around it in a ship, he sold most of the same ores OMP did and you could sell your vendor loot to him), Grisson planet had a small amount of ores in the storm eyes 6-8 and VAST gas fields along the navs increasing in lvl 4-8 to the research station with a smattering of 9s a bit past it.

Sheppard: all the resource navs had ores, as did all trail navs. Geezer rock had a few L9 ores (as well as a deadly body snatcher type), the navs in upper west had ores about thyem put pax swiftstar had 0 ores..it had MASSES of L20 scuttle bugs all around it. All the even numbered center navs had ores around them..a smattering of L9 spawned through all of them. The southwest field navs up to just north of lucre nav had RD throughout, with a destroyable RD repair station (it had a grav well around it)

I remember SO many more spots, I was a rock cruncher extrodinaire :unsure: needless to say the current ore offerings and spawns are paltry in comparison.
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Missing ruined hulks in ore fields. Near enough every ore field should have at least one ruined hulk.

Arduinne gas planet has L5-6 gases while they should be mainly L7 with the occasional L6 and L8. Also, with the field clear bonus and thus no constant gas cloud respawning arduinne has no real potential for group mining.
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The Asteroid Navs behind Arduinne Planet had some nice fields in live. Arduinne Asteroid AA710 has a bunch of CL43 Strand Leeches but no field to clear the other navs also have nothing to mine. Just a little thing that says L9 Gasses that had 1 L2 Helium in it.
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  • 4 weeks later...
Over all there seems to be a shortage of lvl9 roids, i've spend almost a week to get 10 thotium/grail water until i started mining pop rocks.
There seems to be plenty lvl9 chrystals but specially lvl9 radoiactives are hard to find.

Also i notice that appolonite is lacking some for a mineral that is used in ammo comps, eg i get a stack of dischordite and only ~100 or so apollonite even if i mainly mine the higher level(7&8) radoiactive's

And some asteroids still spawn way above or below the upper or lower bounderies, you never can warp to them and end up "bouncing" around for some time, ending up 6km or further from the target.
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I don't think grail water is ultra-rare. But you do have to mine near some nasty 50+ mobs. And you do have to find the systems where it occurs.

One thing that needs work on is the presence of mobs with higher level ores. There are many 7-9 fields totally unguarded. That includes gas fields. I like the way Endriago is done with some viscious mixed mobs of various factions and types throughout the fields. High reward should have high risk.

Roc, Glorys Orbit, Antares, VC, KV, BBW should have more fields.
Inverness Planet used to be full of gas fields.
Perhaps some of the less visited systems off the beaten track should get a couple of nice hidden fields and hulks - Nebiros, Neptune, Ceres, Nostrand Vor, Ard Planet, Glorys Orbit, Planet Ishuan (all at the end of map routes).

I like the idea of occasional hulks scattered through more fields. Once you have found a few hulk fields you tend to farm them. There is more scope to add rare drops to hulks.

Thank you for the great improvements this year - I had a break of 15mths and returned to find a much better game for explorers.
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Ceres has some hidden fields (6-7 if im not mistaken), GO has lvl6 hulks near rd outpost and has a 7-9 mixed crystal/hydro ring off the beaten path and is all in all pretty filled up.

In my opinion one of the best high level field design's is the field in legato, gav well and lots of 40-50 guards with the odd 60 sprinkeled in. Thats how a 8/9 field should be, not like in nif where you see lvl 25 toons chewing away at the lvl9 rocks without any worries at all(plz make einherer red again).
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Arduinne Planet had some nice gas clouds in live, restoring that would be nice.

I do think that most high level fields should have guardians, but in designing the guardians, and the equipment choices of explorers, it must be acknowledged that the people who will end up fighting these mobs will be mostly explorers. The warrior protecting explorer model doesn't really work, it's not beneficial XP wise to either class, and if it's a well hidden orefield, the explorer might not want to reveal it's location.

It should be checked and seen if you have two chars both OL145, with CL50, EL45, and TL50. One is a PW doing combat somewhere to fill those bars with spillover, the other is a JE mining level apropriate ores. Which one will reach EL50 first? IMO in such a situation it should be the JE, but I suspect that the PW will do so.

If this is correct then mining XP needs to be addressed, spillover should not further be reduced. IMO 50% is already too low.
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Why not make actual use of the "explorer" classes, so they actually can be halfproud of their names.

1. Remove static fields., excepr for certain places that should have them like Arduinne gas planet (name?)
2. Add asteroidspawning at any possible coordinate, either as fields or singels
3. Give PS some kind of warping skill or similar to equal things out (JE and TS already have theirs).
4. Bring back some of the oldschool miningprojects.
5. last but not least, BRING BACK POPROID MOBS
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I really like that idea of random spawning fields. I do think that would be a great thing if it's doable, I think hulk fields should be that way as well, but they should be very rare and on long respawn timers. A mix between fixed and random would be great, and the random ones could tend to be more lucrative compared to fixed fields of the same level. Is it possible to do that, while still having them guarded apropriately? Can the guardians be set to spawn where the field spawns, even though the field won't respawn in the same place next time?

Even if it can't be done that way is a "scaled down" version possible? Where there are locations that a field can spawn, but those locations are greater than the number of fields that will be in game, and they can spawn at any of those spots? There would have to be plenty of those spots, since we don't want miners to be without work.

Also please remember when doing the orefields and balancing the economy, that most ores mined by serious miners will not be sold to other players, but to vendors, since we don't have room for all the ores we mine, nor should we.

Oldschool mining projects would be great, I loved the MCP in live, gave my JE purpose as a miner, and rewarded him apropriately to his effort. Would be nice to have a few to choose from.

Pop-rock mobs would be nice, would be even better if they have interesting loot tables.
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It think the random fields are a great idea. I'm not sure how easy it would be to generate good random locations for such fields on the fly, but the data should be there. When a random field is cleared, a random generator could be triggered which generates random locations in a number of predetermined sectors (most sectors open to all should be considered...), and the field is spawned at the first location that is at least 40 k (+ the radius of the field) from any nav point and other ore fields. There think there could be at least a dozen such fields floating around without it overcrowding the galaxy.
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  • 2 months later...
1) pop rocks that have a decent loot table for the type of mob would be nice. example the stone parasites that spawn now....do they actually drop anything of use? incentive to go clear fields and kill the mobs.

2) I will ad agreement to the fact that we need more ore in the game. Its not really viable to level off of currently IMO. Inverness was stripped of the gas that most beginner miners would use to level with, the only real spot now to mine for leveling purposes is glenn.

3) fixing the warp bug where you don't land near the target would be nice. Having the rocks not close enough to mine and having to warp to each rock to try and make time efficient is a turn off when your ship breaks while trying to warp and lands to far away.

4) There were hidden fields but they were removed... i liked a lot of what Merlin did(no clue why it was changed)

5) find some way to balance group xp from mining. there is no real incentive to group with warriors and miners currently. the explore gains for the warriors doesn't match the time of staying in a group with miners.

6) Hulks aren't bad; but if they are gonna have such a long spawn rate why do we have a seldom spawn decent stuff rate? either have hulks spawn faster with the current random seldom drop good stuff, or up the spawn rate of good stuff if you keep hulk spawn timers the way they are. IMO...its not a good incentive to clear a field that will respawn hours and hours later to let someone else cherry pick your work.

7) suggestion: seperate longer individual rock spawn if field isn't cleared; and a bonus faster respawn if the field is cleared.

8) some say that the ore fields in live were more random with lots more stuff in them, the downside is you have to mine and space more stuff to clear fields, the upside is if you are mining to collect specific ores for missions or personal use having the less ore types and more of it makes sense. Takes more effort to find your ore but when you find it you will get more of it.

9) the mission ores need priority for spawn rate. especially if they are getting cherry picked and another person following later won't get any.

10) Maby give explorers a new level 150 quest. Kill x type of pop rock monster x multiple times? even have 3 different kinds for x times?

11) spawn rate of mobs is tricky.....to fast and it hurts solo mining efforts to clear; yet not fast enough the idea of warriors being grouped is lost. The vindi shipyard spawnrate is way to fast. i duel boxed my pw and there was no down time to even try and mine.

12) suggestion: make a high level mining field with chavez as the guardians so that you can faction work while mining . That to me would be a good idea.
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  • 4 months later...
My suggestion here would be to ditch the field clearing bonus and have the fields respawn over time like they did in live. Id also add some sort of code that despawns cherry picked roids after 5-10 mins so that they dont stop other rocks from spawning.

More hidden fields would be nice, we are explorers after all :)

Pop rocks in live were there just to kill macro miners so id leave those to just spawning even CL mobs.
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[quote name='Paul' timestamp='1331807951' post='55547']
My suggestion here would be to ditch the field clearing bonus and have the fields respawn over time like they did in live. Id also add some sort of code that despawns cherry picked roids after 5-10 mins so that they dont stop other rocks from spawning.
[/quote]

All this has been in place and working for months (probably over a year now) :) Except the bit for ditching the field bonus, which I think a lot of people like.

What happens is that the roids will respawn over time as soon as you start mining them. The bonus doesn't interfere with respawning in any way; you only get the bonus if the field is completely cleared before any roids start respawning (like they did in live).

Cherry picked roids cause the whole field to respawn after a set time (like they did in live).
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Thanks for the info Tienbau. The live respawn was per "cherry picked" roid, at about 5 minutes. As in 5 minutes after the unethical miner picked the roid. So by the asteroid and not the field. Also as an FYI, the gas fields in Glenn have gotten a bit slower to regenerate recently. I can clear everything in sight there within a few minutes.

Further, a lot of the off the beaten path mining areas that appeared later in live with the odd nav/roid names, have yet to be populated with anything useful. Is anyone working in that direction? Would you guys like a hand with it and possibly some sector development?

Thanks!
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I like the bit about making all the ores useful for something. Perhaps even to the extent that you can use them to 'replace' other ores in recipies maybe, for a slightly different set of buff effects.

I'm not sure about the fusion bit though; level 9 ores are supposed to be rare. I don't know though - maybe fusion for a parallel tier ore, or maybe have the count required for a higher level ore as prohibitively high for anything other than a desperate inability to find that ore.

One thing I have noticed with some MMO games is how the 'special' items are usually better than ones you research or need to spend a lot of trouble on. I'd like to see some awesome stuff that you can build yourself with super rare ores, maybe using the ores that don't have functions elsewhere. Perhaps have the best non-tradable too. I'm just thinking of stuff here, I have no idea how any of this would affect the dynamics.
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Most the ores live had a use, granted, some were not used much because they made only one comp that was used in a rarely used gear, there were a few exceptions of course, but they were starting to make the ones not used or under utilized have a use in mission driven stuff, like Mars Construction Project and Heal the Maw, some of the ores in that were previously under-utilized, same with feed the bunyip, I don't think cupidite was used for anything at all prior to the bunyip event coming online, then they added it and a alternate use.

I know prior to the bunny our guild ore vault had stacks and stacks of cupidite, then once peeps figured out what he ate the stacks started getting used. Some of the content of course used ores that were already in high demand, creating a bottle neck like grail water in the Heal the Maw missions. Same with the bogrial Zeke missions, many of the ores in that were low to mid ores not really used in the masses mined, but then the Zeke missions took those ores and recombined them into chemical reactions and solutions etc.

The Zeke and PS CF skill missions did two things along the way, they used under utilized ores AND they got people more recipes that helped towards the quality build buff thing.

Instead of fusion or something along that lines, do what those missions did, recombine 2 of this 3 of that to make reactions/solutions, granting new recipes/xp and a unused ore sink. I'm sure some balance cna be figured out on what ores aren't really getting used and low/mid/high ore missions can be fleshed out to provide a use for those ores and access to gear/recipes like MCP/HtM/Zeke/CF. Oh and that one for the V'rix..the one you sacrificed glenn tourists, you had to assemble the chalice/athame and sanctify it and stuff if I remember.
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  • 3 weeks later...
well if heart shields were manufacturable, you would obviously need cupidite/cupidium :)

I like the items that need 2 ores to make a new 'ore' like hydrazine. Add more alloys and composites to get a base ore needed for a comp/item, you greatly increase enjoyment imo. :)
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In the missions that Lyle gave the PE and JE in live there were some new refines. To complete all the missions you needed maximum prospect. The mission required you to gather various ores, do refines you'd be familiar with, and new refines. Ultimately you would make a ring with a gem in it, but there were also "failure" refines. One was a flawed gem of some sort, but I can't remember it's exact name. Doing a "failure" refine didn't mean you failed the mission, but it did set you back in that you'd have to replace the ores you used in the wrong refine.

This mission group was, IMO, one of the better missions in Live. I don't know if it was repeatable, but the rewards were well worth the effort. All of the rewards were non-manufacturable devices. You got the Loony's Hunk O'Metal & Loony's Special Gizmoblatsit along the way. After the last mission in the group was completed you got a choice of 3 non-manu devices.

Missions comparable to these some for each explorer, some for all explorers, some for 2 of the 3 explorers, with different rewards for the effort, would keep JE, Scout, and Sentinel with plenty to do. Maybe some of the more extensive ones, (more extensive than Lyle's) will give you recipe rewards. Over time this could also include mid-level missions. Turn ins of ores, or or even new refines, could help there as well, for xp/faction rewards.

Some of the less used ores could be used in these missions/turn ins. Refined ores and new refines could also be used. Also see no reason why some drops couldn't be used either. For the drops, however, I'd pick mostly organic mobs that are killable by an explorer.
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  • 1 month later...
Since the dev's are adding new items(devices/engines/weapons, etc) why not simply add a new component(s) that require the unused ores? An example would be the badger device or the terran advantage engines.

note: If wanting to avoid adding additional/new comps to the builds maybe just add a refined ore? The level 1 kaza requires 1 refined agate and the level 2 one requires 1 refined moonstone. These are the only places that these ores are used. I think this would be great for items that use multiple non-manu comps too (IE: replace one of the non-manu comps with a refined ore).
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