Changes To Mining
First off, I have added 62 New Mining Only resources to the game. They are spread across the Galaxies, with the Sphere, VP, Anvil and The Forge sharing a large portion of those. The Expanse and Furnace have their own sets for you to locate and mine.
These new resources start at 0 Scan Rating and go up to a medium scan rating requirement. You'll have to work out the max level yourselves, but I kept it an easy reach for most players. As stated above, these 62 resources can ONLY be mined. Should you see them anywhere else in CE please log a bug or grab me to one side in discord chat.
Six Slots
A major upgrade to mining, it also now has Six slots for results from a Mining Laser trigger pull. I have taken the mining code and rewritten it so that EACH slot has as much chance to locate both normal asteroid ores and also the new ones. So no more box X leans in a specific direction type thing. Now each box has the same chances.
Re-Scan + Mining Action Points
Asteroid fields are large, very large, and have never been emptied since we started CE. So it stands to reason that, alike in Combat, we should be able to re-scan on certain results. So I have added 'Mining Action Points'. Basically, you get 3 per mining screen. Use them HOWEVER you desire. Use them all on one slot, use them on an empty slot or do as you wish.
This means you can now take a chance to turn that boring old plain ore or an empty window into something interesting. You CAN also rescan on a window you just tractored in ores. Enabling those with more time than sense to tractor in, theoretically Nine resources per screen!
Mining XP
It's never been great, I'll give you that,
So whilst recoding the screen I also gave the XP from mining a kick in the pants. Low level captains will see the effect, whilst those of you in the later levels can at least be happy knowing your fuel is being but for XP as well as resources XP earned is now tied to the resource you Tractor in and its Scan Rating. So a captain tractor ing in the new resources and basic ores and gases will earn less than say a captain mining top level ores at the rarefied end of Scan Ratings.
There is also a bonus based on your level, so the higher your captain level, the bigger the XP bonus (per tractored window). In testing, I levelled a new toon to level 9 in a short period whilst mining ores and doing 2 initial missions in Sphere. At the upper levels, I was able to bring in around 2-4K per screen in XP (dependent on my scan rating and results).
Mining Header
I did play around with adding back in the Full header for mining like we did for combat, but there are a number of factors and issues that cased me concern, so I have added the XP and Rapport XP bars in, added in the Tabs left and right and also a new bar that shows your actual 'Scan Rating info' on THAT pull. It also displays the Total amount you mined and your F.O.M current Rank. (note: you won't see a level screen whilst mining, but as soon as you exit the mining loot screen if you are due to level you will do so. I had to make a compromise, or you might lose the ores. This way no XP is lost and also no ores
Images
I decided to stick with the Mining green backdrop for these resources, and whilst creating new ones I also cleaned up the current ones. So if you see an image that looks fuzzy, give your screen a hard refresh or clear your browser cache for the new cleaned up images.
footnote: A lot of work went into this one, it might seem like a few small changes but trust me this one was a doozy. After a few days, it became obvious that the code would be best rewritten from scratch. I hope that you will enjoy the fact that once again there IS a reason to mine, and that you're not only obtaining mine only resources, but you have a choice and also much better XP than before.
Happy Mining Folks...
Coops