Star Citizen - media blowout, Chris Robert's new game

NDA is over yay, Concierge, Subscribers and Wave 1 PTU invites went out a couple hours ago so check your emails.

Mining is pretty damn fun but first here's some brief details about the scanning mechanic that you'll be using to look for minable rocks.

Scanning sends out a wave pulse in front of you and you can control both the width and intensity. A fully charged narrow focused wave will give you a lot of info/detail of whatever is in front of you but it will also make you light up on the radar of everyone else nearby carrying over the risk and reward philosophy seen thru the game. A wider wave will cover a larger area (duh) but you won't get as much detail. This is enough to find minable rock deposits on the surface of planets tho.


Once you've found a suitable rock deposit (Their distance will show up on your hud) you can proceed to mine them. Switch to mining mode by pressing "M" and you'll enter fracture mode.

Fire the mining laser at a rock and you'll pump energy to it with the aim to have a controlled fracture. You control the laser throttle with the mouse wheel and your goal is to maintain it in the green zone. That will trigger an audible alert and youll see the rock fragmentation meter inch towards 100%. If you did it right the rock will fracture and youll see both purple highlighted chunks and orange chunks

The orange chunks can be further broken down with the mining laser (mind that laser throttle tho as smaller rocks require less energy) and the purple ones are (mostly) raw ore ready for extraction. Switch to extraction mode with the right mouse button and fire away at the rock chunk. You'll see the minerals fly into the ship and your cargo hold will start to fill up.
 
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I got a look inside the 600i last night. From all the Reddit complaints during the concept I thought the thing was going to be the size of a constellation. Talk about being wrong lol. That thing has a ton of room. The luxury look is really inmpressive. Still not sure if I'll convert one of my ships over, but between the 600i and the pheonix in terms of luxury it's a no brainier. It does give me some high hopes for the 890 jump being amazing.
 
The UK ship team got their hands on it and it grew to near the size of a Starfarer so yeah they had plenty of room to make it look nice inside.

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Ahh nice. I see it's about 30m longer and 3x the mass now.

Also looks like they have persistence working for bed logouts now.
 
I exploded myself with a rock last night. 10/10 would explode again. Best mining mechanic in a game so far, at least that I've seen. Also learned not to go for the rocks on a hill unless I like going after all the little pieces at the bottom of the hill after each fracture stage.

New Quantum UI looks nice too, think I may need to switch up some button binds on the flight stick for it though.
 
Yeah lol, if you throttle the mining laser to the max the rock quickly goes boom (mind that overcharge meter) and if large enough/close enough it takes you out. It also depends on both the resistance and instability of the rock being mined. Extremely resistant or unstable rocks are often not worth the effort to mine.
 
Is it just Daymar and Cellin with ore nodes? I didn't check Yela yet but I didn't see any on a quick run by or Delamar.
 
Yela has 'em on the surface too.

Delamar doesn't have any for now but I believe the plan is that the huge asteroid clusters orbiting it will be minable along with the Yela asteroid belt.
 
Is there any in depth data on the fracturing and extracting? Unless my mind is playing tricks on me or the server lags a bit, the rate of extraction and fragmentation changes depending on where the laser is pointed, as well as the distance from the object. I was blasting a rock from around 90m at 100% and the rock was barely heating up, hit the same rock at 100% at 20m and it nearly blew up in an few seconds.

I also don't understand the radar ping focus. Seems anything past 2x only hits nodes behind me and once you get to 20x something, nothing lights up at all.
 
Ok let's go in order starting with the scan ping

Scanning is omnidirectional at its initial/default setting which is why you see things light up behind you. There is currently a bug tho that makes the focus area not line up correctly to the front of the ship when you narrow the ping.

Edit: I just went and checked with the most recent build released today 3.2.0n. Narrowing the scan is now properly focused at the front of the ship only the visual "wave" is still misaligned.

There is also another bug which may be working in conjunction with what you mentioned. We have mining nodes and those nodes spawn minable rocks. Not all mining nodes spawn rocks at the same time. Instead as rocks get consumed by mining a random nearby empty node will spawn a rock.

Well the bug was that when you scanned an area it would reveal every single NODE even if there were no rocks spawned by them causing people to see a marker as they scanned but no rock to mine when they got there.


Fracturing/Extraction.

The rate of fragmentation is governed by how unstable the rock is and its resistance. As you mine the more stable rocks you will notice a steady and granular control of the laser throttle with the mouse wheel (say 1% per every 1 scroll up of the mouse wheel), in unstable rocks that is more erratic and you get say 3% per every scroll up making the task to stay in the green zone to fill up the fragmentation sensor more difficult not to mention more unstable rocks are prone to blowing up.

And yes what you observed by going closer/further away from the rock is also built in and works in conjunction with how resistant/unstable the rocks are. You can combine both the laser throttle control AND moving the ship closer/further away from the rock to keep the power levels in the green zone.

There have also been a few changes from the initial implementation to discourage people from turning off/on the laser to keep it in the green zone. Now the laser throttle resets to 0.10% if you turn it off so that little "cheat" doesn't work anymore but what you can do is move the powered up beam away from the rock then back on to achieve almost the same effect.
 
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That makes sense, glad to see those were just bugs. Is there any reason at the moment to use a high focus radar other than to reduce your active radar profile to others? ie does it give you more detailed information on the nodes you pinged?

Also during extraction the rate jumps around on me depending on where I'm hitting the fractured node bits. Usually it's around 250/s but I'll see it jump to 1000 (may have been decimals in there I can't remember at the moment, like 0.250/s). Wasn't sure if that was sever lag or if there is a specific way of extracting ore quicker. I wasn't changing distance just moving the extraction lasers around the node rather than keeping it in one spot.
 
Lorien said:
Ok let's go in order starting with the scan ping

Scanning is omnidirectional at its initial/default setting which is why you see things light up behind you. There is currently a bug tho that makes the focus area not line up correctly to the front of the ship when you narrow the ping.

Edit: I just went and checked with the most recent build released today 3.2.0n. Narrowing the scan is now properly focused at the front of the ship only the visual "wave" is still misaligned.

There is also another bug which may be working in conjunction with what you mentioned. We have mining nodes and those nodes spawn minable rocks. Not all mining nodes spawn rocks at the same time. Instead as rocks get consumed by mining a random nearby empty node will spawn a rock.

Well the bug was that when you scanned an area it would reveal every single NODE even if there were no rocks spawned by them causing people to see a marker as they scanned but no rock to mine when they got there.


Fracturing/Extraction.

The rate of fragmentation is governed by how unstable the rock is and its resistance. As you mine the more stable rocks you will notice a steady and granular control of the laser throttle with the mouse wheel (say 1% per every 1 scroll up of the mouse wheel), in unstable rocks that is more erratic and you get say 3% per every scroll up making the task to stay in the green zone to fill up the fragmentation sensor more difficult not to mention more unstable rocks are prone to blowing up.

And yes what you observed by going closer/further away from the rock is also built in and works in conjunction with how resistant/unstable the rocks are. You can combine both the laser throttle control AND moving the ship closer/further away from the rock to keep the power levels in the green zone.

There have also been a few changes from the initial implementation to discourage people from turning off/on the laser to keep it in the green zone. Now the laser throttle resets to 0.10% if you turn it off so that little "cheat" doesn't work anymore but what you can do is move the powered up beam away from the rock then back on to achieve almost the same effect.
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I'm sorry but this doesn't sound "FUN" to play at all.
 
relapse808 said:
I'm sorry but this doesn't sound "FUN" to play at all.
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Lets not forget that this is the very first implementation of a new game system. Aside from that, it may not be what you enjoy and that's okay, but frankly I'm very glad to see this kind of continual depth added to each game system. This is the kind of thing that makes it so that stellar cartography, jump-plotting, mining, cargo hauling/prisoner transport, scanning, science, engineering, refining, medicine, manufacturing and all of the other non-combat parts of the game are just as in-depth as the combat-related ship content. These sorts of activities are meant to be more than just "Press X to scan the system" or "Press X to drill when you're klinda sorta hovering over the circle on your UI" that they would be in other games. They're meant to take skill, to be affected in meaningful ways by player skill and in-game equipment, and to be engaging. Don't forget however that if you don't enjoy one of these types of game systems, you have many other options. Its likely you may find some aspect that you enjoy.

This to me is a reason why Star Citizen is so worthwhile and I don't mind them taking the time to develop it properly . Yes, I know that many users frankly don't care about animations for climbing into the cockpit or laying down in bed, with mining or engineering being in depth systems more than "press X with the proper widget equipped", but I do - and so do many others who backed this project. There are plenty of games out there with bog standard mechanics, but Star Citizen is supposed to be something different, shooting for a level of depth that is not present elsewhere. I'm sure that this mechanic and every other one will go through many iterations to make them flow better and be more enjoyable, but I certainly hope they don't dispense with the depth originally envisioned.
 
Co-op mining is also a thing. Some rock deposits are extremely tough so much so that a single Prospector is incapable of fracturing it on its own so you'll need to grab other people to help.

 
Smoeki said:
That makes sense, glad to see those were just bugs. Is there any reason at the moment to use a high focus radar other than to reduce your active radar profile to others? ie does it give you more detailed information on the nodes you pinged?
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For rocks/mining no it doesn't since you get the detailed info when you switch to frac mode and the rock gets automatically analyzed there. For general ship to ship scanning it will matter tho because a more focused ping will give you more detail about a ship and in further iterations past this initial tier 0 implementation you'll have the ability to scan the internals of a ship and get info like how many crew members are on board, how much cargo it's carrying, etc.

Also during extraction the rate jumps around on me depending on where I'm hitting the fractured node bits. Usually it's around 250/s but I'll see it jump to 1000 (may have been decimals in there I can't remember at the moment, like 0.250/s). Wasn't sure if that was sever lag or if there is a specific way of extracting ore quicker. I wasn't changing distance just moving the extraction lasers around the node rather than keeping it in one spot.
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You see the rate jump because when you fractured the rock you got different sized chunks, that's all. I guess it would help to know the total mass of the rock being mined so that you could verify the percentage of minerals it contains.
 
That's sounds good, I didn't realize the ping was working as a system for ships as well.

So far I'm really happy with the mining system for the first iteration. Hopefully it gets a bit more detailed rather than simplified.

I'd like to see the prospector be able to drop the ore cargo containers so another player can load them up on a smaller cargo vessel like the freelancer or hull a. Seems to fill up pretty fast currently. That will add some multiplayer play as well as the harder nodes.
 
They keep on adding nifty stuff. 3.2.0o deployed with component overclocking. Components will increase in performance but power consumption goes up as well. Weapons also overheat faster so you'll want to invest on a better grade cooler and a larger power plant.

Overclocking those slow M4A cannons fire nearly as fast as repeaters lol

Edit:Videos are better than screenshots




 

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It’s really weird this game is on 3.x.x and it’s still in Alpha.

It would have been nice if they saved 1.x for the actual game launch... so I would know when it’s worth my time to bother with it.
 
Yeah I'm sure they'll use 1,2,3,4,5, etc. again when they get into beta. Instead though it will be Beta 1,2,3,4,5, etc., Personally it doesn't bother since I know which version is which. People tend to ignore the word (Alpha) before the numbers for some reason.
 
It looks like they added the ability to melt your old Voyager Direct items for UEC. I'm not sure is everything is meltable or obtainable in game so be careful melting. I think there were a few items like trophies that you shouldn't melt, but most of the regular stuff should probably be obtainable in the final game
 
The mining mechanic is pretty good, what needs help is the Prospector needs to use its internal systems better to dump some of the waste material so our bags are not full of 80% waste. This way we can carry a reasonable amount and the ships is doing its job properly.

But all in all not too bad. FPS is MUCH more stable albeit lower than 3.1.3 and the micro studders are mostly gone. Just the odd random lag out but much more tolerable. I think my initial driver update failed or something, was getting game crashes every 15 to 20 minutes when trying to stream. Reinstall the drivers and recorded locally for 30 minutes with no issue and only one 15 second lag out.
 
Ripskin said:
The mining mechanic is pretty good, what needs help is the Prospector needs to use its internal systems better to dump some of the waste material so our bags are not full of 80% waste.
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That's actually done on purpose for a couple of reasons

One. It rewards players who are more careful and picky about the rocks they mine. The aim is to engage the player both dexterity and mentally wise.
This is taken from the Vulture Q&A https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/16647-Q-A-Drake-Vulture

Mining in 3.2, players can just fracture and extract every rock in sight but without scanning and reviewing their composition and carefully fracturing, returns will be low versus a player who specifically targets the high value assets.
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Two. They are laying the foundation for upcoming gameplay mechanics. Remember that refining ore is going to be a thing. The Orion has a built in ore refinery that will be manned by a player or a hired NPC.
Here's a portion of the description from the mining design document https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14522-Star-Citizen-Careers-Mining

Refinery operator

The position of refinery operator only exists on mining ships that contain an integrated refinery. Refineries allow raw ore to be gradually converted into their purified component forms, with the undesirable elements being ejected back out into space in the form of dust. Purified materials consume a small fraction of the storage space of their unrefined counterparts, which is of particular concern when dealing with low quality asteroid fields that possess valuable elements only in a highly diffused form, or when attempting to minimize the number of return trips back to a trading or storage facility.
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Lorien said:
That's actually done on purpose for a couple of reasons

One. It rewards players who are more careful and picky about the rocks they mine. The aim is to engage the player both dexterity and mentally wise.
This is taken from the Vulture Q&A https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/16647-Q-A-Drake-Vulture




Two. They are laying the foundation for upcoming gameplay mechanics. Remember that refining ore is going to be a thing. The Orion has a built in ore refinery that will be manned by a player or a hired NPC.
Here's a portion of the description from the mining design document https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14522-Star-Citizen-Careers-Mining
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One other factor to consider is the Prospector's droppable ore containers aren't working yet. Once they are it will allow teams of players to have the prospector mine and drop off ore containers for your teammates to pick up and sell (or take to get refined once the Orion is in and working) so you can stay out mining longer. I think the Prospector might be able to carry some full ones too, I can't remember if the hatch in the back is for that or some other funtion that hasn't been added yet.
 
Oh I get that we need to be selective in what we mine and all that but we are still stuck with mostly waste material. The filtration system on the Prospector should be sifting out a fair chunk of the loose rock and dirt so we can get some ore. The Orion will be able to take that ore and make something of it as well as mine on a massive scale.

I'm not expecting this little ship to go nuts but its pretty worthless right now even in the small area we have to play in. Taking it out to go "prospect" moons or asteroids that are not right there will be meaningless. I cant even mine 1 cockpit sized rock completely even if the percentage is fairly high yield of material to waste.

I love the mechanic and all that, just saying the ship should be able to sift out some of the loose dirt as originally advertised so we can hit up 4 cockpit sized rocks (one per bag) and actually "prospect" an area. If we ditch the original bags for someone to haul off as it stands now 5 minutes of mining for 20 + minutes of hauling 80% or more of dirt. I'll open the bag and throw out the waste myself :p

As long as that is in the pipeline for implementation that its great and this first implementation is really good.
 
I thought it was the plan to have the prospector be able to sift (not refine) through material. If it can't they need to modify the payloads. It already separates it in inventory so it should have the option to expell the waste as an option.

While it's true that dropping the cargo bags is a good idea for group play and something I look forward to, the prospector is still billed as a solo miner. Staying out longer collecting only higher percentage ore comes with the increase risk of damage, fuel costs, pirates, etc... Including the loss of the the waste material as a constant income flow, ie higher risk = more money.


Like I said, I thought sifting was the plan, did I misunderstand something or did something change?
 
I doubt they will change the current system where you end up with a large % of your ore cargo as filler because it makes scanning an important step in the process, that's how ore works IRL, and the current economics of it is roughly balanced vs. other ways to make money in the game. I'm sure they will tweak the economics of this a ton as more of the systems come on-line, this is all still the very early stuff. Expect scanning to get more complex and them to introduce mining focused scanners. So eventually we might be able to go scan three different craters, pick the best one, then go looking for that rich rock to mine. Right now I want a rock to be good for at least 2000 UEC if I fill up on it. I've seen some people post rocks that got them over 9000 UEC in a single load.

If you looked at most of the ore mined today you won't even be able to see the iron, copper, whatever, with your eye. There are not relatively pure veins running through it so you could break it up and just grab them, sifting is not part of the process for many types of ore. Instead the rocks look fairly uniform, maybe with a slight coloration from the mineral you really want. The particles of the "good stuff" are smaller than a grain of sand, and they might even be chemically bonded to other elements. The mining process is breaking it up enough to get in a dumptruck, then moving it to get refined. The refining process invloves breaking it up even more and then running it through various chemical and mechanical processes to separate the high value parts from the dross. Aluminum processing involves huge amounts of electricity too, and was one of the early applications of hydroelectric power.

The current SC mining is basically getting the rock into small enough chunks that the tractor beam can pull it in and put it into the storage container. So, only to the point where it goes into the dump truck. They might add more later, but my bet would be after you fracture a big rock you would then scan the smaller chunks to see which have greater or lesser concentrations and then only fracture/extract the better ones. The smaller rocks would average out to the same concentration as the big rock they came from. Seems like a possible teir 1 (we're currently on teir 0) enhancement to me.
 
MISC_Prospector_Laser_Cutter.jpg



I knew I wasn't imagining things.... Haha

Anyway, I'm sure it's possible they changed it but I haven't heard anything yet I'm aware of. I thought it was strange that it already sperates the ore from the waste in the inventory. So I think it's just a issue of 8ta first iteration along with the deep surface drilling where you have to land and put your power into the laser.


https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15306-MISC-Prospector-Unearthed
 
Quantum linking reliably working on the 3.2.1 PTU currently being tested. My friend is from AUS and we were playing on a EU server so lag does influence the syncing of the ships during flight.


P.S: PTU is open to all backers and has every single ship in the game available so even if you don't do any hardcore testing it's worth it just to check out any ships you may have wanted to try.

 
TroubleMagnet I'm not worried about taking along some waste, its part of the job. But a shaker tray at a minimum has been used since panning for gold. All this fancy tech and a ship sold with a filtration system and I'm left hauling mostly garbage no matter what is... blah... The internal system should be able to clean up the ore samples a bit more and ditch 50% of the waste. If we have to get up and go to the back to do this on the other computer fine. If its a new "mini game" type of thing fine.

No real world prospector goes out with 6 pans and comes back with 1 pebble of gold and 6 hefty sacks of dirt. They get gold or fail.

Either-way scanning and selecting your target should be very important. Scanning the fractured chunks for higher value material should be part of the job. But the ship was built for it and I REALLY hope they enable the sifter to ditch out a percentage of the waste down the line. Even if its just a fan and a few metal screens for rocks to fall through while the dirt is blown out. We know its a small prospecting ship but part of prospecting is testing a few areas. One small rock should not fill us up :(

Early mining I know and it is well done but if they don't increase the cargo by a fair amount or get filtration working (even if its just another mini game that crunches some numbers resulting in higher grades of ore vs waste) in some way the ship is not going to be viable.
 
Lorien said:
Quantum linking reliably working on the 3.2.1 PTU currently being tested.
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Nice, hope they find a way to keep the performance up :eek: last few times I have been in its really sluggish and freezes up once fun things actually happen. Had none of that at launch really.
 
Just to add, I'm not against all the added waste either. The way I'm understanding it at the moment is once you mine you have 2 items in your inventory. X% of mixed/raw ore and then waste material that contains zero ore percentage. I think the first value is fine since it's not actually pure ore. The waste material seems like if its actually identified waste should be able to be expelled. This should be done with the filtration system in the prospector, wich then leaves the door open for cheaper starter mining that can only collect with larger waste collection like we currently have. The prospector could have some kind of spectril analysis built in as well to help filter.

Now if I'm wrong, and it's not separating them in inventory, so the ore listed is pure and the waste material is just the bonded and/or unsiftable material then it should be listed as one item in inventory otherwise it gives the impression that you're just gathering garbage. If this is also the case then I feel they may need to modify the mining time/payload recovery rate because right now it seems like I gather way to fast as a solo player vs the travel times.
 
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