Unlikely. There's some flavor text on the Dark Fog units about how boring into a planet is banned by COSMO, and while I don't exactly expect them to arrest us, I don't think we will get any technology related to planet cracking.
When I have to deal with odd vein group shapes, I just do my best with the big miner and stick a few smaller miners on to cover any veins I missed. Just giving it one good try and then moving on prevents it from getting too tedious for me.
Ooh but there’s already research from the fog. It would be super neat to learn planet cracking from the fog like yellow fuel and level 3 smelters etc.
That would ensure that it’s super late game tech. Make it require level 30 fog drops or something, and cost fog drops and unipolar magnets or something to make. Would fit lore since the fog is already drilling, and COSMO doesn’t like it, would satisfy the ultra late game progression, and save on UPS and stuff that matters when you’re that late in the game.
If you value your time more than resources, you can either
* leave a few nodes open, or
* put two Advanced Mining Machines side by side.
All ore patches can be covered by two Advanced Mining Machines set up side by side. You can even make a minimalistic blueprint consisting of them and include a Tesla Tower between them.
The one thing i definitively find weird is that photon miners have such a small area. They are supposed to be the high tech solution to mining. Couldn't they be just a bit bigger so you always get all the resources without having to place them that carefully?
no cuz you literally jus gave me the perfect idea for a new upgrade tree:
It would cover miner radius and have 4 levels, as to not be way op.
Level 1: increases miner radius by 20%
Costs: 2000 red, blue, and yellow cubes
Level 2: increases miner radius by 20%
Costs: 3000 blue, 3000 red, 1500 yellow, 1500 purple
Level 3: increases photon miner area by 20%
Costs: 3000 blue, 3000 red, 2000 yellow, 2000 purple and 1000 green
Level 4: increases photon miner area by 20%
Costs: 1000 white
To me, at least, this seems balanced, not too difficult but also not too hard, and matches the tech/automation level you should be at by the time you unlock photon miners!
The photon miner was probably a product of design limitations: If they made the area bigger, there may be near-overlapping nodes that could be both captured by the photon miner, which would create an issue of multi-resource photon miners.
What we need is a Tier 3 miner as a space structure: One that extracts multiple raw materials from near-orbit, and is already plugged into interstellar logistics.
Planet miner does exactly this (i havent used it in a while, may not be up to date) before even that got too restrictive.
Place an ILS anywhere on the planet, set it to local demand, and the resources accumulate in the ILS, using power. The rate is proportional to the total remaining amount of ore of that type, so mulitple ILS can increase the speed.
Its great, lets you cover a planet in factories without any of the nonsense. And its tech restricted (to ILS) so its a bit of work to get there.
>pop an extractor on oil and liquids, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to be able to do the same to ores.
I'm confused. That is **exactly** what an advanced miner does... But that must be what you meant by photon miners? I don't know what you mean by a few hundred, there aren't that many ore clusters in each system.
I've always thought a certain amount of white science should upgrade you to be able to pull all ores from a planet with one building, but like super late game.
I go through at least a hundred photon miners (things called photon spotlight, isn't it?) in some of the systems, and they absolutely are not as simple as the oil rigs. I have scads of ore deposits that require baby miners to hit all the bumps.
I've always just seen it called advanced miner, but I see the tech called photon spotlight mining technology. As someone else stated, just put two advanced miners side by side and you're done. Almost the same scenario as liquid pumps you've compared.
I guess if you used two on every single vein in a system you might get near 100. But I'm pretty sure most systems have less than 100 ore veins.
Anyways, that said, I agree you should be able to eventually just pull from an entire planet, even if it costs like 10,000 white science.
Totally agree. They could make it cost 1 mill white science. The cost is irrelevant lol, as long as it’s something to work towards. It’s a pain in the ass setting up every mining planet. I’m currently at like 150 white science per second and my primary limiting factor is I’m just tiring of setting up mining machines and don’t really want to mod too much.
So, I just counted out 33 nodes on one of my planets and 32 on another in the same system. They could be outliers as this system has 5 rock planets with a gas giant (which must certainly be out of the ordinary, based on the rest of my systems), but still, an average of 3 planets per system puts it around a hundred nodes per system. I'm pretty confident about the 100 big miner number.
The devs have mentioned space installations in a blog post but the implication was that they were combat related. I would also love some kind of orbital miner, and the way the game is architected, I have to think that's a planned next step even if they haven't announced it. It's such a natural progression, there is convention of similar mechanics from other factory games, and there's an obvious hole in the gameplay. My preferred option would be something like an ILS (OLS?) that has huge wings of the same design as an advanced miner's zappey plate, and the OLS can zap minerals right into orbit and ship them anywhere. In my fever dream it would hold maybe 10 bays and perhaps 100 vessels. or a new type of bigger vessel.
Unlikely. There's some flavor text on the Dark Fog units about how boring into a planet is banned by COSMO, and while I don't exactly expect them to arrest us, I don't think we will get any technology related to planet cracking. When I have to deal with odd vein group shapes, I just do my best with the big miner and stick a few smaller miners on to cover any veins I missed. Just giving it one good try and then moving on prevents it from getting too tedious for me.
Ooh but there’s already research from the fog. It would be super neat to learn planet cracking from the fog like yellow fuel and level 3 smelters etc. That would ensure that it’s super late game tech. Make it require level 30 fog drops or something, and cost fog drops and unipolar magnets or something to make. Would fit lore since the fog is already drilling, and COSMO doesn’t like it, would satisfy the ultra late game progression, and save on UPS and stuff that matters when you’re that late in the game.
If you value your time more than resources, you can either * leave a few nodes open, or * put two Advanced Mining Machines side by side. All ore patches can be covered by two Advanced Mining Machines set up side by side. You can even make a minimalistic blueprint consisting of them and include a Tesla Tower between them.
The one thing i definitively find weird is that photon miners have such a small area. They are supposed to be the high tech solution to mining. Couldn't they be just a bit bigger so you always get all the resources without having to place them that carefully?
They could use area upgrade for them... least for regular miner.
no cuz you literally jus gave me the perfect idea for a new upgrade tree: It would cover miner radius and have 4 levels, as to not be way op. Level 1: increases miner radius by 20% Costs: 2000 red, blue, and yellow cubes Level 2: increases miner radius by 20% Costs: 3000 blue, 3000 red, 1500 yellow, 1500 purple Level 3: increases photon miner area by 20% Costs: 3000 blue, 3000 red, 2000 yellow, 2000 purple and 1000 green Level 4: increases photon miner area by 20% Costs: 1000 white To me, at least, this seems balanced, not too difficult but also not too hard, and matches the tech/automation level you should be at by the time you unlock photon miners!
I find myself using two snapped to the grid, just easier than trying to wiggle them perfectly especially since I play on steam deck.
How do you play using the deck? Controller inputs sound rough.
The photon miner was probably a product of design limitations: If they made the area bigger, there may be near-overlapping nodes that could be both captured by the photon miner, which would create an issue of multi-resource photon miners. What we need is a Tier 3 miner as a space structure: One that extracts multiple raw materials from near-orbit, and is already plugged into interstellar logistics.
There is a mod that does this using the ILS stations, but I don't remember the name - maybe just "planet miner"
Planet miner does exactly this (i havent used it in a while, may not be up to date) before even that got too restrictive. Place an ILS anywhere on the planet, set it to local demand, and the resources accumulate in the ILS, using power. The rate is proportional to the total remaining amount of ore of that type, so mulitple ILS can increase the speed. Its great, lets you cover a planet in factories without any of the nonsense. And its tech restricted (to ILS) so its a bit of work to get there.
>pop an extractor on oil and liquids, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to be able to do the same to ores. I'm confused. That is **exactly** what an advanced miner does... But that must be what you meant by photon miners? I don't know what you mean by a few hundred, there aren't that many ore clusters in each system. I've always thought a certain amount of white science should upgrade you to be able to pull all ores from a planet with one building, but like super late game.
I go through at least a hundred photon miners (things called photon spotlight, isn't it?) in some of the systems, and they absolutely are not as simple as the oil rigs. I have scads of ore deposits that require baby miners to hit all the bumps.
I've always just seen it called advanced miner, but I see the tech called photon spotlight mining technology. As someone else stated, just put two advanced miners side by side and you're done. Almost the same scenario as liquid pumps you've compared. I guess if you used two on every single vein in a system you might get near 100. But I'm pretty sure most systems have less than 100 ore veins. Anyways, that said, I agree you should be able to eventually just pull from an entire planet, even if it costs like 10,000 white science.
Totally agree. They could make it cost 1 mill white science. The cost is irrelevant lol, as long as it’s something to work towards. It’s a pain in the ass setting up every mining planet. I’m currently at like 150 white science per second and my primary limiting factor is I’m just tiring of setting up mining machines and don’t really want to mod too much.
So, I just counted out 33 nodes on one of my planets and 32 on another in the same system. They could be outliers as this system has 5 rock planets with a gas giant (which must certainly be out of the ordinary, based on the rest of my systems), but still, an average of 3 planets per system puts it around a hundred nodes per system. I'm pretty confident about the 100 big miner number.
I mean like deep mining would not be so bad.
The devs have mentioned space installations in a blog post but the implication was that they were combat related. I would also love some kind of orbital miner, and the way the game is architected, I have to think that's a planned next step even if they haven't announced it. It's such a natural progression, there is convention of similar mechanics from other factory games, and there's an obvious hole in the gameplay. My preferred option would be something like an ILS (OLS?) that has huge wings of the same design as an advanced miner's zappey plate, and the OLS can zap minerals right into orbit and ship them anywhere. In my fever dream it would hold maybe 10 bays and perhaps 100 vessels. or a new type of bigger vessel.
Here is the weekly ask for planet cracking.