Overview

Every product's journey starts from the ground (or an asteroid). In order to gain access to natural resources, you'll have to mine or extract them. Here's what you need to know about mining.

Extractable resources can be found in Resource Deposits. Extraction is carried out by Mines and vessels with Extraction Modules.

Resource Deposits

Resource Deposits are the locations where you'll need to set up shop in order to harvest those precious, precious resources. Resource Deposits can be found on either Planetary Surfaces or Asteroids. Each deposit can contain multiple resources.

Each deposit has three main metrics you'll want to pay attention to:

• Amount: The integer value in metric tons of the resource. Very straightforward.
• Accessibility: A percentage value that limits the maximum rate at which the deposit can be mined. If your mining ship is capable of mining at 10T per second, but the deposit has an Accessibility of 30%, the maximum rate possible will be 3T per second. Accessibility can be increased by gaining access to more advanced mining techs.
• Purity: A percentage value that tells you how much waste will be included in your yield. Unrefined Ore always gives you a certain amount of useful material as well as an amount of waste. Unless your mining ship has a refinery module attached that will allow you to refine in situ, you'll have to use some of its precious cargo space to haul (usually useless) waste when you head back to a refinery. If a deposit has a purity of 80%, then for every 1,000 kg you mine, 800 kg will be usable ore, while 200 kg will be waste. Waste can be mitigated by having an extraction module with high selectivity, detailed below.

These values will initially be unknown until they are surveyed (Surveying ).

Extraction Modules

Extraction Modules are the tools you use to extract all those juicy resources. They can be used on both planetary surfaces and asteroids.

Extraction Modules have four metrics you should care about:

• Extraction Rate: The max rate a module can mine at 100% accessibility. For example, USS Big Bertha may be able to devour asteroids at a whopping 100 tons per second, while USS Tiny Tim may only be able to yield 100 kg per second.

• Thermal Output: Breaking stuff produces a lot of heat. Higher thermal output means either a decreased mining rate or more thermal dissipation systems required.

• Power Consumption: Not having enough power decreases the mining rate, possibly to zero.

• Selectivity: Selectivity is how you target only the good stuff and none of the useless stuff. Higher selectivity results in less waste yield. For example, you may be operating on a deposit with only 10% purity, but if you have a Selectivity of 90%, you can avoid almost all of the waste you would normally yield.

  As a more concrete example, if you mine 1,000 kg in that same scenario, you would normally yield only 100 kg of useful material and a whopping 900 kg of waste. Having 90% Selectivity, however, will decimate that 900 kg down to only 90 kg.

Surveying

In order to successfully mine a deposit, you'll need to know what you're dealing with. The three metrics (amount, accessibility and purity) of a deposit will be unknown to you until you use a Surveying Vessel to probe the deposit and reveal those details. Read more about that over in Surveying.