Attention Everyone - Scrap Mining

[Dusty Lens]

Good day everyone.

I felt that there might be a kernel of wisdom hidden amongst the steaming pile of fail in a thought that I might as well keep you lot updated on my current plan for the scrap mining system.

Scrap.

Here's the chief issue with scrap. It is very prolific. Every house save Kusari has a pile of it sitting in its heart. Liberty is completely doused in floating metal across two entire systems. Virtually every Junker base is sitting dead in the middle of a cloud of the stuff.

So its troublesome to come up with a satisfactory system of supply and demand.

The following is my plan for the scrap mining beta.

A) "Deactivate" every scrap mining field save for New Berlin, New London, Sigma 13.
B) Select a number of bases to serve as end game destinations.
C) Establish credible trade routes for both ALG and the Junkers.

The following are the current end game destinations coupled with the fields that will fuel them.

New Berlin > Vierland Prison
New Berlin > Bornholm Depot
New Berlin > Culebra Smelter
New Berlin > LPI Huntsville
New Berlin > LPI Sugarland
New Berlin > Tripoli Shipyard
New London > BPA Newgate
New London > Invergordon Space Port
New London > Valetta Shipyard
Sigma 13 > Valetta Shipyard
Sigma 13 > Tripoli Shipyard
Sigma 13 > Fuchu Prison

Now, here's the thing about Liberty as a strong mining zone for scrap. The first complication is that many of the destinations near Liberty end up becoming overly nerfed due to proximity to scrap fields. Such as LPI prisons, Culebra Smelter and so on. Secondly they cannot compete with Sigma/Berlin/London scrap fields for export to Gamma/Alpha.

Third is, of course, the subtle hope to encourage players away from Liberty. Which is coupled again with the fact that artifact/cardamine trade runs terminate in Liberty.

So.

Right now I'm going to be sticking with powering up Berlin/London/13 scrap mining and leaving Liberty powered down for the time being. Once the final kinks are out of that system we'll move into the next stage. Powering up Liberty.

Where the goal of ore mining is to spend more time mining and less time trading the nature of scrap demands that the overall value of the individual commodity remain low, necessitating a higher mining yield. So Junker/ALG bonus' will be much higher than standard mining which will enable them to harvest vast swaths of scrap in short order but leave your average joe sitting around scratching their head as they try to figure out what is good loot and what isn't.

Which will allow a Salvager to fill itself in short order, or a couple of Recyclers to load up a pirate train in the bat of an eye.

If you spot a softspot in the logic here feel free to point it out. If you feel that the softspot is that Junker bases should buy ore for 10000 credits a unit and that they should be able to mine it while sitting at a quickdock point please feel free to boil your head.