View source for Talk:Miner/@comment-79.218.170.47-20190708003649/@comment-79.218.170.47-20190708005727

For anyone who is curious:

Get a ship with prospectors, collectors, a surface scanner, seismic charge launcher, abrasion laser and a pulse wave analyzer. The bigger the ship, the better. If you want to play it safe, make sure it's tanky.

Once you've done that, find an empty system that has ice rings, I used eddb for that. Surface scan the rings you find with the probes, if there's a void opal hotspot, jump into it. Go around and see how frequent asteroids with void opals are in that spot. I'd turn on night vision and watch out for extremely bright yellow asteroids. Get close to them and see if they have fissures with no material blob on top of them (sometimes they have both). If they do, prospect them and if you want, use your seismic charges to crack it, grab your spoils with collector limpets. If you find that the frequency is pretty low and it'd take ages to find one, try to find another spot. Frequency seems pretty random depending on the spot, so sometimes it'll be pretty rare, other times you'll stumble upon motherlodes constantly.

The reason you want to go to an uncolonized system for that is simply NPCs. My mining python only has minimal defensive capabilities and if I'm in an inhabited system, NPC ships keep spawning. In uninhabited systems you'll only have NPCs spawn when you drop in, which will go away after a while, then you won't have to deal with any during your farming run. If you only have limpets in your hold, they won't attack you and then you can just wait it out or move away from them.

Now, once you got your hold filled, open up inara (or another similar site) and go to galaxy - commodities - common commodities and on the right you'll choose void opals from the dropdown menu. Optionally you can also input your current system if you want to know what station is closest to you. Once you applied the seach filter, open up the "best sell" tab. You'll find stations selling them for more than a million per unit. Fly there, offload, get rich. Also, watch NPCs that try to interdict you.