Miner

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Mining

Mining was added in the Beta 3 update on the 28th of October as a new way to make money. Like other "profession" in Elite: Dangerous and unlike other games mining is not a skill or something you have to "research", or "train" your character and is only depent on you.

Equipment

To mine you need a couple of things.

The first thing that is worth a seconds thought is the ship you are going to use. To mine you most likely want something that has a decent amount of cargo hold, but that is quite manouverable. The Cobra Mk. III is reccomended, but if you are doing mining from scratch you are going to be using the Sidewinder Mk. I which is only put at a disadvantage with less cargo hold and fewer hardpoints.

What ship you are using is up to you, all works. Some better than others, but all works. However, two vital components are needed to mine at all. Those are the Mining Laser and the Refinery. These are relatively cheap (5000-15000 credits) components. The closest place to find them if you have just started the game is in Styx at Wingrove Platform.

Mining locations

To mine you have to have something to mine. That something in Elite: Dangerous is asteroids. These can be found in some systems. In the Targets menu on your left hand you will find targets (if you have information about the system, either bought it from the Carthographics service or scanned the system yourself) with names similar to this: [PLACEHOLDER]

Lock on to it and get into hyperspace just like you would when going to another station or a planet. When you have dropped out of hyperspace you will most likely be staring at a massive, bright star. Ignore that. Scattered with varying (asteriod ring to asteroid ring) density you will find mineable asteroids there.

The mining process

Once you have aquired the equipment and found yourself a nice asteroid to mine you are ready to start mining. To do so you have to make sure you bind your Mining Laser just like you do with any other weapon in game. If you have more than just Mining Laser on your hardpoints you will find that making a seperate fiering group for the Mining Lasers is a good idea. When you have bound the lasers correctly you can then fly up to the asterioid and blast away at it. You have to hold down your trigger for a while (depending on the quality of Mining Laser you have bought) before a piece of rock chips off. When you get the hang of it you will find that waiting until you have mined several rocks off the asteroid before collecting them will save you a lot of time.

Having chipped off a piece of rock you now have to scoop it up with your cargo scoop. To do so you have to engage your scoop (just like you would with your landing gear or hardpoints), then fly slowly towards the target. Upon engaging the Cargo Scoop you will find that a blue box have appeared on the lower left of you HUD. On there you should, if pointing at the rock, see a icon in the crosshairs (the box). Continue to fly slowly towards the rock while holding rock in the middle of the crosshairs of the cargo scoop crosshair until you have successfully aquired it.

Now that you have the rock in your hold you will find that, if going to the right hand menu under the tab Cargo, you have some names of minerals in there. Press the minerals you want to refine. Maybe you have picked up 15% gold and 10% Indium. Then you can press the gold and the Indium so that when you next time pick up some Indium and Gold they will "stack" ontop of what you have already. The % stands for the amount of percent it is of a full "stack". One full "stack" gives you 1 ton of cargo (one unit of whatever mineral you have collected).

Selling the minerals

It is now the extra cargo hold of a Cobra Mk. III comes in over something like an Eagle Mk II or a Sidewinder Mk. I. You have to go to a station to sell whatever minerals you have collected. This is easier said than done. Most systems and stations do not want minerals and your best shot is therefore to look for systems that are "Refinery economies" because they are interested in materials they can refine and sell at a higher price. Styx is an example of such a system.

The value of a mineral is scaled to the supply/demand meaning that selling minerals where there are tons of other players selling the same mineral is a bad idea. Systems that are both refinery economies and have an asteroid field will tend to give you a worse price compared to what you get if you travel to somewhere more distant to the source (soruce being asteriod fields).

Styx is an excellent example of where we see a massive drop in prices. It has both mining equipment for sale, is very close to the spawn point for new players, have mineable asteriod fields and is a refinery economy (means it will have a constant demand for minerals to refine), it is therefore going to be very popular to sell minerals there, which is going to lead to a price drop due to a saturated marked.

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