In the latest episode of Inside Star Citizen, lead system designer Thorsten Leimann explained how the team plans to upgrade the mining experience by adding new materials, giving specific aspects to each material, improving customization options for mining ships and making them more valuable, and finally striking some balance in multi-crew mining.
As one of the most profitable jobs in Star Citizen, you can currently mine with either a ship, Greycat, or multi-tool facility on foot. With Alpha 3.19, Cloud Imperium Games aims to make each of these methods more valuable, especially foot mining which is currently only used inside prison caverns.
The developers aim to introduce a number of new mineable materials with the upcoming alpha, such as iron, copper, genonide, and more. Some of these things like Genonide can only be found inside caves, which means you can only mine them with a multitool. Now, it is still not known how valuable the Genonide is, but this is already a good reason to explore caves on different planets.
Further, the developer will redistribute the material in the Stanton system. So, while high-value materials like Hadanite will still be distributed randomly, there will be a class of standard materials, including those mostly used in real life like aluminum, copper, and iron, that can only be discovered and mined on certain planets.
For example, copper will only be available at MicroTech. This is the beginning of a path to making each star system home to different materials, which means miners will need to travel to different planets and locations to mine certain items.
Should the balance change, Alpha 3.19 will introduce new ship mining parts such as mining heads. Each of these new parts would be a better fit by mining a specific material. So if you wanted to become all iron, for example, you would have a mining head that would make it easier to extract iron.
Multi crew mining will also get more balance which will help players with rock instability. Since materials will be more specific with certain aspects such as instability or mass, it will be more important for players to control the mining process, especially when doing it with multiple people. So, the new mining UI system will give you more hints about multiple factors like your distance from the rocks, mining challenge level as well as better control of the mining laser to avoid overcharging and exploding.
The development team is confident about bringing all of these changes to Alpha 3.19, but as always, there’s no release date for them. At the moment Alpha 3.18 is still in PTU testing and awaiting live server release.
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