SpaceBourne 2 – Basic Mining Guide

Basic guide for mining, what you need, the technique, the finesses.

Basic Guide for Mining

All credit goes to japp_02!

What You Need Before You Start Mining

Mining is actually interesting and complex. You must first become member of the Miner Guild, go find a Miner’s Guild Station, go in the UI by pressing u, i or j then open the Guild tab, scroll down to the Miner Guild and you can see where the next mining station is located, in which star system. Go to this location, enter the station, enter the registration room and register. You will then get a hand mining laser and you are entitled to buy a mining ship which is almost free for you, you only buy its equipment.

Be sure that after buying your miner ship everything needed is installed, go through the service tab (F) of your ship and install everything, you need mining lasers, gatherers, misactor boosters. In the mining station, go to the Epic console which is near the wall and get everything.

Then, move to an asteroid field, which one doesn’t matter, there is one in every system.

What You Can Find on the Field

Once reached the asteroid field, always have the sun in your back so you can see which asteroid is near you.

Approach bodies enough so to see what ore type they have. You will see a scanning window displayed onscreen, once an asteroid is scanned it can also be located from far away by pointing at it.

Some ores are not worth your effort for mining because you don’t get payed enough. The best ones are in descending order:

• Wolfram.
• Platinum.
• Gold.
• Nickel.

There is another one called Assortak (badly typed ‘Assorted’ on the scan display) which actually pays 22k per ore, but there is only very few of it and difficult to locate inside the asteroid, not worth your time despite the good price, you won’t get enough of it in a reasonable time. So I suggest you keep going with the asteroid types above.

Mining Technique

In most cases you can see the ore clusters on the asteroid surface, if so start from there. Press 4 to liberate your Misactor and use it to mine, press C to change 1st person, 3rd person view (1st p. is much better); LMB to activate the mining laser. RMB to pick-up ores that appear (marked as triangles), MMB to launch a special device (see next section). Return your Misactor to the landing pad and press F to couple it again with the ship and transfer the ores to the cargo.

You can always leave your mining ship in first person (keep pressing G key) and mine manually with your hand mining laser, you equip this one in the Character section of the UI, place it on the right side, 3rd slot below the Armor suit. Is it worth to mine by hand? Currently in v. 1.6.1 of the game the hand laser may yield as much ore as the Misactor vehicle, but that is definitly going to change, making the mining vehicle much more efficient if it’s not already the case, you should expect far smaller results when mining by hand.

Also, your mining ship is not limited to mine in asteroid fields, you can go planetside and find valuable rocks to mine, watch for [?] icons that will appear showing you POIs to explore, one may indicate such a rock. The mining technique is the same on planets.

The Tools That Will Help You During the Mining

Your Misactor is equiped with several tools that you will need when mining because in most cases you won’t get such an easy run to find all ore clusters right on the surface of the asteroid, you need to dig inside and this without destroying the clusters and the ores in the process.

You get these 3 devices to help you:

• Tunnel digger.
• Bombs.
• Worms.

You only have a certain nr. of them, return with your Misactor to reload them.

• Tunnels & Bombs: A tunnel is made through the asteroid but destroys all on its path, same with the bomb which liberates a spheric area with its explosion.
• Worms: They make small tunnels through the asteroids moving slowly in a random path and keep yellow as they move, they stop if they find a ore cluster inside and turn red, depending on the distance you can then tunnel towards them and find an inside ore cluster, but beware that tunneling may destroy ores on its path.

Tip

Do not use the Tunnel digger to start with, you don’t know where the ore clusters are and if you destroy them you may not find such an asteroid type again anytime soon, so pay attention and chose the right mining plan. Start with sending a Worm into the asteroid and watch the route it takes. if it takes a longer route without stopping you’ll know that there isn’t any cluster so start now to make a tunnel and work from there to send other Worms in different directions. Follow visually the Worms so to watch when they stop. Don’t forget: They stop when finding a cluster!

It’s up to you to use these devices the best you can for rapid ore yielding.

If your mining ship is overloaded, don’t care you can warp anyway but it will be much slower.

Conclusion

What do you get for your hard mining work?

How many cash can you make per hour with mining asteroids? Not as much as farming villages or looting POIs planetside, but at least your criminal record will stay clean, this is important once you get in the Faction stuff of the game.