Welcome back citizens! Today I’m discussing the changes to mining introduced in Star Citizen patch 3.19. The changes are aimed at decreasing the prevalence of Solo mining, encourage multi-crew mining, and even out the rewards for mining different elements.
The first changes to be discussed are those made to FPS Mining. The user interface for ships has been updated, making it easier to understand and less cluttered. They’ve added a new ‘Extraction Mode’ to the multi-tool mining attachment and a rare, valuable mineral can now be mined in FPS. While the extraction beam improvement is a great quality of life addition, it hasn’t yet made FPS Mining particularly attractive.
Most of the changes to Rock Mining were minor, but the most significant effect was an increase in the spawn probability of minables. Mining lasers have been rebalanced and now have a minimum power setting to prevent the issue of two lasers being applied to the same rock, greatly decreasing difficulty. Ship Mining has undergone a major overhaul with the rebalancing of mining equipment and the addition of a greater range of minable sizes. This greatly encourages multi-crew gameplay, but it might give Prospectors a disadvantage as some minables require a Mole to mine.
Finally, certain minerals will only appear in certain locations, encouraging trading, and sale prices of minerals have been rebalanced. The ability to detach mining bags from ships has been added, but refining the contents of the bags won’t be useful until the Expanse is released. On the whole, the changes made to mining in 3.19 have achieved their goal of encouraging players to group up while mining, but there are still some balance issues that need to be addressed. Thanks for watching and fly safe!
