Star Citizen - Did CIG kill the Prospector?

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!

#salt-e-mike reacts:

The changes to mining in Star Citizen 3.19 have been met with varying opinions from players. Some believe that the Prospector has been made obsolete while others think it is in a better place than ever before. This review discusses the various changes made to mining in 3.19, including an update to the mining mode UI, the addition of a new minable, the distributions of minables, a rebalance of mining equipment, a rebalance of sale prices of minerals, the addition of a stability bonus for the Mole when multiple lasers are mining the same minable, and the introduction of some rare minerals appearing only in certain locations.

The main goal of the changes was to encourage multi-crew gameplay, and to some extent this has been achieved. Although Prospectors will not be able to successfully mine every minable, they are still very useful when used with a Mole and even when used solo. The rebalance of the sale prices of minerals also had some effect on the Continuum meta. However, due to the resource pool being too small, refineries are still overloaded and a more effective solution needs to be implemented.

Lastly, mining bags are now able to be detached, with the bags for the Mole being slightly bigger than those for the Prospector. This creates an interesting opportunity for cargo ship runs, however, it is still a bit impractical due to a lack of designated drop-off points for the bags and the bags being unable to be purchased in stores. Nevertheless, all in all it appears that these changes have generally been well received by the community and are an improvement overall.