Star Citizen’s patch 4.7 introduced crafting and mining changes that have made mining frustrating due to the rarity of high-quality ore, low yields, inefficient refining processes, and cumbersome inventory management. Additionally, challenges with blueprint acquisition and mission mechanics further hinder the mining and crafting experience, highlighting the need for improved UI, clearer systems, and smoother gameplay in future updates.
The recent patch 4.7 in Star Citizen introduced crafting and significant changes to mining, but many players feel that mining has become nearly impossible or at least very frustrating. The core issue lies in the quality of minable ore, which is determined by a normal distribution with quality levels ranging up to 1,000. However, due to game settings, realistically players can only find about 700 quality at most, and the chance of finding ore above quality 500 is roughly 3%. This low probability is by design and controlled through minimum quality thresholds and modifiers applied to different ore instances within deposits, making high-quality ore rare and difficult to obtain.
The distribution of ore quality is further complicated by the way deposits contain multiple instances of ores with varying quality modifiers—typically one high-quality instance with a modifier of 1 and a low-quality, high-volume instance with a modifier around 0.49. This means that most deposits yield a small amount of high-quality ore and a larger amount of lower quality ore. While this system allows the developers to finely balance ore quality differences across regions and types, it results in a frustrating experience for miners, especially given the overall low yield and the significant loss of material during refining, which can leave players with very little usable output after hours of mining.
The mining loop is also hampered by user interface and inventory management issues. Players often accumulate dozens of small stacks of refined materials with different quality levels, leading to hundreds of individual boxes that are cumbersome to manage. The current refinery UI lacks a “refine all” button, forcing players to manually select each batch for refining. This inefficiency, combined with the reduced refinery yields introduced in patch 4.6 to control cargo volume, makes mining feel unrewarding and tedious. The upcoming stacking function in the new inventory UI may help somewhat but won’t fully resolve these frustrations.
Crafting itself faces challenges, particularly in blueprint management and acquisition. There is currently no easy way to check which blueprints a player owns without access to a fabricator, and the planned Moby Glass app to address this has no set release date. Blueprints are mostly obtained through missions, but only a fraction of the total blueprints are available this way, with many still to be added in future updates. Mission rewards for blueprints are randomized and poorly communicated, requiring external tools to understand what can be earned. Additionally, mission turn-in mechanics for mining and collection missions are clunky and vulnerable to interference by other players due to lack of secure hangar spaces and awkward elevator interactions.
Overall, while crafting and mining are intended to be key progression paths in Star Citizen, the current implementation has significant design and quality-of-life issues. The rarity of high-quality ore, low yields, UI shortcomings, and mission-related inconveniences combine to make mining feel unrewarding and frustrating. The developer’s focus on control and balancing is understandable but comes at the cost of player experience. Improvements such as better inventory management, clearer blueprint systems, and smoother mission mechanics are needed to make mining and crafting more engaging and satisfying for players in future updates.