Having trouble figuring out mining/harvesting. I have my mining colony ship, and I ordered it to land. It said it would be a new outpost. I have my small harvester around the planet as well. How do I extract the ore?
Printable View
Having trouble figuring out mining/harvesting. I have my mining colony ship, and I ordered it to land. It said it would be a new outpost. I have my small harvester around the planet as well. How do I extract the ore?
If you select the small harvester there should be a button next to the move command that looks like a planet with an arrow coming out of it. That's the harvest button. Once you've pressed it you'll see some new buttons come up to set a source / destination planet. Once the command is confirmed your harvester will start collecting ore from your mining colony and taking it to it's destination planet.
So set the source and destination and the small harvester should harvest? This is harder than I thought it would be ;)
I think I got it. They are going back and forth between planets. Is there a way to kind of see what is assigned to each ship? This could get confusing down the road when I have a bunch of ships and forget what is doing what.
Edit* think I found the answer for this too.
Just an opinion but it seems a little redundant so have the buttons for source and destination planets appear above the planet you click on and in the upper right corner. Probably having the icons show up in one or the other spot would be sufficient.
People like them in different places. Maybe it should be an option in where you want the menu to show. On the planet, or under the top bar. I guess what would have to happen then in cases like navigation where you can set it on a sector, I would need a menu to appear on the sector, like it does on the planet. So you would end up with [Enter Sector] [Select - if nav active].Quote:
Originally Posted by Trom
We'll give it some thought. For now though I don't expect it to change.
Can someone give me some general direction as what to do? So much to do here.
- I have a mining colony ship on a planet in another solar system. Can't do anything there yet though.
- I have 2 small harvesters harvesting a planet near my original homeplanet.
- Currently building my first orbital shipyard.
- I have 3 probes just scouting around my area. I have already found a few players.
Thanks in advance ;)
Sounds like you're off to a good start. Generally when I start playing the first thing I do is build one harvester for every planet in my home solar system and get them started with transferring resources to my home world. From there I build some probes and set them to exploring the galaxy. While I'm waiting on those guys to build I then go over to the tech tree menu and choose a specialty and get started with researching new technologies. Next I'd start planning out what solar systems you want to expand out to.
Where you go from there depends on your play style / specialty, etc.
roywall: Mining colonies will not produce a population. Only a colony ship will do that. Mining colonies will make it so a planet will produce resources that you can harvest. Imagine putting a drilling platform in the ocean. A real population isn't there, but instead you have workers extracting the materials for you. Once you have that in place you can send harvesters there to start collecting the ore.
Generally what I do to start is - Jump to my homeworld, go to the build menu start a ship yard. Then I go to skills choose my specialty, and queue up a few skills (Since I chose researcher I knew the first skill would complete while I was sleeping). I generally queue up skills to get me defensive abilities so if someone decided to attack me I'd be able to defend myself. I queue up to Stealth Orbitals.
I then return to my planet and create a few probes, and a few small harvs, and start harvesting my local system saving up for a colony ship, so I can expand my population. You require an actually colony to have the colony grow. Every 100 million in population you get 1 factory, to a max of 9 factories on a single planet.
There is no special way to build, and you sound like you are on a good route already. With the new game everyone is in the same boat, so many new options and so many different ways to grow your empire. Feel free to post questions. We will do all we can to try and answer them.
I see I see. Thanks for the great info.
Is there any way to see how much each harvester is grabbing each time it makes a trip back to my homeworld?
Edit- I just noticed my Orbital Shipyard said it should take 24 hours to build when I gave the order, yet its showing -329% complete and time left 102:57:10.
Yes and no. It is built in to the client to support that, but we have to fix one of the server packets before the data will show up.Quote:
Originally Posted by roywall
We are aware of this. It's actually a time display bug, the yard will still finish in the correct amount of time. When the server is corrected it should go to the proper time.Quote:
Originally Posted by roywall
Also you said you have a pair of mini-harvesters collecting from Thr same planet in your home system. One miniharvester is more than enough to harvest from a planet in your home system. Send the second harvester to a different planet. A single miniharvester is even enough if it is harvesting from a planet in an adjacent system from you. Once the planet is 2 or more systems you need to use a full size harvester or cargoship
How does mining work in terms of numbers? Do my outposts have a capacity of mining ships they can handle at a certain time? Or is it based on the rating of the planet? For example, I have a rock planet with +1Ku CO in the same solar system as my homeworld. I have 4 Small Harvesters and they have a 250u capacity. Does that mean that any more than 4 of these set up on a harvesting route with the rock planet will not be of any use (ignoring RO)?Quote:
Originally Posted by Spartanius
Does each of my colonies have it’s own store of CO/RO to use? I have come to this conclusion based on the fact that I have no total CO/RO counter in the interface.
How do I get my ships to stop where they are if they are set to go somewhere? I had my probes go all the way across my quadrant and they discovered some planets along the way, but I couldn’t stop and send the probes to the planets to look at them until the original waypoint was reached. Not only that, but when I click on something that is in transit, I have no idea where it’s going or even that it’s going anywhere.
Why can’t I rename my star?
There is no resource pooling across planets (unless you are a Trader and you have a high-level skill). You can move resources around with ships. You will use harvesters/cargo ships as much for moving resources between planets as you will for mining resources. Setup routes to bring resources from mining outposts into colonies, especially colonies that have shipyards.
Stars don't have names, planets do. Stars are just coordinates. You can only rename planets that you colonize or place a mining outpost on.
OK so I have to bring the resources to the planet where I will be building stuff, but how do I know what the efficient number of harvesting ships is just by looking at the planet (e.g. CO +1Ku, RO +0u)?
In economics terms, when does the marginal utility of an extra harvester equal zero?
Great questions. I am sure there are mathematical formulas to figure all of this out. What I do is simply keep building harvester/cargo ships until I get the proper balance. If I over-build ships, I generally reallocate a few of them later. Watch resourcing levels and determine if you need more or less and then tweak accordingly.
On the menu where you build ships if you touch the 'more' button under item details you can see the stats for a ship including it's speed and cargo capacity so that should help with your calculations.
The number by the + indicates how many resources of that type a planet gains per hour.
If you look at your ships under the global ship menu all ships that are currently active are listed under the AI Ships tab. If you then select a particular ship it will tell you where it's headed and you can jump to it's location or cancel it's movement. I'm not sure if it stops immediately or finishes moving first though, I know that was a change on the list but I don't recall if it went through just yet.
If I'm correct in assuming that every time the harvester goes from the mining planet to drop off the cargo and it's at full capacity (250u for a small harvester), then one should definitely be enough for a planet with an output of 1000u/hour because the harvester does a mining cycle every few minutes (when it's in the same solar system). I guess this gets more complicated once you are mining outposts that are several sectors away and you have to factor in the time it takes to get from your colony to the outpost. The time it takes alone is worth it to use a harvester with a higher capacity so you can fully utilize the output of the outpost.
You got it. :) Generally for the early planets you just need a small harvester. As you said though, when you start dealing with planets that are further away you have to take in to account the time it will take your ship to fly to the other sector and back.
Where you generally fill up a ship is when you start trading. If you find a good planet that someone is maintaining a lot of ore at, like a home world, or another colony and they keep a lot of ore there then trading with them will pretty much always fill your ship to capacity. I'm not going to bring in the trader and how he has the ability to short change you, but generally speaking trading is an excellent way to get resources.
There are also several skills that help with resource generation in the later game, so moving to bigger ships makes it easier if you have higher resource techs.
On a side note.. one thing to keep in mind about Mining Outpost ships, and Colony ships is when you land them on the planet the resources it took to build the ship are now available on the planet. Those are 2 ships you don't lose the resources for. Keep in mind though it could make the planet interesting for other parties...
I sent my first Outpost Ship to create an outpost on a lava planet at a star system a couple sectors away from my home planet. However, the ship just sat there orbiting the star once it got there and won't respond when I tell it to orbit the planet, or leave the sector. It is stuck :confused:
This sounds like you could set them to explore on their own, but didn't find a way. Did I misinterpret?Quote:
Originally Posted by Leedot
Oh, I just meant that I send them to some far off corner of the galaxy to see what they uncover along the way.
I got a question about Shipyards. Do I have one when I start the game? I imagine I do, since I'm building ships, but nothing is listed on my home planet in terms of existing "shipyard" or anything. Also, I have seen mentioned that building a shipyard early is important for its unit capacity I'm assuming, but if you research "advanced shipyards" you get an extra 10units to build there without having to build a shipyard at all....
Is that right??
I don't believe that is correct, as Advanced Shipyards is a Level 2 Tier, which I believe you can't have without first getting the Tier 1 complete, ie: Shipyard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Corinthian
And as far as starting with a shipyard, No. Think about it in like Star Trek terms. Harvesters and Mining Outpost ships are small in comarrison to Destroyers and their larger brothers. You can build a small boat in your garage, but you need a larger dry dock (shipyard) to build a destroyer. Or you can build a shuttle on earth, but you need a space station to build the USS Enterprise.
So I've consistently been able to build over my object limit on each of the three severs, so far up to -8 objects left (18/10). Is this a bug or am I somehow penalized for building beyond my means?
This is a bug they're working on, though I'm sure it is now substantially lower on their to do list. Especially since the servers keep crashing. I'm not sure what will happen to the extra ships when they do patch this particular bug. I'm staying within my unit limits, just to be safe.Quote:
Originally Posted by Snax