Mining in Star Citizen is one of the best way to earn some money if you have a miner ship. We will be talking about how to get started with ship mining in Star citizen in this guide. Ship mining in star citizen is actually really easy to do. If you don’t have a ship that is able to mine for resources, It is highly recommended to just rent one. If you are new in Star Citizen, we recommend you to check out our Star Citizen beginners guide as well.
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How to Use a Mining Ship in Star Citizen?
In order to start your mining adventure on Star Citizen, you will need a ship that’s capable of mining. You could either buy or rent a ship to start mining in the verse. To find minerals or other materials, you can head to various planets, moons, and asteroids.
Let’s say you spawned your ship which is the Prospector and headed to one of the moons in the Stanton system. There are obviously also other areas where you can mine such as asteroid fields around the arc stations. The moons around Arccorp are actually best places to mine due to their frequency of high value items. The different types of ores you can mine are quite vast.
Here is some steps to get you started with mining:
- Warp to the moon you want to mine ores
- Head down to the surface
- Deploy the mining tool by pressing M key
- Occasionally press the Tab key to scan around
- When your scanner finds the resources, fly to the resource beacons at the site
- Point the mining tool to the rock
- Wait for the scan to complete
Once you completed the scan, on the right side it will tell you following specifications of the rock:
- The resistance
- Fragility
- The type of ore
- Instability
- Mass
- Composition
The Inert material is basically dirt. To decide which resources you should take, there are some online tools that has up-to-date prices on all mineable ores. Quantanium, for example, is the most precious resource in Star citizen universe.
When mining Quantanium, there are a few important things you need to know. Quantanium is an unstable material. This means that from the moment you collect it, you have a time window until it goes critical and takes you and your ship out with it after breaking apart.
You can fire up the mining laser and increase its power by scrolling up and down on your mouse. You need to wait until the rock disintegrates so that you can harvest the big boulders. The not only makes them collectible but it also separates the resources among the smaller chunks. So if a boulder has 50 of a specific resource for example, some of the following rocks might have a hundred percent of other more valuable resource.
It is advisable after scanning the smaller rocks and deciding which ones to collect. Press right click on your mouse to switch to the collection tool and fire away at your desired rocks to collect them.
Make sure not to overload your ship since this will currently cause a total loss of the access ores when spawning the ship or logging out.
Best Ships for Mining
MISC Prospector
The prospector is a wonderful entry level ship that has lots of cargo space and upgradeability. The rental cost is about 50k aUEC. You may find the a spot to rent this ship in the mining support center at this console.
ARGO Mole
The ARGO Mole is a multi-crew mining ship operated by three crew members with three independent mining turrets. With 96 SCU it also has three times the loading capacity of the Prospector.
Drake Cutlass Black
This Cutlass Black is also a recommended ship to rent due to its low price but very large cargo space. And it is available in the mining support center.
Mining vehicle for Solo player: Greycat ROC
The Greycat ROC is a mining vehicle for surfaces of moons or planets. It can break up large deposits of gemstones and absorb the resources. The ROC can be bought in-game for 172.000 aUEC in Lorville (New Deal). At the Plegde Store the vehicle costs $63,80.
Upgrading Mining Lasers
In some cases, some of the rocks that you want to mine will be too resistant for your mining laser. You can obviously upgrade your mining lasers to a powerful one. The lasers come with many different aspects. If you are a new starter, we recommend you to stick with the laser you have till you save lots of money to buy a decent mining ship.
