Cogmap1/Miner

The Miner is a special Engineering role tasked with exploring and gathering the wealth offered by a nearby asteroid field. To facilitate this, Miners start and base out of a separate facility on another z-level from the main station, connected by a two-way fast shuttle. Being a Miner means a mostly solitary job amidst cold space, and you have access to as much or more EVA gear than EVA itself on the station proper. The job can be hazardous, especially given its isolation; Security almost never responds to calls from the Mining Outpost no matter what happens, so antagonists often mark it as a murder-with-no-consequences zone. On many shifts, Mining department does not contribute measurably to the station and its operation, either due to hostile action, a lack of miners signing up, or incompetence. A skillful Mining shift, however, can be of enormous benefit, gathering precious ores by the hundreds and using the Cargo Teleporter to send them where they're needed in a matter of moments.

All in all, mining is a job that is very easy to do, but quite a bit harder to do well. For details, check out the Guide to Mining.

Gettin' to work

Miners are equipped with the yellow-striped Engineering Headset allowing them regular radio contact as well as a special Engineering channel that, while rarely used, can be more useful or private. Speaking using any special headset can be accomplished with :h before the message. On many shifts, Miners actually use this channel more than other Engineering personnel to coordinate mining efforts or conduct search-and-rescue operations for lost miners or anybody else who wanders off the main z-level and requires assistance. The only way back to the main station once one leaves its level, short of a teleporter, is the Mining shuttle.

As you start the round, walk over to one of the lockers and unlock it. Get rid of your backpack and suit up in an engineering space suit, breath mask, and jetpack. When you pick up the jetpack, double click on it in your hand and turn down the release valve pressure to 21. This is plenty of air to keep you alive, any more is a waste and you will be using a lot of your air just to maneuver in space. Grab your mining belt and fill it up with the 3 mining satchels, a geological scanner, and 3 low-yield mining explosives. Also bring along a space GPS. Ditch your PDA - you will never have a use for it. You will also want a cargo transporter and your handy power pick. Also don't forget to put Optical Meson Scanners on your eyes or your job identifying good veins will be much, much harder.

All set? Great! Click the jetpack icon in the top left to turn on your jetpack, and then click the breath mask icon to start your flow of oxygen. Head south until you're out on the asteroid belt. As a miner, your biggest preoccupations are going to be harvesting as much ore and as many gems as humanly possible, moving those things to where they're useful, and blinging yourself out with the coolest stuff your fabricator has to offer.

Speed Mining

The first thing to understand about mining is that while you have a pick, you should basically never be using it. Mining individual squares takes forever, and there is no chance whatsoever of you getting things done fast enough if you resort to that. Instead, you want mining explosives. Lots and lots of mining explosives.

You start off with a decent number of low-yield explosives, and your fabricator can produce the good shit if you bring it enough rocks. Before you leave, check the fabricator for the recipe of Concussion Charge and make a mental note of the materials you need. Then drift out into the asteroid field, exploring rocks that look unusual. Clicking your geological scanner on a rock will make it tell you what ores are contained in it. Use your pick to tunnel in to interesting veins if you need. Clicking on your geological scanner in your hand will make it survey the surrounding area for anomalies, letting you know if there is any danger around.

After you find a vein you need, tunnel in close, take an explosive off your belt, and click on the rock you want to blow up. Run away after you get confirmation you've set the charge, because you CAN blow yourself to hell like this! Come back a short time later, and you should find the vein mostly obliterated and the ore ready for your collection. If there are a few stubborn rock formations, hit them with your pick - they should be weakened by the blast and easy to harvest.

Try to fill up your ore pouches every time you go out. When you have enough of the ores you need, go back to the mining station, remove the ore pouch from your belt, and use it on one of the fabricators. You will empty all the usable ore into it. Now make yourself a pack of 5 Concussion Charges. Pick up as many as you can.

Now that you have decent bombs to work with, go back out into the asteroid belt and start blowing up a little of everything you find. Do not recklessly set bombs on everything, as the explosions will lag the server and make everyone pissed off at you. That said, every time you see a new kind of mineral, try putting a bomb on it to get a nice load of the associated ore. Have some fun exploring, and revisit the Mining Outpost frequently to offload your finds into crates. After putting your finds into a crate, be sure to use your cargo transporter to send it back to the station. The Quartermaster is always happy to get stuff from Mining, but if the station doesn't have one it's also fine to send it to Robotics, which goes through a lot of ore. Keep an eye on how many bombs you have and how many more you can make. Don't let yourself run out.

Once you are reasonably practiced, you should be able to produce 400, 500, or even more ore by the 25 minute mark in a round. You may not get lauded as a hero since people tend to expect so little out of Mining, but you will have a lot of fun blowing things up and learning how the coolest fabricators on the station work.

Gettin' your bling blang

The mining fabricator makes some of the coolest toys on the station, things that would be mercilessly abused by players if the mining station weren't so remote and hard to get access to. Before making anything with the fabricator, it would do you very well to turn up the speed. Click the fabricator with an empty hand, then scroll all the way down to the bottom, where you will see the Adjust Speed Setting option. Click it and enter 3 into the box that comes up. This will make the fabricator consume 3 times more power, in exchange for producing things 3 times as fast. Power is never a serious problem in the mining outpost, so you are essentially getting a bonus for nothing here.

Laser Drill

The first thing you will want is a better tool. The power pick will frequently fail to get desirable minerals out of rocks, and more importantly it is considered a 'hot' form of mining by the game, which means that if there are any explosive minerals around, using your power pick will cause them to detonate, which can ruin your day pretty quickly. Furthermore, your power pick will run out of charges after mining 20 rocks, while the laser drill never needs anything.

Getting a laser drill, fortunately, is not hard after you've perfected the art of mining with bombs. You can often replace your power pick in the first 5 minutes of the round after you know what you're looking for. Simply don't get distracted and use your initial low-yield charges wisely. After you've mined out a few good rocks, load the ore into your satchel and head back to the mining outpost, dump your ore in, and make your new toy.

Industrial Space Armor

One of the perks to being a miner is the ability to create the Industrial Space Armor, which is pretty much hands down the coolest set of threads on the station. In addition to acting as a space suit, it provides you with a lot of protection against radiation and explosion hazards. It's also part of the crew objective for miners to produce a couple suits of the stuff, so there's no reason not to go for it!

Most of the materials you see in its creation should be simple to recognize from your adventures out on the asteroid belt. The one you probably don't recognize right off is Uqill.

Uqill is not a mineral, but a gem. It counts toward the 10 you have to find for your crew objective, but needs to be mined out of gem nodes in asteroids. There is no way to tell that the gem you are about to unearth is specifically Uqill, but Uqill occurs most often in Pharosium and Mauxite veins. When you're near an asteroid, use your geological scanner to see if there are any gems in it. If there are none, move on. If there's only one, it is probably most efficient to simply dig it out manually. If there's more than one in roughly a 4x4 area, dig to the center and let a bomb handle the rest. After you have enough Uqill shards, run back to the mining outpost, put the Uqill in the fabricator like any other ore, and make your toy.

Mechanized Boots

Mechanized Boots increase your running speed to the point where it can be difficult to control at times. They are a real thrill to run around with, and if someone is trying to shoot you with these puppies on, you'll almost see the steam issuing out of their ears after a certain point. They are very useful for exploration missions since you can cover large stretches of nothing in about half the time, but the materials used in their production competes with the other fun stuff that the fabricator can make.

Concussive Gauntlets

These gloves let you mine without tools. Simply punch rocks with your hands and they will disintegrate before your mighty fury. Unfortunately, this isn't really useful in practice. The Laser Drill is cheaper, just as effective, and the extra free hand is not really useful out on the asteroids. These gloves will also not protect you from electric shocks the way that insulated gloves do, nor will they make your unarmed punches more deadly. A cool toy to show off, but one without any real use.

More space suits

If you really want to dumbfound the station, you can mass-produce engineering space suits and jetpacks from your fabricators, then stuff them into crates and teleport them back to the station proper. These are items that people normally break into EVA storage for, so simply giving them away hand over fist is one of the few ways to have the entire station singing Mining's praises.

Crew Objectives

As a loyal crew member, you can sometimes be assigned some strictly optional objectives to keep yourself busy while you wait for something to happen. As a miner, you can expect to see the following:

Find at least 10 gems among all miners
Just go out and slap concussive charges on thick veins, the gems will pop out almost on their own. You merely need to reveal them to complete this objective, they do not need to be shipped to the station.

Create at least 3 suits of industrial space armor
You want one for yourself anyway, so if you're of a mind to complete this objective, just get some more Uqill and run the fabricators.

Treachery

A traitor miner does not seem to happen often, which is probably for the best as a traitor miner is theoretically one of the worst things that can happen to a station. By default, a miner has access to EVA gear and top-quality internals, a completely remote area to spawn his traitor gear, and easy access to added toys that the station does not get (mechanized boots in particular are amazing for a traitor). Miners often have access to other identities, whether due to their colleagues spawning brain dead or by a quick murder of a co-worker out in the unforgiving void of space. They also have limitless supply of explosives. Under normal circumstances, mining charges may only be attached to an asteroid, nullifying its potential for widespread havoc. However, a little application of an emag, and the station can watch in horror as that restriction disappears and a suited, unknown man in a mining space suit charges down the main hallway, slapping bombs down in his wake and running far faster than any mere mortal. This is even more horrifying when you realize that miners naturally have access to the singularity room, and can free the hungry force of nature with one emagged charge.

For better or for worse, a traitor Miner plays a lot like an Operative. Only a traitor Scientist has a hope of matching the raw explosive force a Miner can bring to bear, and even then the scientist probably can't do it as quickly.

---