Miner

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Your workplace.

Your workplace.

Your workplace.

The magnet.

Your workplace.

Your workplace.

Your workplace.

Your workplace.

Your workplace.

You haul 16 tons and what do you get? Radiation poisoning and blown up, most likely. The Miner is a special engineering role tasked with procuring ore for the station. Miners start in their own area with an intra-departmental arc smelter somewhere and a catwalk to the mineral magnet. A shuttle to the old mining outpost is also available.

Your purpose in life

Being a miner is a mostly solitary job amidst cold space, but a skillful mining shift can be of enormous benefit to the station, gathering precious ores by the hundreds. Quartermasters, roboticists, and mechanics will always be thankful for the proper materials for their job, and people using the public arc smelter will be besides themselves with excitement when you bring them cool, new materials.

You also get a Quantum Telescope in your department so you pull in particularly mineral-rich asteroids. Expect the Research team to come knocking at your door to use so they can configure the long-range teleporter and go to all the cool hip locations.

Miners are equipped with the yellow-striped engineering headset to stay in touch with each other. To use it, simply type:

• say :e I'm gonna use a mining charge, watch out!

Gettin' to work

Your primary gear is a space suit, a jetpack (goes on your back), a mining belt (goes on your waist), and a pair of optical meson scanners (goes on your eyes). Other essential equipment includes ore satchels, concussive charges, a geological scanner and a powered pickaxe. You can take whichever of these you will need and put them in your pockets or the mining belt.

Alternatively, claim a mining pod instead and upgrade it with better sensors, ore scoop, and magnet link array. Though you won't be able to mine rocks until you get a hold of some plasmastone for plasma cutters, you'll collect ore astonishingly quickly, especially if you have the other miners break rocks while you scoop up the ores.

All set? Great! Exit the airlocks, take a short walk on the catwalks, and find the mineral magnet's control terminal (it's often in its own little shed with a bunch of other machines.) Pull in an asteroid and start mining!. If you're in a pod, use the remote control to interface with the magnet directly. You can only pull in asteroids so often, unless you enable the override. There is also an automatic mode, which (if there aren't any obstructions) activates the magnet as soon as the cooldown has finished. Beware: uncollected ore is lost in the process!

Particularly math-savvy miners may want to try out the quantum telescope. This nifty computer allows you to pinpoint and pull in especially mineral-rich asteroids, including erebite and miracle matter asteroids! To use to it, click the Scan button to get a list of interesting objects to home in on. Select a Celestial Object to focus in on, click on a location on the map, and click Scan. It'll then give you the distance to the object but not the direction, so you usually need to click and scan more locations to get a better bearing, sort of like a galactic Marco Polo with space rocks (particularly geometry-savvy miners may be able to use triangulation to get faster results).

If you can get within 25 LY of the asteroids, you'll see a little asteroid icon. Click on it and then the Track button in the lower right to automatically its location to the mineral magnet controller. You can then pull in in via Activate telescope Location and mine it to your heart's content.

Maintenance is required at regular intervals - simply use a welding tool on the mineral magnet to repair minor damage. In case of severe structural damage, the wiring has to be replaced with a cable coil first. If it has suffered catastrophic damage, replacement parts are required to build a new magnet by using the existing chassis.

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 the mining fabricator has to offer.

Note: The majority of ore and gems won't be usable in the mining fabricator unless you process them with the material processor or its portable version first.

Sturdy Metal, High Energy Conductor?! Help!

For a description of advanced mining equipment and the various ore classifications, check out Guide to Mining.

Profiting

If the warmth and affection of your fellow station crew isn't enough to motivate you, miners have some other incentives to do their dirty work.

• Using your ID card on a barcode printer will add your bank account information to any barcodes printed. A crate marked this way that ships from the cargo bay will split the sale profits with you, directly depositing to your account.

• The quartermasters themselves can occasionally get their hands on stuff that is useful to you, and generally look for a fair trade.

• Special ores are required for a lot of higher-end gear and constructions. Cool pod equipment and custom alloys are some of the best stuff you can get through the work of miners.

• Miners are also in a good position to go on salvaging missions in deep space, finding cool loot and making money in more dangerous, but also more exciting conditions.

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. Miners 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.

Syndicate miners

By default, a miner has access to EVA gear and top-quality internals, a remote area to spawn their items, and the ability to manufacture toys that the rest of the station does not easily get. 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. Use your cool gear for hit-and-run style attacks on the station, retreating into the depths of space before sec can nab you.

The miner also has access to a special mining charge hacker. It turns regular mining charges from concussive to explosive and allows you to stick them onto anything (walls, floors, etc.) Mining charges are cheap to produce and you can carry several on your belt at once, so you do the math. A little bit of regular mining work will pay off as well. The mechanical boots will let you avoid security and vigilantes in space, and an industrial armor set will let you safely blow things up at point-blank range. A well-equipped mining traitor is basically an one-man nuke ops team. Make sure to gloat as you hold the station at your mercy.

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