Can anyone explain Fleet Mining?

[Edymnion]

Interesting, does your fleets work each and every time with out flaw ?
Last i tried, the drones where lame in the head and would often not start. this was with default sector sizes which is what i am blaming.

is this the fleet you are referencing ASI Hyena Class Type C Fleet Mining System

Known bug with mining drones is that sometimes you just get a "bad core" that won't work at all no matter what you do to it.

The workaround is to build a bare minimum drone (core, 1 salvage module, 1 storage, no hull, etc), and then test it before you blueprint it. If it mines, then you're golden. Build the rest of the drone, blueprint it, and it'll be fine for all the new ones you spawn in. If it doesn't mine, scrap it entirely and start over again, nothing you do will fix it.

After that, try to keep the core in line with the salvage arrays. I prefer to put my main output for the array directly behind the core, as the AI can derp out when the core and the array have vastly different views on the target (namely it seems the array firing AI and the core view AI fight each other for dominence, so the drone tries to line up the core and the output at the target block at the same time, meaning neither wins when they're far apart).

The AI is bad right now, but it can be built around.

 

[DrTarDIS]

iF YOUR DRONES AREN'T WORKING IN SINGLE PLAYER, TRY RUNNING 2 VERSIONS OF STARMADE AT THE SAME TIME: ONE AS A SERVER, THE OTHER AS YOUR CLIENT(CONNECT "ONLINE" AND MANUALLY IMPUT "LOCALHOST:4242" AS THE SERVERNAME)...screw you capslock...
Anyways, fleet AI breaks on server-side the same way logic breaks on server side. If there's "too much" for it to do, it just halts. Splitting the server to dedicated sort-of helps with this.
If you're doing it online on someone else's server, you can sometimes "fix" buggy fleet AI or logic by leaving the entities in the fleet (or with frozen logic) to unload. as long as you are more than 2 sectors away(1 jump) or you log-out for a minute or two, the sector unloads and "flushes" the bad data. When you reload it *might* start working again. Having a "busy sector" with lots of entities, lots of logic, or a combination of the two seems to "break" things more often as well.