You have to be extremely careful with the mineral separator if you tweak mineral prices.
I actually want players in my server to lose money if they break down a lvl 5 mineral. Do the math on this. It can get nuts.
The reason for this is because I want to lower the value of level 5 minerals immensely. They are worth 5k each in my server now. All loot numbers are at .1. If you don\'t do this, even at .1, the first lucky pirate station you find with lvl 5 minerals could still drop anywhere from 50 to 100 of them in a stack. Now you\'re rich again from one pirate station that takes 1 minute to destroy.
So I made lvl 1 worth 25 (instead of 10) lvl 2 is 100, lvl 3 is 500, lvl 4 is 1000 and lvl 5 is 5000. To combat exploiting mineral separators, downgrading a mineral gives you 2 of the lower mineral instead of 10.
To get people going to planets make Cacti, Wood and Ice Crystal all worth 100 a piece. This makes a single planet find of those types worth anywhere from 165k to 270k in about 20 to 30 minutes of work with a small sized mining ship.
Asteroids are also useful now. With my medium sized mining ship (2200 blocks or so), I can mine out a medium asteroid in about 15 minutes and score around 90 to 100k credits if I pick the right roids.
Now to combat all the ways people can just find things that will make them perma-rich, you now need to make ALL hull blocks except for brown cost 1 credit. Make power blocks cost 100 credits. Make Plexi-glass 1 credit. Make wedges 250. and other similar tweaks. Hull is infinitely easy to get anyway so just remove the squares from the economy by making them worth 1. Now if you mine a random space station out, you can make 100k or so off of it by selling the power cores.
The reason for all of this is that if you go with the standard economy, mining is pointless, planets are pointless and asteroids are pointless except for just building stuff on them all.
In this economy, I spent about 7 hours of playtime working my way up to a fairly large mining ship. Now I can make about 150k to 250k in an hour if I work at it really hard. It\'s a good progression for a server and the plan is to gradually put pirates in tougher blueprint ships as the world gets filled with more powerful player ships.
I\'ll post my economy file for everyone to have a look at if you wish. It still need a lot of tweaking but I feel like we\'re on the right path.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i62u6jaulcbte8f/BlockConfig.xml