Fleet Mining Wierdness

[Laltonel]

Hello all,

Short story is I made a small mining fleet as the new power update prevents me from creating the planet consumer size mining ships i used to use, so i opt'ed for 6 smaller ships. Built the first one out, connected everything up (salvage to salvage beams and storage, storage connected to cargo), fleeted up and bam! First ship worked no problem. Save the blueprint, spawn 5 more of them, added them to the fleet and none of the spawned ones will mine. I've tried specifying the blueprint as a "mining ship" and that has also failed to yield a mining result. Any idea on what I may be doing wrong with this?

 

[jaytime104]

I got my fleet to work and it was hell to do. Ill tell you what i did as it might help but none of it makes any sence to me why it worked. also i cant spell type or write well sorry.

1. go to a new galaxy spawn them in agin by a astroid make sure everyone is in the same sector and not poping out of the sector

2. if put them to idel

3. tell them to mine and they should do it if they just spaz out like mines did then keep going down the list

4. unconect the salvage and storage computers and reconect them try to get them to mine if that dont work

5. delete the blueprint resave it and spawn them in agin

The problem here is that eace and every ship had its own problem so 1 may work fast but the others might take all 5 steaps also relog between every step and turn off the bobby ai and relog then turn it on agin cuse the gui gets buged up and it might just but not active so yea its buged all to hell you might even need to uninstall and reinstall the game also i had to do that as well idk what really worked but i got my fleet up and mineing in the end lol :P

P.s ; fleet mineing sucks cuse in the end of it all u still have to be in the same exact sector with the ships are they wont mine nothing meaning ur all mineing the same rock most of the time. also dont go by the sun lol cuse they dont care about sun danmage.

 

[MacThule]

Did you try restarting your client, sending the fleet to an unloaded sector then calling them back and everything?

I was using fleet mining a lot at one point, but had to stop because it became so unstable that I was spending way more time troubleshooting and doing remedial restarts of the miners than getting any mining done. I am hoping that once they get weapons and power all updated and cleaned up, fixing fleet behaviors will be an early priority because the convenience of drone mining when it was working its best was fantastic; I could issue an order, then ignore the miners for 2-3 minutes while they stripped a sector and I either chatted or detailed my mothership, then pop back into fly mode, finish any remaining crumbs manually, send the fleet to the next adjacent roid sector, and get back to designing. Every 15 minutes I'd have them re-dock to unload the goods, then send them back out. Speedwise even my best drones took like 5x as long as my fastest heavy speedminer, but I could multi-task, so the mineral yield per minute spent actually actively mining was like 10x. I really, really want that back.

For now though, as far as I know fleet mining is offline. I can't get them to mine more than one roid at a time without taking extreme remedial measures (disbanding and reforming the fleet, deleting all the miners and respawning them, or multiple relogs along with other random steps calculated to try and get the fleet to re-set whatever variable value it is getting stuck in its head that is making it fly 20 sectors away to try and mine roids in the sector I am in and ordering them to mine - I think they are simply misreading the map after the first mine order, TBH). Sometimes nothing seems to work, even deleting everything, relogging, and spawning an entirely fresh fleet from a BP that has tested to work the same day.

 

[MacThule]

I got my fleet to work and it was hell to do. Ill tell you what i did as it might help but none of it makes any sence to me why it worked. also i cant spell type or write well sorry.

1. go to a new galaxy spawn them in agin by a astroid make sure everyone is in the same sector and not poping out of the sector

2. if put them to idel

3. tell them to mine and they should do it if they just spaz out like mines did then keep going down the list

4. unconect the salvage and storage computers and reconect them try to get them to mine if that dont work

5. delete the blueprint resave it and spawn them in agin

The problem here is that eace and every ship had its own problem so 1 may work fast but the others might take all 5 steaps also relog between every step and turn off the bobby ai and relog then turn it on agin cuse the gui gets buged up and it might just but not active so yea its buged all to hell you might even need to uninstall and reinstall the game also i had to do that as well idk what really worked but i got my fleet up and mineing in the end lol :P

P.s ; fleet mineing sucks cuse in the end of it all u still have to be in the same exact sector with the ships are they wont mine nothing meaning ur all mineing the same rock most of the time. also dont go by the sun lol cuse they dont care about sun danmage.

Minor note: you do have to be in the same sector as the fleet to issue the Mine order, but (and this may have changed) you can follow them in, issue the order, and then go manually mine the adjacent sectors while they work. As long as they stay loaded in they will keep going; you don't have to stay right on the same rocks they are working.

 

[Nosajimiki]

If you are are trying to make a wide area miner in power 2.0, try using Salvage/missile. That way you can have 1000 outputs for the same power penalty of a 200 output system or whatever miner size you prefer to use.

 

[Laltonel]

I think i may of been a bit unclear, but I shall try to clarify. The issue not the ships firing the mining lasers, they all actually do that, they do that very well actually, but the only ships I can make mine are ones I have manually constructed not ones spawned from blueprints.

I've tried moving sectors to unload the ships, then call them back in to mine, that failed to work, ripped them down, and spawned new ones with the blueprint reclassified as a "miner", removed ships from the fleet and even if its one ship, if it is a blueprint spawn, it will fire it's mining beams and mine nothing. The asteroid will not register blocks taken off nor will anything accumulate in the ships storage. I've check everything connected and even manually reconnected salvage beam systems, same issue.

It would be nice if it was just this design, but this is my third iteration for a mining ship and they all have the same problem, the manually built prototype mines just fine, I blueprint it, spawn it, and it mines nothing. They all swarm the asteroid and pew all the mining lasers, but nothing gets mined, sans the solo prototype ship in the fleet, that actually removes blocks from the asteroid.

I have tried removing the prototype from the fleet, even down to one blueprint spawned ship, moved sectors, called in to mine, its swoops in, lines up, shoots lasers... and nothing mines. I find this quite confusing.

Client restarts have failed to help, the only thing i haven't tried yet is a full blown reinstall.

 

[Ithirahad]

Fleet mining behaviour is random and inconsistent. Sometimes just relogging fixes issues, sometimes dropping/recreating fleet, sometimes coming back another day, sometimes sacrificing a goat to the gods of chaos, and sometimes nothing at all will make your fleet mine.

 

[GnomeKing]

this has been the case for a long time now > old threads will tell you buggy fleet mining > 'next patch...'

 

[Ithirahad]

this has been the case for a long time now > old threads will tell you buggy fleet mining > 'next patch...'

The only case where they said 'next patch' was when the AI update was supposed to be coming. That ended up getting pushed by the power update, now I have no idea which patch it'll be fixed in. :P

 

[GnomeKing]

Currently I advise something like this regarding mining drones:

-keep number of individual drone beams low (eg 24) and drones quite small (eg 10x12x25)
-keep number of drones low (eg 8)
-beware of drone launch collisions or similar - (once in a drone-spasm they might not recover until unloaded)
-also making docking very, very, very easy for the at times painfully retarded AI

-reload sectors/restart client when drones just stop responding.

-and do not become emotionally attached to the stupid little bastards

(if you want effective, fast mining of lots materials, drones are not currently the way to go > but a lot of masochistic fun
(varieties of strip/drift-mining with salvage-blades are also viable semi-automated methods)

 

[Laltonel]

Well I wanted to thank everyone for their help. I did eventually track down the issue. It was faction modules.... None of the ships had them. Once added they all mined just fine. Strange thing to cause the mining system to bug out, but that is the way of things sometimes.