Mining Builds

Laser min­ing is the sim­ple, chill ver­sion of min­ing. You use prospec­tor limpets to find a rock with the resource you want, then shoot it with lasers until it’s “emp­ty”. For the cur­rent laser min­ing meta – the best resources to mine, and the best places to find them – check the pinned post in the EliteM­iners subreddit.

Note on trav­el­ling and sell­ing: Nowa­days you can usu­al­ly find a good min­ing spot with Fleet Car­ri­ers in orbit will­ing to buy what you mine, mean­ing you don’t have to under­take the often long and risky jour­ney to find a sta­tion to sell at your­self. (Many a new min­er has a sad tale to tell regard­ing los­ing car­go to pirates on the sell jour­ney, or get­ting to a sta­tion a hun­dred lightyears away only to find its price has dropped!) Regard­less, if you plan to trav­el long dis­tances with or with­out mined car­go, swap out some mod­ules for the high­est lev­el, high­est rat­ed fuel scoop you can, and a Guardian FSD Boost­er if you have one. You can store them at the near­est sta­tion before min­ing, then retrieve them when you’re done and ready to travel.

Note on Resource Extrac­tion Sites (RES sites): RES sites give a boost to frag­ments gained laser­min­ing from rocks, with high­er dan­ger sites giv­ing a big­ger boost. There are var­i­ous tricks to min­i­mize attacks by pirates but none are 100% reli­able. Nev­er­the­less, mapped Haz­ardous RES sites cur­rent­ly offer the best time:money ratio avail­able in Elite min­ing, pro­vid­ed you have access to a “big 3” ship and suf­fi­cient engi­neer­ing to defend your­self with­out sys­tem secu­ri­ty to help. High RES sites and low­er can be attempt­ed in less well defend­ed ships, but YMMV as to whether sys­tem secu­ri­ty is able to ade­quate­ly pro­tect you. For full guides and a wide vari­ety of maps, check the extreme­ly com­pre­hen­sive pinned post in r/EliteMiners.

Note on Limpets: All Limpet Con­trollers require limpet drones to work. Limpets are a gener­ic item which take up car­go space (1 limpet = 1 ton), and their role is deter­mined when they’re launched by a Limpet Con­troller. You pur­chase limpets at Advanced Main­te­nance on a Sta­tion or suit­ably-equipped Fleet Car­ri­er before head­ing to your min­ing site. You will repeat­ed­ly for­get to do this.