Medal Guide: Mining for Splinter/Shard/Gem
Going for the Precious Gem was my worst best idea. Let me share about everything I did wrong in the hopes someone can learn from my innumerable mistakes.
In this article, I’ll tell you about my adventure getting the Precious Gem, and also what I learnt from it. If you just want the learnings and don’t care too much about the story, scroll towards the end and you’ll find a useful bullet point summary.
If you read my guide on leveling, you may be on the hunt for medals. I advocated for the Skill Stars, following pilot GrimGriz’ excellent advice and my own experience with it. I also linked to Soldarian Storm’s page on medals, and you may have wondered why I didn’t say anything about the assortment of medals awarded for mining and selling large amounts of ore types. Indeed, those catch the eyes, to say the least. There are three, called Splinter, Shard and Gem, for each ore other than common metals, making it 12 medals in total. They’re worth 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000 experience respectively, times four for Radioactive Metals, Semifluxors, Ice and Precious Metals, making it a grand total of 360,000 experience for the taking. That’s like a whopping 24 Gold Stars!
Sure, you can’t quite get them before unlocking the Tow at rank 26, since the lowest one, the Splinter, requires a sale of 250 units of ore, and no ship comes near to that much cargo before the Tow… BUT, once you have the Tow, you can attack the Gem medal straight out. With a single sale of 450 ore units, you can unlock Splinter, Shard and Gem all at once, pocketing 90,000 experience in a single trip! This is enough to breeze through any one rank below 28 in a single go! Holy Priceless Rock Collection, Batman! Shall we get on with it?
Planning for Precious Metal
OK, so this is sort-of-a-guide on how to get the medals, but perhaps it’s more of a guide on how NOT to get the medals. I’ll say there’s a few things to learn here. Mostly from where I went wrong.
So, as you may have figured from the guide on leveling, I was really excited to get myself in the Tow at rank 26. It was a bit of a slog to get from 20 to 26, but also I’d figured I could breeze through my Amananth faction Political Rating by mining there with the tow, and make good XP in the process thanks to the mining medals. The next thing I did is take a look at what asteroids exist in Aman space, which I did using survey data from blommaskog.net. From this, I could see there’s a decent number of good roids in Amananth Station sector, and adding the neighbouring sectors, Precious Metal roids looked:
relatively large and abundant,
more common in Aman than in other factions space.
Therefore I decided to get started with the Precious Gem. While I still stand by the logic of the assessment, I overlooked a few things but let’s get to that later. I fitted my tow with 2 Barracks for the trip, taking 2 Bankers and a ML Amplifier in cargo. Having lit some red beacons and downed a few flux on the way, I dodged a swarm around Aman Hook and docked without incident. I bought my Rotacol at Amananth, swapped over to the Bankers, and got going mining out the Station sector.
The plan was as follow:
Hit up every med/big Precious Metal roid in sector.
Also hit up small Precious Metal roid within reach from the larger ones.
Hit up at least one of each the other types’ big roids, or med for Semifluxors since there’s no big one.
Dock and hand in 3 or 4 missions for all types except Precious.
After this, if I’m left with more time, I’d do the following:
Refit the ship with one Barrack and a Duelist.
Fly to The Split and mine that sector the same way. Lots of Precious Metal there!
Manage squids using the single Barrack gun.
I wasn’t exactly sure what the yield would be for each trip, but my first actual attempt in Amananth encouraged me that the plan was viable.
During that trip, I filled up with about 210 cargo ore, of which there were close to 50 Precious Metal. I did have a swarm incursion at Amananth, but since nobody else was visiting the sector, it didn’t bother me and went out after a little while, leaving me to my mining.
Pressing Ahead
I didn’t have time for a second trip immediately after clearing Amananth, so I logged off and came back a good few hours later. As I’d more-or-less expected, the local asteroids had not quite cooled off yet, which I could tell from their distinct blue shine.
So I headed to The Split with my 50 unsold Precious ore in cargo, and followed the plan I’d outlined. I cleared up resident squids fairly quickly and started mining. That second trip went relatively well: I was able to follow all the steps of my plan as I did in Amananth, dispatched visiting squids easily, and ended up with about 250 ores in cargo. It took longer because of the single Banker, and because I hadn’t started empty. I didn’t quite double my Precious haul, ending up somewhere above 80 after docking at Amananth again.
One thing that had become apparent at this stage was that the low Precious yield meant I’d have to cycle through a lot of ore to accumulate 450 of the one type. The reason is that Precious Metal has the weakest yield overall, making up less than half of the output of Precious asteroids and only a fraction from other roid types. There were two obvious consequences: I’d need more trips in total, and also, as I’d get close to the Tow cargo capacity of 500, I’d have to shuffle quite a bit more ore to station to make space. That second point turned out not to be an issue practically, as I discovered new, more fundamental issues with the plan soon.
Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Ore is Fucking Heavy.
My third and subsequent few trips really brought home how terrible my plan was. As I undocked with 100 ore in cargo or thereabout, every leg of my trip turned into a slog. Lining up asteroids was starting to take long enough that I gave up trying to mine neighbouring pebbles, which would only yield less than a handful units of precious metal. Braking precisely was hard due to the distances involved, the lack of good reference points, and the varying quantities in cargo. Quite a few times, I missed the braking point and came dangerously close to the target asteroid. This despite making sure I had not lined up straight on target, as I was trying to balance this with not ending too far away, since any course change was a pain. With the trips taking longer and me skipping roids, the overall progress per unit of time was down-trending quite noticeably. I was not yet at 150 Precious, still far from even the Splinter medal, when the worst trip happened. But I was already annoyed to hear other pilots having fun doing whatever they wanted to do on the day, while I was stuck with my plan in Aman, and no way to bail without given up My Preciousssss.
On one notable trip to The Split, while I was loaded with over 200 ores, a Shield Storm came upon me and sat there for a while, leaving me to fend off against the flux on armor with my lone gun. The storm lingered as I was moving from one roid to the next, so I had to run approaches with my loaded tow purely on radar. If that wasn’t enough, I got visited by a swarm, and sat there with no shield and no visibility, hoping hard no-one would visit the sector and cause the swarm to come at me. I clenched my teeth and my buttcheeks and kept mining, but it drove home the point. The longer I went, the harder and slower it was gonna get. It’d have pissed me off to lose 150 precious metal after a few days at this. It was going to take me many more days, and besides the tedium of it, I wasn’t sure I could stomach losing all this work in an accident. And the possibility of an accident was making itself hard not to consider.
How I Became Depot-Dependent
As I could no longer bear the daily mining, I gave in and finally changed the plan. I decided to mine one last roid to bring my Precious haul to 200 and stash it in Primus Point ore depot. The roid decided it wasn’t in the mood, and stopped yielding at 196. I said: “fine, have it your way!” I set course to Primus Point and unloaded everything at the depot. I’d been inspired enough to start investigating depot mechanics before this adventure, mostly in the hopes that ore depots could function as a temporary personal stash, which they don’t exactly. But no-one would know my ore was there, because there was already a stash of over 300 semifluxors at Primus Point. This meant I could stash my 196, go fly a Nix, fight a sentient or two and have some fun with friends, and resume my medal work later.
This new plan sort-of-worked but not exactly. I thought if I’d play it right, I could keep my stash lower than the Semifluxor one, sneakily adding to it but not topping the KTRI-advertised quantity. Then I’d do one final trip to bring it to 450, making it the one at the top for a short amount of time, then immediately unloading and cashing in credits and XP.
What, of course, happened is that the day after I’d stashed 196 in there, the Semifluxors went away and my haul was there for everyone to see.
The current Jumpgate player base is, of course, quite caring and honorable. By this point they all knew I was on this stupid plan and also knew someone was putting this Precious Metal there that wasn’t them. Still. My plan, which now was to accumulate 100 to 150 precious metal in Aman, drop it at Primus and come back, was dependent on the stash staying in its place waiting for me. I would like to be able to say that I slept well at night with, now, 296 Precious Metal in store for anyone, ANYONE, to take. In truth, I didn’t sleep very well. I got up in the morning quite single-minded to finish this errand as quickly as possible. And possibly to never touch a Precious Metal roid again. Or for a few days anyway.
With my tow now much more lightly loaded, I was able to complete the haul in relatively short order, still focusing on Amananth and The Split sectors. Then, I only had to haul 450 ore from Primus Point to Octavius Storage Depot. Not something I was exactly looking forward, but armed with some patience and two guns, it was a piece of cake compared to everything before that.
So What Did I Learn From This?
Getting the medals felt nice, but it didn’t feel worth it, and I would not recommend doing it the way I did.
What went well?
I did not crash the tow.
I brought my Docking Computer.
I always braked to zero V for manoeuvers.
I used the zoom and always aligned on a clear path, away from obstacles, so even missing the braking point I would minimize risks of hitting anything.
I escaped the Flux, including several swarm visits.
The swarm escapes were down to low player count in Aman and luck.
My research on survey data from blommaskog proved accurate.
I learnt a lot about heavy mining.
It may seem like a lot, but I would definitely not approach this the same way.
What would I do differently?
Use the Heavy Miner to mine, not the tow.
The tow is adequate for some light mining in a pinch, but not more.
Even the Octavius Heavy Miner is a vastly superior mining ship to a tow, and the difference is more dramatic for Quant and Sol heavy mining ships.
It’s really worth waiting out rank 30. Hauling is a perfectly fine way to rank up from 26, or just fly the Fighter ship.
Don’t mine hauling ore around, use a depot.
Hauling less than 100 ore is fine.
Hauling less than 200 ore is pain.
Hauling over 200 ore is a form of torture.
Don’t start with Precious Metals, it’s literally the worst.
Plenty of Ice around.
Plenty of Semifluxors in Hyperial territory.
Radioactive is second worst, but better purity than Precious Metals.
Get an Antiflux.
The Antiflux currently retails at ~1.2M but it opens better possibilities for mining than the station sectors.
You can make your own if you luck out hunting for artefacts and stumble upon a UC-15, but easier to use jumpgate-tri’s POS page to search for one.
Don’t crash your ship when you have an antiflux onboard!
Do it with friends if possible.
Get some mining buddies to fill an ore depot more quickly.
Some players might be willing to fill a depot for you in exchange for cash, or other reasons. Ask around! It’s a multiplayer game after all :D
That’s it folks! I still don’t think those medals are a very efficient way to accumulate experience, even if you optimize the method compared to what I did. I do not particularly recommend them as a way to power through ranks as a result.
Closing Thoughts on Design
If I could change how this works, I’d look at re-balancing these medals a little. It’s worth noting they were added not by NetDevil, but on the current private server, and may not have gone through enough play-testing and balancing as a result.
I think it’d be significantly more fun if they would unlock one at a time:
Splinter to require Light Miner or Medium Transport, ~20 ore quantity only.
Shard to require Tow or Heavy Miner, ~200 ore quantity only.
Gem to require Freighter, up to ~500 ore quantity.
Giving players better ways to stash ore would be nice too. I suppose a lot of the current limitations, such as the inability to sell ore in small quantities, or to trade ore, is to avoid players gaming the system to chain mining missions. Ideally, now that this is no longer a game with paying subscriptions, this should be revisited. Providing players with more useful storage options in Player-Owned Stations would be another good way to help this.
Maybe you’ve got your own ideas on what to do to make the medal-hunt more fun? Please share in comments!
The easiest way to get the shard medals is to watch KTRI and wait for an Ore Depot to collect 450+ units of the one you're after. The "transport ore to depot" mission it gives you counts as a mining mission and you can collect all 3 shards at once with 450 units.