Ore Depots: The Full St'ore'y
Ore Depots are weird, but that's okay. Here's a detailed exploration of ore depot mechanics.
As I was fumbling around, trying to complete my mining medals, I looked at Ore Depots in despair. Since rejoining, I’d been flying around, making hundreds of sector jumps and completing dozens of missions, but I’d not even come close to an Ore depot yet. Now, I decided, staring at the Ore Depot, you will save my cursed endeavour!
I piloted my tow close to the depot, expecting, as I would get close, it would helpfully guide me to its docking bay. I got to within meters, yet nothing happened. Puzzled, I circled the building, until I found the pinhole.
The hole gazed at me, silent. The only indication of what I should do were two pixelated blue arrows slowly blinking on each side of the opening. I lined up the ship, gave the throttle a nudge, and went through at glacial pace. Again, nothing happened, and I simply came through on the other side. Everything was quiet. I headed back to station, docked, and logged off.
Ore Depots And Where To Find Them
The only piece of documentation on Ore Depots I could find online is an archived entry from JOSSH database on SoldarianStorm. It describes the depots as “Mining Support Facilities” with this excerpt:
Ore Depots can be used by miners to deposit and recieve [sic] payment for their ore. These buildings can be found throughout space.
There’s then this user manual of sorts.
Resource collection is a major source of business for TRI, as well as a means of sustaining the space-based economy. The original Quantar design for these facilities was optimized using Solrain storage technologies.
These facilities will remove all ore from your cargo bay, and credit you the current ore rates. All ore deposited at an Ore Depot is stored. Ore sold to these buildings will not count towards mining mission totals, but can be a convenient way to get quick reimbusement while remaining in deep space.
Arrival at one of these facilities with an empty hold and no current mission will cause the building to offload some of its stored materials into your hold. You will be assigned a delivery mission to transport your new cargo to the owning faction's Depot station.
This didn’t really help with the depot’s refusal to interface with me, so I ended up asking on the chat.
You just need to be in the ‘right’ part of the tube and your velocity must be less than 1.
I could go on about UX consistency but I guess I’ll keep that for a future entry.
To get started, you need to head to a sector where an ore depot is found. Ore Depots are easily found on the targetting system once you’ve reached the right sector, but there’s not much to tell you which sector to go to. Here’s a helpful map solving that problem. Each of the three main factions has one ore depot in their space. Hyperial also has one.
When you stop in the tube, you will be prompted with a chat message to hold position. If you have ores in your hold, they will be transferred to the depot, as suggested by the specification document. The stuff you get from pure asteroids isn’t taken: it has to be common metal, radioactive metal, precious metal, semifluxor or ice ore. You get money and experience for your work.
Once the transfer completes, the depot unceremoniously shoves your ship away from the tube, similarly to how you eject from a docking tube, but with a more degrading feeling.
If on the contrary, you dock with no ores in your hold, the depot will instead fill you up with whatever ore it has got the most off. You also get a mission, which requires you to transport the transferred amount to the faction’s storage depot station.
This works exactly like a cargo mission. You sell the ore on the station’s market to complete it and get the reward. Note that it doesn’t matter if there’s other stuff in your hold when you visit the Ore Depot, but you must not have any other active mission. As long as your hold has space, doesn’t contain ores, that you place your ship in the right part of the tube without any sort of docking guidance, and that you bring your velocity below one. Should have been obvious, yes?
Dealing With Noisy Ore Depots
Something possibly obvious but worth mentioning at this stage: Ore Depots are a shared facility. Anyone may drop ore, anyone may pick it up.
The most-filled Ore depot will advertise its most abundant ore, as a periodical KTRI announcement. Actually you can see one on the first screenshot of this article. It reads: “KTRI: Primus Point OreDepot has 215+ Semifluxors for pickup.”
This means that if you show up with an empty hold, you’ll get a mission for this much Semifluxor ore to drop off at Octavius Storage Depot Station - each Ore depot always gives their faction’s Storage Depot Station (SDS) as the destination. If you pick up from Hyperial’s Ore depot in Main Gate, the destination will be Quantar SDS, which greatly upsets Hyperial factionalists, understandably. I’m sure that’ll be fixed once Hyperial has built their own SDS…
After you’ve picked up ore from the depot holding the KTRI announce, the next one to come up will be a surprise. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no way to figure the content of a depot otherwise. The depots don’t seem to hide any ore though. If you drop off more ore of the already advertised type, the message will be updated exactly as you’d expect with an increased amount.
Raiding Depots
There’s one more way to interact with depots, in fact probably the most fleshed out implementation around this rather half-baked game play feature: Military Raid missions.
You can get those by being registered in your faction’s Military registry, which you can change in any of your home faction’s stations after reaching rank 9 and 50 political rating with your faction.
Raid missions, when available, will require you to visit another faction’s depot, but once you do this, instead of returning to the depot faction’s SDS, you will be asked to return to the destination station you picked, which (like other military missions) can be any of your faction station or an unregulated space station. The depot you’ll have to raid depends on which destination you pick.
Note that Raid missions only compensate quantity up to 30 units, which I believe is to incentivize you to use the Fast Transport. You still get paid market price for however much ore the depot can offload to you though, which is only limited by the depot’s stock and your cargo hold space.
Also worth mentioning: since Raid missions are taken when you’re far away from the target depot, there’s a chance you could be left high and dry if someone else empties the place before you get there. If that happens, you’ll have to fail the mission, wait for the depot to get re-stocked, or stock it yourself! The infamy!
The Short Form Manual to Ore Depots
Here’s the tl;dr for pilots in a hurry.
Dropping Ore at a Depot:
There must be at least one ore (common metals, ice, precious metals, radioactive metals, semifluxors) in your cargo hold.
Locate an Ore depot and enter the depot’s tube.
Bring your velocity down to <1 when inside the tube.
You will receive a “Hold position to complete transaction” message.
Your cargo hold is then emptied of all ores, which are added to the depot stash.
You receive credits and experience based on the quantity of ore you dropped.
Your ship is then automatically propelled outside the depot tube.
You may use the depot again immediately for pick ups or drop offs.
Collecting Ore at a Depot:
There must be no ore of any type (common metals, ice, precious metals, radioactive metals, semifluxors) in your hold.
You must have no active mission.
There must be at least one free cargo space on your ship.
Locate an Ore depot and enter the depot’s tube.
Bring your velocity down to <1 when inside the tube.
You will receive a “Hold position to complete transaction” message.
Your hold will be filled with the depot’s most abundant ore.
How much of ore you will receive is as much as the depot is holding, or the capacity of your hold, whichever is reached first.
Your ship is then automatically propelled outside the depot tube.
You will receive a message reading “You have been assigned an ore deliver mission”.
Your mission display will show the mission destination.
You may use the depot again immediately for drop offs only (as you now have an active mission).
Other Depot Facts
All Ore Depots are located in sectors with potential for Conflux activity. Watch your six while using them. The Cerulean Clouds and Main Gate are manta sectors.
You may have non-ore items in your hold during drop-offs and delivery. These have no effect on the depot’s functionality, other than limiting space in your hold for pick ups.
You may ignore the depot tube entry/exit signs, and enter from the wrong side.
The depot will always propel you towards the exit upon transaction completion, though.
The Cerulean Cloud Ore Depot gives missions to Solrain Storage Depot, 7 jumps away by shortest route.
Primus Point Ore Depot gives missions to Octavius Storage Depot, 7 jumps away by shortest route.
Ring View Ore Depot gives missions to Quantar Storage Depot, 4 jumps away by shortest route.
Main Gate Ore Depot gives mission to Quantar Storage Depot, 9 jumps away by shortest route (to do: confirm this is correct).
If you are not elligible to pick up from a depot, you will get spat out of the tube after the “Hold position to complete transaction” message, but there will be no further message. You’ll have to troubleshoot which of the required conditions I’ve listed above you are not complying to, since unfortunately the game does not tell you.
So, Should You Use Ore Depots?
My recommendation here would be: don’t use them for the XP, or the missions, which are barely okay. Mining missions and cargo missions will normally have better returns.
However, Ore depots are useful as a staging location if you’re mining nearby. As you may have found out already, filling up your hold makes approaches on the next asteroid progressively slower and harder. Once you’ve mined over 100 ores, it becomes a chore. Over 250, it’s verging on self-harm. So, you’ll want to visit a station at that stage. If a station’s nearby, great! If not, and there’s a depot close to you, you can drop ores off there, go back to mining, and pick the whole lot up later. Just keep in mind anyone can pay a visit and collect your ores while you’re away. This advice is obviously geared towards the current low-population private server, where chances are no-one cares about your stash. Unless you take forever, it’ll likely still be there for you the next day, and the one after that. And if not, you can probably find out whodunit!
With the way this is implemented, though, that wouldn’t have been a very valid strategy on the official EU/US servers. I don’t remember what happened then, really, but I guess the idea would have been for squadmates or wingmates to coordinate drop-off and pick up activities.