Pure Mining: The Starter Guide
Wait, there's a secret type of asteroid in Jumpgate nobody told me about? And there's not a single guide online about it ?? That CANNOT be true. There is ONE guide about it now.
“Pure Mining” is a type of mining that involves discovering and exploiting a class of asteroids made, as the name suggests, of a single commodity, be it aluminium, iridium, or most other non-gaseous types. I am a little bit unclear when pure mining was introduced to the game. Some players have told me it was there “forever”, but my current theory is that it made its way into the game either with the “exploration” update in November 2001 (US server) or some time in the first half of 2002. The first explicit mention of pure mining in the patch notes is in a May 2002 update, and refers to a bug fix, suggesting pures were introduced silently in an earlier patch.
Whichever it is, when I rejoined the Jumpgate community, I had no idea what Pure mining was, or even that it was a thing, having completely forgotten or never known about it.
But now, thanks to Hammer-BS and his pure mining contest, I’ve had the perfect opportunity to give it a shot. The good news is: anybody can do it, it’s really easy! I’m no expert, and this guide isn’t the one to end all (yet), but if you know nothing about “puring”, it can at least get you started.
Pure Mining Ship Loadout
Pure mining really is just mining, and the only piece of equipment you absolutely must have with you is a mining laser. Therefore, it’s open to pilots of any rank, although, as with everything mining, Octavius pilots start with a disadvantage in cargo hold capacity and likely won’t want to bother until at least the Light Mining ship is available.
There’s a few extra pieces of equipment that’ll make your purer life much better though:
The best radar you can fit - a Knocker or better will give you 35K of range and give you considerably better odds of finding roids faster.
A camera ModX: Hawkeye, Optima or Witness, will allow you to observe roids from afar so you can spot your next pure target.
A ML Amplifier ModX to increase your mining efficiency.
A DeepRadar ModX - available for purchase from rank 21, this will color all Common Metal roids as brownish on radar, so you won’t waste time investigating them.
A Docking Computer ModX - this is generally recommended for any ship you’ll fly loaded with large quantities of heavy ores, since it will save you so much time on the trip back to station.
A Rotacol ModX - optional, if you want to easily be able to find a pure roid you left at a later date.
Of course, you’ll want as much cargo capacity as available to you. You can technically go pure-mining with any ship, but you’ll likely want at least 50 spaces of carrying cargo to guarantee you can mine out at least one pure asteroid in a single trip. Failing that, make sure to bring that rotacol so that you can easily find the last roid you mined but did not have enough cargo to pop.
Finding A Pure Asteroid
It’s much easier to find a pure asteroid than an artefact, if you’ve got a loadout like above. Just follow those steps:
Find any sector that isn’t a station sector.
Find that sector’s “zero-gate”. This is the jumpgate that has rotacol coordinate [0, 0, 0]. It is always the selected gate when you first enter a sector, but if you equipped the rotacol, you can also enter
/rotacol 0 0 0at any time and select the ROTACOL target, navigate to it. You’ll find the jumpgate.Look around the zero-gate for roids with a ‘grey’ signature - assuming you fitted the DeepRadar ModX, you can skip all the brown-signature roids, they’re common metals. You can also skip checking roid clusters. Pure roids are of the lonely type, so it’s unlikely you’ll find one in a group.
Zoom on each grey-signature roid using your camera ModX and find out what type they are. If you found a weird-looking, sparkly asteroid, that’s your pure!
OK, I admit, I enhanced the sparkles just a bit on the picture above. BUT, you can tell, right? The little rock doesn’t quite look like a regular roid. Ice and Common metals are brightish, radioactive have plain green patches on them, and semifluxors are dark. This one looks a little like a semifluxor, but the texture is much more contrasted. I’m not entirely sure if the sparkle is an artefact of rendering caused by the contrast, or intentional design. It’s a little hard to explain what this looks like in game, but assuming you’ve looked at enough asteroids, it should be easy to tell the pures look different.
Another clue is the size. Pures come in small, medium and large size. No pebble. If the roid is too small for you to tell what it is, it’s unlikely to be a pure. And the sector has ONE and ONLY ONE pure.
Once you’ve located it, just proceed to mine it like a normal roid. After you started lasering it, you can use the /cargo command and you’ll be able to tell what type it is. My first pure was a Cobalt.
According to Hammer-BS, pures come in three sizes:
Small, 10 units +/- 20%
Medium, 20 units +/- 20%
Large, 50 units, +/-20%
Unlike normal roids, pure roids don’t “overheat” and you get the maximum extraction rate all the way. Once there’s no more ore to mine, the pure “pops” and a new one is immediately generated somewhere else in the sector.
Pures always spawn fairly close to the zero gate, perhaps up to about 30 units from it? I don’t know the actual range, so I’ll have to do more research here. The point is, the next one has high chances to be in radar range if you have a good radar, and if not, it’s perhaps because your current one spawned a bit far out and you’ll find the next one easily flying to the other side of the zero-gate, and using your camera on grey-signature roids again.
What I’ve done myself to better locate the next spawn is positioning my ship so that all the visible signatures are ‘bunched up’, if I can help it.
In the screenshot above, you can see that all the objects in radar range are within a slice of my radar view. I rotated my ship intentionally that way while mining this Molybdenum pure. The reason I did this is that if the next pure spawns in range, and not too close to the rest of the bunch, it will be much easier to spot on the radar. In any case, if you see a new grey signature anywhere on radar, that will be your next pure. If not, just repeat the above process using the camera.
Pure Rewards
For each pure roid you mine out, you’ll be awarded 3,000 experience. This happens as soon as the roid pops, so it’s not like completing a mining mission. On top of this, of course, you get to sell the commodity at station. You can further take advantage by dropping your commodities at a station that doesn’t need them, and then shipping them to a station that do, using a cargo mission. Indeed, pure spawns are artificially biased towards commodities that are in short supply, according to an August 2005 patch note:
-Added a function to the pure roid generator that will use shortage information in the economy to increase the chance of pures for the shortage commods.
I don’t know if this is a very strong effect, seeing it did not stop me from finding abundant commodoties at all, but I haven’t done enough pure-mining to move my evidence beyond “anecdotal”.
I’m Started. What’s next ?
Look, I don’t know! I wrote this piece because there’s literally nothing I could find about pure mining online. I was only able to start thanks to clues shared with me in-game with people online. I only know of one additional reference on pures, which is blommaskog’s page about them. I don’t mean this as a slight to Flowbar’s awesome work on this site, but it’s not the most intuitive. I was initially confused at the quantity reading, which is the total amount of the commodity available on the market. The cost and weight numbers are the commodity’s single unit values, useful to know the worth of your find, and the pain you’ll take moving it.
Since finding pure roids is so easy, it’s a favoured way to quickly gain credits while gaining rank, especially for Quantar pilots who can make the best of their ships this way. I’ve yet to learn much about pure-mining, and lots of unanswered questions, so it’ll be a while before I get to write the Definitive Guide to Puring. I’ll want to beat Sinver’s recent tally of 76 pures mined in a day, or Hammer’s total of well-over 2,000 pures (on a single account, not counting the official server final count, or that of any alt, of course).
