Star Atlas Mining 101 — Introduction to the Concepts
In the Star Atlas ecosystem, mining is a critical activity that powers the entire ecosystem. Even in the current early stages of gameplay loops, mining raw materials is the only way to produce new resources and components. As Star Atlas continues to grow and introduces more gameplay loops, mining will become ever more important (and lucrative).
For those newer to the Star Atlas ecosystem and who are interested in mining, we’ll cover some of the basic concepts to know and keep in mind, as well as some tips to help maximize your efficiency (and in turn your earnings).
This guide is written with the current iteration of SAGE Labs in mind, and we’ll keep it updated as future iterations come out. As always, this is not financial advice, please do your own research before making any decisions.
How does mining work in Star Atlas right now?
Currently, mining in Star Atlas is done through the SAGE Labs web experience. You can visit the full version here, and other ‘lighter’ versions of the app are here and here (these all do the same thing, some are less resource-intensive on your machine).
At a very high level, mining happens when you send a fleet to a certain sector. Each sector has difference resources that you can mine. Your fleet will spend certain resources to mine the resource, and then you can bring the resources back to a starbase.
What do you need to start mining?
To mine, all you need is at least one ship, plus the resources that your ship consumes. Currently, any ship in Star Atlas can perform mining.
The two categories of ships we’ll look at here are:
Mining Ships: There are 3 ships that are ‘specialized’ for mining. These are the Armstrong miners, and currently they are the IMP Tip, IMP Tap, and IMP. Compared to other ships, these mining ships do not consume ammunition when mining, and generally also have better mining rates compared to other ships in their tier.
Non-Mining Ships: These are all other ships outside of the 3 mentioned above. You can absolutely use any ship to do mining! Relative to the mining ships, all other ships will consume ammunition when mining.
Once you have a ship, now you need some starting resources. These are:
Fuel: Fuel allows your fleet to get to and back from mining locations.
Food: Food is used during the mining process.
Ammunition: Non-Mining ships use ammunition to allow them to mine.
Every ship uses different amounts of these resources; we won’t go into that here, but check out some of the community tools that can help you plan how many resources you’ll need.
Key things and terminology to keep in mind
Now that you know the very basics of what it takes to mine, here’s a few other things to start thinking about. Keep in mind that you can keep mining as simple as you want, or take it as far as you want. Some people simply choose to mine raw resources, then sell or stash them. Others choose to get into manufacturing as well, to turn the raw resources into components. For now, we’ll focus on the mining part; we’ll cover the basics of manufacturing in another article.
Resource Locations: Perhaps the first choice you’ll need to make is what resources you want to mine. Each sector in Galia (the Star Atlas universe) has one or more resources. Each of these resources fetch different prices in the marketplace.
Keep in mind that your starting location (the Central Space Station, or CSS, of your chosen faction) also has a resource! All CSS sectors have Hydrogen, which means you don’t have to travel to another sector if you just want to get started.
Clicking into a sector will show you what resource(s) are there. You can also use community tools to see a list.
Mining Hardness and Richness: Something that will affect your mining rates are the concepts of hardness and richness. In a nutshell:
Hardness refers to the difficulty of getting a raw material out. If we use a hardness of 1 to indicate a ‘normal’ mining rate, then a resource with a hardness of 2 will take twice as long to mine.
Richness refers to how much of a raw material you can extract in a given amount of time. If we use a richness of 1 to indicate a ‘normal’ mining rate, then the same resource at another sector that has a richness of 2 will be mined at twice the rate (and fill up your cargo hold in half the time).
Sectors with higher richness are farther from the CSS’, so if you’re just starting out, get a feel for mining at sectors close by. This is because it also costs you more fuel and time to get to sectors further away. Once you have a handle on the basic mechanics, you can judge for yourself if it’s worth it to find a sector with higher richness.
Cargo Size: Every ship has a different cargo size, and the total cargo size of your fleet will be the biggest limiting factor in how much you can mine. As a simple example, let’s say you have a single Airbike, with a cargo size of 249. This means that once you’ve mined a total of 249 cargo’s worth of whatever resource, that’s the maximum you can take away. Even if your Airbike is in a mining state for days, you can’t take more than your cargo limit. This is where every player will make their own choices about the ships they want to invest in, how much cargo their fleet(s) have, etc.
Withdrawing Resources: Currently in SAGE Labs, resources mined can be withdrawn to your wallet. This needs to occur if you want to transfer resources to other wallets or sell resources on the marketplace. The CSS’ are the only places that you can withdraw resources from SAGE Labs.
For example, let’s take a look at the MUD sectors. MUD-1 is the CSS, and MUD-2 has Iron Ore. If I send a fleet to MUD-2 and mine Iron Ore, I can choose to store Iron Ore in the local starbase at MUD-2, or I can bring my fleet back to MUD-1 and unload it there. If I want to withdraw the Iron Ore, it has to be brought to MUD-1 and placed in the CSS.
This opens up some choices for players. Some choose to store their mined resources in the local starbase, which also allows some crafting options. For example, you could mine Iron Ore at MUD-2 and have some crafters turn it into Iron and/or other downstream components. Some may choose to do this because crafted products can sometimes occupy less total space than the raw material. If we take Ammunition, it takes 1 Copper Ore to produce 1 Copper. However, it takes 2 Copper to produce 1 Ammunition. Copper Ore, Copper and Ammunition all take up the same amount of cargo space. Thus, to make 100 Ammunition, I could choose to haul 200 Copper Ore and/or 200 Copper back to the CSS, or I could produce 100 Ammunition locally, and it would take half the space to haul that 100 Ammunition back to the CSS.
At the end of the day, however, any resource that you want to sell in the marketplace or store in your wallet needs to be brought to the CSS’. The Star Atlas team has shared that as of now, in the next major iteration of SAGE Labs (codenamed Starbased), all resources do need to be withdrawn to wallets to carry forward.
Basic concepts on mining profitability and efficiency
Now that we’ve covered some of the basics as well as things to keep in mind, let’s walk through some examples of looking at how you calculate margins and profitability. Remember, you can just go out and mine and not worry about any of this. For those who want to do more planning and increase efficiency, it’s definitely worth it to think about what you’re mining.
On this topic, we’ll start with a couple of basic principles:
Profit: For our conversation here, we’ll view this simply as the total worth of the resources you mine, after accounting for and deducting the cost of the resources you spent mining. For example, I like to calculate profit in the total of amount of ATLAS that each of my mining trips makes.
Mining Efficiency: Again keeping it simple for now, we’ll consider this the profit you make every period of time. For example, I like to use ATLAS per minute as my metric. The reason I pay attention to this efficiency variable is that it can help you standardize across different resources, since they likely have different mining and travel times.
Here’s a series of data that can help us see why these numbers are important.
First, let’s look at some example resources, using the same mining fleet. If we only look at the sale price of the cargo, they look pretty different of course:
Next, let’s add in the costs; remember that it takes fuel to get to different sectors, it takes food during the duration of mining, and for non-mining ships, it takes ammunition:
In the above chart, it becomes interesting to note the net income between Iron Ore and Copper Ore. In the MUD sectors, Copper Ore is farther away than Iron Ore. In Chart 1, when we only looked at the sale price, it seemed that Iron Ore and Copper Ore were both pretty similar in what we’d get. However, after we add in the costs, there is a much bigger difference. Due to the increased cost of fuel, Copper Ore gives us 100 ATLAS less in profit per trip.
Keep in mind that these numbers are for those who are planning on selling the raw materials. Manufacturers may not care as much since they can gain additional profit margin building components. Also, each race in Star Atlas has resources at different distances from the CSS’, so sometimes it can be worthwhile to have another wallet in another race. Copper Ore for example is a distance of 7.00 AU from the ONI CSS, but for MUD and USTUR are 10.20 AU away from the CSS’.
We have the net profit per trip, but we want to look at the final metric, which is to account for mining time (for the sake of simplicity, I won’t add in travel time, but that can of course have an impact if you need to do multiple warps to get to farther sectors):
As you can see, this puts another spin on things. In Chart 2, when we look at the net profit per trip, Iron Ore is at 365 ATLAS while Carbon is at 172 ATLAS. By that measure, Iron Ore is clearly the winner. However, Iron Ore also takes twice as long to mine as Carbon. In the end, the actual net income per minute is a lot closer together.
The net of it here is, if you’re only focused on profiting from mining raw resources, you want to take a look at these different metrics to ensure you’re planning and deciding on an apples-to-apples comparison.
As you can see from this basic guide, there are many layers to Star Atlas, which makes it extremely interesting to all sorts of participants. For those who like the economics side of things, there is a lot of depth already, and we’re still in the early stages. At the end of the day, there is something for everyone, so trying things out, find what you like, and most importantly, have fun!
P.S. Our next guide will introduce the basics of manufacturing. Let us know in the comments or on Twitter if you’d like us to write about a specific topic!
If you’re looking for a guide on how to navigate SAGE Labs, setup fleets and more, I suggest you check out the handy guide from the Aephia guild.
Appendix — Mining Distance Data
Here’s a quick summary of the raw resource locations, along with the distance from the faction CSS.
ONI
MUD
USTUR
