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[Antichrist Hater]

So far, the best thing of got out of 10+ tech mining colonies of various sizes was corrupted nanoforges, 1 Pristine Nanoforge, many AI cores including Alpha cores, 1 Autonomous Mantle bore and blueprints.

Honestly pretty iffy on the whole industry. I like how it's only a $150,000 investment + fuel, supplies, crew which mostly gets recuperated when you abandon the colony after exhausting the ruins but the items you gain are not wholly worth the effort for the time spent.
It's also very inconvenient if you choose to invest 2 storypoints and an Alpha AI core for +50% more items and have to go and pick it up again instead of abandoning it through the colony tab.
In my next campaign, I'm going to bring along a lot of crew with me and colonize any planet with decent ruins I see. Then abandon when need be. This seems like the best way to do it.

[Kos135]

Tech-mining has diminishing returns and attracts Pather cells. At most it can give you a few useful BPs, but you can find BPs by looting Research Stations and working for certain contacts you meet at station bars. It's the least useful industry in the game right now and needs some kind of buff to be worth it.

[Megas]

Tech Mining has too many downsides to bother with for a chance for useful rare loot.  Takes up slots and takes too long to drain mines.  By the time I can afford to tech mine worlds, either I already have maximum worlds settled and/or have the rare items they may yield.

[BigBrainEnergy]

Maybe if the total loot was the same but you burned through it much faster it'd be a fine temporary industry that you scrap and replace once you get your value out of it.

[Megas]

I (partly) liked the original implementation of Tech Mining.  It produced commodities like supplies and others for export but did not scale with colony size.  The worst problem of that was it easily attracted expeditions (at your size 3 colony) before the player was ready for them... which would not apply in this release because factions do not raid your size 3 worlds (and cells do not appear either) like they used to.  It was great for suppling demand for your smaller colonies before other industries became fully operational.

I think restoring Tech-Mining to its original implementation (while maintaining protection for size 3 colonies) would make them more useful, at least before endgame.

[Oni]

Simplest fix for me?

Changing it to a structure instead of an industry. It works surprisingly well.

[Igncom1]

I could see Tech-Mining be exp[anded to also be a kind of ship breaking and scavenger fleet launch point kind of industry, with the player collecting profit and loot overtime from the sector and potential second-rate ship offers if they want to buy other peoples scrap which you don't have blueprints for.

Like this Month: Scavengers and Tech-Miners earned you 200,000 and found these rare items: Blank X20, they also found a relic item and are offering it at double the usual cost (pristine nanoforge for x2 it's worth), Shipbreakers have also received a 2 D-mod 14th Onslaught ready to be salvaged from the Hegemony, but you can buy it for a 50,000 deposit and it will be fixed up and sent to your storage port, or scraped for 150,000 credits profit.

Which now that I think about it does sound like a slots machine, but yeah I'm thinking of it like that, a second hand salvage market for goods of some sort.

[Kos135]

I submit that scouring ruins upon discovering a planet should be phased out and replaced with tech-mining, which ought to be a renewable resource akin to farming, mining, etc. Does it really make sense for your salvage teams to strip an entire (ruined) city of its best goodies in the span of, what, 2 minutes?

Additionally perhaps there should be distinctions between planetary ruins aside from their size as well, in order to signal to the player what kind of loot they could expect from certain ruins? And perhaps there could be negative events tied to tech-mining based on the type of ruin? For example, if you're tech-mining the ruins of a secret Tri-Tachyon outpost in the outskirts of the sector your miners might accidentally awaken some inactive [REDACTED] and cause a long-term stability penalty, maybe damage to the tech-mining industry, etc.

[Megas]

I submit that scouring ruins upon discovering a planet should be phased out and replaced with tech-mining, which ought to be a renewable resource akin to farming, mining, etc. Does it really make sense for your salvage teams to strip an entire (ruined) city of its best goodies in the span of, what, 2 minutes?

For casual gameplay, yes!  I rather have the reverse of giving the goodies now like research stations do, regardless if it is a research station, ruins, tech-mine, or combat loot from special bosses.

[smithney]

I've personally always taken Ruins as a bonus rather than as a factor in colony selection. The current mechanics do feel like wasted potential at the moment. At the same time, I would prefer Ruins remaining a spice-up to them becoming a key factor in colony selection. At this point, making Ruins have a size-based modifier affecting colony stats a la Decivilized Subpopulation would be a welcome little band-aid for how underwhelming Ruins feel right now. Perhaps you could affect the modifier by building the Tech-Mining industry. Anyway, I'm sure Alex is already cooking up some solution for the long term, especially with his recent announcement of utilizing track mechanics.

[Serenitis]

Roads not taken:

Spoiler

Ditch tech mining completely. Well, as a separate entity anyway.
Any habitation on a world with ruins automatically pulls stuff from said ruins on its own. The bigger the population, the faster it works.

The ruins themselves never deplete completely, but they will eventually drop to a 'minimum' level.
Ruins can't be cleared inside the timescale the game takes place in, they're just too big.

[close]

OR

Spoiler

Have the tech mining industry buildable anywhere, and instead it sends out salvage teams to untapped ruins you have discovered.
(For this purpose, consider 'untapped' to mean 'survey complete + initial quick looting'.)

The size of the team is based on the fleet size modifer.
There would be a slider or selector somewhere so the player can deliberately send smaller teams than the base is capable of producing if they prefer.

Small teams are faster, but can only carry small stuff like items and blueprints.
Large teams are slower, but can carry non-trivial quantities of anything.
Smaller teams would be more subject to rng variance since the smaller things are rarer, so its possible they might return with nothing. While the larger teams would almost always bring back something even if it might not be the most valuable.

Destination selection for salvage teams is directable to a degree.
There would be three selections for "This system", "This Constellation" and "Everywhere else", which could be set as desired to prevent salvage teams from removing things from places you might want to colonise and exploit yourself.

[close]

[FreonRu]

I would suggest an improvement in techno mining.
The first level - techno-mining exactly on the constructed planet - extracts resources and puts them in the player's warehouse, over time the resources are exhausted and the prefix to the planet "ruins" disappears.

The second level (building improvement) is techno-mining of the entire sector. Once a month, a research fleet is sent to systems in which the player has already found ruins (but has not founded a colony) - and within a month, the research fleet will excavate there, and then return to their home system and send all the finds found (including extremely rare items - artifacts of the domain era, etc.). Due to the fact that such an industry is very expensive - you need ships, fuel, supplies, a research group - it is most logical for this building to occupy two industry cells at once.

In any case, now technomaning is not the most popular and useful building, I would really like to see its development or renovation.

[Antichrist Hater]

I'm tech mining again on a new campaign and getting nothing but bleh...
Where are all the rare domain artifacts hiding at? For me, that is the main incentive to even do tech mining as it's seemingly the only way to obtain them but the deck is stacked against me.

[Igncom1]

You'll get far more from surveying and salvaging then tech-mining, ultimately.

Does feel weird that one salvaging trip to a planet can net more goods then a decades long tech mining operation. But I suppose it's probably quite easy to spot an anti-matter fuel refinery from orbit.

[Serenitis]

You'll get far more from surveying and salvaging then tech-mining, ultimately.

Ultimately, this.
If you explore an entire sector you can almost guarantee you'll get a full set of items (or very close).
Tech Mining is comparatively lacklustre because on the whole it's output seems to be very very capricious, and non-interactively time consuming.

But maybe it is worth borrowing an idea from another part of the game to provide some potential shortcuts?

Domain derelicts sometimes have snippets of information that point to other derelicts.
Maybe ruins and abandoned stations could have a similar thing that points to useful items. (Possibly a specific thing, maybe just "something of value".)
That would send people to the approximate locations of things so they don't have to sweep the entire sector.

Not entirely sure how well that would mesh with the drop tables though.