Second, will you be doing a guide on getting started in mining with a rental Prospector?
I did a 1 day rental for Planetside Mining both in 3.10 and now in 3.11 as well, and it's kinda really not worth it at the moment. Reason being that you cannot upgrade the laser, and can mostly only crack junk rocks that bring too little profit for the time spent. The best I could do was to get the rental price back after spending roughly 6 hours trying to crack rock after rock after rock. (I lost count after the 63rd rock from which I was able to crack 4)
It seems possible to turn a profit if you get very lucky, but one has to spend a lot of that 24 hours playing to make it worthwhile.
My best haul was 19K aUEC after finding a rock with very high concetration of diamonds and tungsten that I was able to crack for some reason. Anything containing higher value ores was impossible. Yes I tried all the tricks of moving the laser around, flying around the rock, changing distance rapidly... it did work in some cases but made no real difference in money earned cos of time wasted doing it and low concentration of good ores.
As a general rule with the rental basic ass laser, I found that rocks larger than 5000 mass are mostly impossible to break, and higher value rocks won't budge at all. Using the tricks I could get them up to some % power, but not into the green.
Planets where I tried in order of success: Cellin (by far the best), Lyria, Wala, Daymar.
TLDR.: it's more frustraion than fun gameplay in a rental Prospy, it's just not worth it in 3.11.
note: FPM mining tool seems to be broken in 3.11 on planet surface gems. Didn't try in caves yet.
I am actually going to get down and dirty this week with a stock prospector to see what its limits are. That info will go into the Supplement once its done.
