Mining

Mining in Aurora refers to the extraction of TN Minerals. Mining is the cornerstone of any Empire, whether single-planet or a thousand star systems. Without minerals, it is impossible to construct anything at all, so it is important to manage your mining correctly.

Minerals can be found on Asteroids, Comets, Moons, Gas Giants and Planets. Planets are usually the best sources for minerals, but most Gas Giants and Super-Jovians are excellent repositories of Sorium.

Geological Survey

See Survey.

Before you can start mining you have to find minerals first. Only an estimated 5% of all bodies contain minerals. The initial survey is always conducted from orbit. By later assigning Geology Teams to a body you can sometimes find more minerals or improve their accessibility.

There are several ways to find out which bodies have been surveyed and what has been found:

• selecting "Show Surveyed Bodies" from the Minerals tab in the system map window. Here you can also see how much mineral reserves have been found, and their accessibility (i.e. possible mining rate).
• going to the System View window (F9): the first column shows either nothing (not surveyed yet), an "S" (surveyed but nothing found) or "M" (minerals present).
• the Geological Survey Report window provides a search function for minerals you've discovered.

Finally, the Summary tab of the Population & Production window tells you whether a geo-team search on the colony has been completed yet.

Extraction

There are various mining systems:

1. ground-based Mines, requiring a population to run them. It is generally advisable to have a number of mines on any planet you inhabit, if it has mineral deposits.
2. ground-based Automated mines, where robots do all the work but are more expensive.
3. ships with Asteroid Mining Modules, which are ship-mounted automines that work only on asteroids and comets. Expensive, but large fleets of Asteroid Miners can make short work of an Asteroid Belt. Their mobility is also a plus. Tip: If your asteroid miners are not mining, it may be because you sent them to a moon or planet, not an asteroid.
4. ships with Sorium Harvester Modules, which extract Sorium from gas giants or Super-Jovians and convert it directly into fuel to fill their tanks. The raw Sorium cannot be gathered. This is the only type of mine that can be used on a Gas Giant.

Extracted minerals are stored on the planet. See the Population and Production window for an explanation of the Mining Report.

Mass drivers are the easiest way to transport minerals within a system.

Caution

If you have a group of asteroid miners or harvesters working in orbit, don't send new ships to join that task group. You must send ships to the asteroid or planet first, then tell them to join the task group, otherwise their mining rate won't be added to the total. The same applies to terraformers, orbital habitats and maintenance vessels.

Minerals Quantity & Accessibility

Every world has a chance to contain some of the TN-Elements, each with a specific quantity and rated at a level of accessibility between 0.1 and 1, which dictates how quickly the mineral can be harvested with any given quantity of mining equipment. Very massive planets are likely to have large number of minerals available at very high quantities but low accessibility, while smaller worlds, moons and asteroids are progressively more likely to have fewer minerals at higher levels of accessibility.

Minerals Accessibility value is multiplied by your annual mining rate to give the total amount for that mineral that you can mine. So if your mining rate is 12 tons/year and the accessibility of a mineral is 0.5, you will mine 6 tons/year. Over time, as more and more minerals are mined from the same body, its accessibility of the remaining minerals will decrease.

The ease of mining for that particular mineral, ranging from 0.1 to 1.0. A mineral with an accessibility of 1.0 will be mined at the same rate as the annual production shown above. Lower accessibility minerals will be mined at a lower production rate based. For example, if a colony has an annual production of 5000 tons, then 5000 tons of each accessibility 1.0 mineral will be produced but only 3500 tons of an accessibility 0.7 mineral and only 500 tons of an accessibility 0.1 mineral. For planets and moons, if a mineral's accessibility is greater than 0.1 it will begin to fall once you have mined out half the mineral. The accessibility will reach 0.1 shortly before the mineral deposit is exhausted

This spreadsheet contains a workbook which can be used to estimate the total extraction rate average over a planet's useful lifetime.