Mining

Every hull mines. Each one carries a mining laser of 1.0, and a survey ship’s laser component raises it from there, tier by tier. Non-survey hulls cannot upgrade past 1.0 — which is why their laser component reads zero — so they extract at exactly the node’s own rate. They are not barred from mining, and mining bonuses still speed them up.

The figure a ship’s detail panel calls MINING BONUS is that laser after bonuses, and it is a multiplier on the node, not a quantity per hour. Bonuses do not all sum: Mining Speed bonuses come in two kinds, laser bonuses and speed bonuses. Laser bonuses raise the laser itself, in the laser’s own units (+26,500% is 265 more laser), and speed bonuses add to each other and scale the result — speed = (laser + laser bonuses) × (1 + speed bonuses), the (1 + B) × (1 + C) of the formula above. Within each kind everything is additive, which is why a hull whose own ability is already enormous barely moves when research is added to it.

Resources per hour is that multiplier times the node’s own hourly rate, which is a property of the node and is shown on the system’s Mines panel rather than anywhere on the ship. A hull with no laser upgrade therefore reads the node’s bare rate, which makes it a convenient way to measure a node: whatever it extracts is the base, and every other hull is that base times its own multiplier.

Bonuses are scoped to materials. A source that names specific resources raises the rate only for those, so one ship’s headline can be enormous on one material and bare on another — a specialist miner and a generalist can differ by orders of magnitude on the material the specialist was built for, and be equal on everything else. The ship’s own panel shows only the unscoped figure, so it will read lower than the rate you actually see parked on a node you have bonuses for.

Most bonuses scale the laser. One kind does not: a bonus scaled by an officer stat, so its size depends on the crew aboard rather than on the hull or the research behind it. Healthy Mining on the North Star is the example — it adds a share of the crew’s health to the rate, on 3★ ore, crystal and gas. It is a separate term (D) rather than another laser or speed bonus: those multiply the laser, and this is added after that product, so speed = (laser + laser bonuses) × (1 + speed bonuses) + Healthy Mining. A rate quoted for a bare hull, with no crew named, cannot include it at all.

The stat it reads is the crew’s base health — the officers’ own stats before the account-wide officer-stat bonuses are applied, not the boosted figure the crew screen shows. The difference is not small: a crew whose boosted health runs into the hundreds of thousands may have base health an order of magnitude lower, and the term follows the smaller number. The coefficient itself rises with the ship’s level, so the same crew contributes more aboard a fully levelled hull.

The ship’s own detail panel does not include this term. On a hull carrying one, the panel — and the extraction estimate the game derives from it — both read low, and a run finishes early by exactly the share the term contributes. That is a defect in the readout rather than in the mining: the resources arrive at the full rate.

Speed is not yield. Mining Reward is a separate final multiplier (E) on the quantity a run produces: it does not shorten the run, it makes the same run pay out more, and it is applied to the collected amount rather than to the extraction rate. It lands when the ship leaves the node — it warps or moves off, is hit, or is recalled — so the hold reads the amount before it until then, and the game’s mining speed never includes it. A run is bounded at the other end by Cargo Capacity — once the hold is full, extraction stops however fast the laser is.

Bonuses reach a ship from every account-wide source — research (including a seated fleet commander’s nodes), buildings, loyalty tracks and the Independent Archives — and from per-preset ones: the ship’s own abilities, seated officers, installed Forbidden Tech and active consumables. Most carry a gate, and a gate the hull fails removes that source entirely rather than reducing it: a survey-only building does nothing for an interceptor, and a faction extraction does nothing for a hull of another faction.

See also: Mining Speed, Mining Reward, Cargo Capacity