A drone mining loop for new players

Mining with drones is the gentlest way to learn breaches. You spend most of the run watching your surroundings instead of fighting, and the rewards feed straight into ORE and Merits.

What you need

• A ship with a free battery hardpoint (the diamond) for a Dronelink.
• Mining drones in cargo. Each faction Quartermaster sells the blueprint for 160 Merits, 20 uses.
• A small stack of Veskar and Pirite. Damaged drones repair in cargo using them.

The loop

1. Pick a breach your build rating fits. Your faction's lower-tier breaches keep the other faction out, which makes them the calm option.
2. Find mineral fragments: they float, with clouds around them.
3. Hover a fragment and press Q to send drones out. Dronelinks give bandwidth, which caps how many drones are out at once. Cargo space caps how many you carry.
4. Don't stay long. Scout before you settle on a rock, don't pull NPCs you can't handle, and leave while the hold is still worth less than the ship.
5. Extract by train. Read the green marker so you board the train for your own hub.
6. Recycle at the hub. The Recycler tab of your stash turns minerals into ORE, and depositing resources there also earns Merits.

Things that go wrong

• Q does nothing. No dronelink fitted, or no drones in cargo.
• A utility module isn't mining. Passive utility modules only boost stats; they don't mine. Mining-speed bonuses do apply to drones, though.
• A fragment won't give anything. Hel fragments can't be extracted yet.
• A train turns you away. Cargo counts toward build rating at 25%, so a full hold can push you over a destination's limit. Take a different train.

What to keep

Keep the rare minerals, Dark Triton and Solstine, for recipes. Early on, recycle almost everything else: ORE identifies modules and repairs your ship, and you will need both.

When you lose the ship

You lose the ship, its fitted modules and its cargo, except the safety hold. Your stash stays safe. That's the deal, so keep the loop short.