Greycat ROC Mining

The key steps required to get up and running with ROC Mining are

1. Purchase or hire a ROC. In this guide I’ll cover hiring
2. Purchase some mining armour if you are going to mine on a planet that has extreme temperatures (e.g. Aberdeen or Arial)
3. Purchase or hire a ship big enough to carry the ROC. Again I’ll cover hiring for now
4. Fly to a mining station and retrieve your ROC
5. Prospect for minerals to mine
6. Mine the minerals
7. Sell the minerals you have mined

Shopping at a refinery station⌗

To hire a ROC, ship and purchase your mining armour you need to head to a station that has a refinery such as the following:

• MIC-L1 Shallow Frontier Station
• HUR-L1 Green Glade Station
• ARC-L1 Wide Forest Station
• CRU-L1 Ambitious Dream Station

When you get to the station go over to the elevators, the same ones that take you to the Galleria, and select the refinery floor. Make you way over to the mining shop by walking through the refinery

Locate the shop

When you get to the mining shop you are now able to tick off requirements 1-3 from the list above.

• Purchase the Pembroke armor (10,330 UEC) and helmet (5,050 UEC) to mine in hot environments such as Aberdeen or Arial
• Rent the ROC (9,030 UEC for 3 days)
• Rent the Drake Cutless Black (72,728 UEC for 3 days)

The purchase of the armour, helmet and a 3 days rental of the Cutty Black and ROC will set you back approx 97k UEC. I would typically make approximately 80-100k UEC per hour depending on how easily I located minerals so you should recover you investment pretty quickly. It probably makes sense to save up to purchase a ship large enough to hold a ROC such as the Cutty longer term. This will allow you to mine more easily and this opens the doors to lots of other missions and play styles such as playing with a friend, Quant mining and trading goods (both legal and illegal types).

Note You can use any heavy helmet with the Pembroke armor and it will give good protection against the heat, although not as good as the Pembroke, and better visibility

To get setup at the mining shop confusingly there are two terminals you need to use, one for the armor and one for the ship/ROC rental. The armor is purchased at the following terminal

whereas the ROC and Cutty Black are hired from this terminal

Prospecting⌗

In this guide I’m going to be visiting Arial. First head back to the hangar and habs floor and retrieve your Cutless.

Note You can only retrieve the Cutless Black at the station, you will spawn and load the ROC from the mining outpost

There are three steps to complete at the planet:

1. Land at a mining outpost (e.g. HDMS-Bezdek, HDMS-Lathan)
2. Retrieve your ROC and load it onto the Cutty
3. Mine the planet
4. Sell your mined resources (this can be done on planet or other stations in the Verse)

Head over to the ship, take off and quantum travel to Arial. Once you arrive quantum travel to either HDMS-Bezdek or HDMS-Lathan. Land on the pad, exit your ship and head over to the building that has a blue hue and should also have a small landing pad next to it. This is where you can spawn the ROC (or other size 1 vehicles)

Head into the building, locate the terminal and claim the ROC. Once claimed you can then spawn it. It should appear pretty quickly on the pad right outside the window.

Jump into the ROC, power up, start the engines and then drive it over to your Cutty. Load it into the rear cargo area and close the door.

Once the ROC is loaded the next step is to take off and search for resources to mine. There are currently three resources that you can mine with a ROC

Its up to you to figure out if it’s worth mining the less valuable minerals. Personally I weight my prospecting heavily towards Hadanite, but if I find a large cache of one of the other minerals I will probably mine it particularly if I’ve been having problems finding the good stuff and I’m getting fed up of flying around in circles.

For the next part of the guide you need to make use of two different features of the ship

• Ping. Sends out a burst over a broad range to identify nearby objects
• Scan. Provides detailed information of a particular object

In order to locate potential resources you first make use of the ping feature Key: Tab. Set your ping angle to around 90 degrees, and certainly less than 360 degrees otherwise you’ll be chasing objects you have already passed and disregarded Key: Period (increase angle), Comma (decrease angle)

I would travel reasonably low and slow whilst pinging. Keep pinging until your radar produces a box or diamond shaped icon. I typically avoid boxes that are more than about 3k km away since mining minerals don’t seem to be detectable over that range. If you get a box icon fly closer to the icon and keep pinging until the item changes. If it changes to a shield then you can ignore it, but if it changes to a diamond you’re all good. If you get a diamond right away then that is good too.

The next step is to scan the resource and figure out specifically what it is. Enable scan mode Key: v, fly pretty close to the object and scan it Key: Left Mouse Button. The UI seems to populate in two halves. The left side Overview seems to populate from further away and the right side Carrying seems to populate only when you are very close to the object. It’s the right side information you need since this determines exactly what mineral you have found.

Note You can scan other players ships and gets lots of useful information including the type and amount of cargo they are carrying!

You can see here I got lucky and found some Hadanite

If you are happy with the mineral you have found, which is ideally Hadanite too, land the Cutty and drive out the ROC,

Mining⌗

Once you are in the ROC drive up to the mineral you found. If you had to park your ship a little distance away due to the terrain you can still ping from the ROC to help you locate the minerals. There are two different modes for ROC mining:

• Mining Mode. Used to break apart rocks into minerals
• Extraction Mode. Used to collect minerals for storage in the ROC

The first step is to enable mining mode Key: m. When you point the laser at the rock in mining mode it will be scanned. The scan will confirm the type of mineral and also provide some key statistics such as mass, instability, resistance, composition etc. These give you an indication as to how best mine the mineral.

The mining itself is a mini-game. The objective is to blast the rock with the laser until the charge level enters the optimum range. Whilst the charge level is in this range the rock will “charge up” and eventually fracture. Based on factors such as instability the charge levels will jump up/down a bit during this process. You need to regulate the power of your laser Key: Mouse Wheel Up (more power), Mouse Wheel Down (less power) to offset those changes and keep in the optimal range. Typically mining the mineral goes a bit like this

• Laser on full power 100%
• Charge level enters the optimum range
• Reduce laser to around 75%
• Watch what the charge level does and adjust the laser up or down depending on if it spikes or drops off
• If it spikes up reduce laser to around 35% - 50%
• If it spikes down laser on full power

If you overcharge the rock you will receive and audible warning. If you overcharge the rock too much it will explode and might take you with it. Even overcharging the rock a little bit will mean that when it eventually breaks apart the collectable minerals will be spread over a wider area. This makes for a longer, more tedious collection process.

Once the rock does fracture you should see lots of little diamond icons strewn amongst the area. Next switch to extraction mode Key: Right Mouse Button aim the laser at the diamonds and fire Key: Left Mouse Button. Keep the laser relatively still and wait 4-5 seconds for the minerals to be collected. Move the laser around the various groups of diamonds and repeat the process.

Once you have mined each of the rocks that you detected in your scan its time to load up the ROC and search for the next set of resources. Given Star Citizen is still in alpha and can be a little unstable at times I’d recommend not mining too many minerals before heading off to sell them. I would generally not fill the ROC up by more than half.

Selling⌗

Once you have loaded up your ROC, or are being sensible and half-loaded it, it’s time to sell the minerals and generate some cash. To do this you should fly over to a station, locate the Admin office and sell your minerals. I would typically head to a mining post to do this since its quicker and allows you to get back into mining faster. If on Arial for example I’d fly back to HDMS-Bezdek or HDMS-Lathan land on a landing pad and exit my ship. I’d then walk over to the Storage building, locate the terminal. Once at the terminal select location as being Greycat ROC and click Sell. On the right hand panel you should see the mineral(s) contained in the ROC. Click on each mineral, confirm the amount you wish to sell (all of it!) and then click the Sell button. Repeat this for each mineral that was mined and stored inside the ROC.

That’s the end of my guide. Remember I focus on the very basics so there might be more to discover vs what I covered here!

Troubleshooting⌗

• ROC Overheating. The ROC can overheat, particularly on a hot planet and especially when the cooler becomes worn. If the ROC cooler wear level hits 100 the ROC will shut down. To resolve this ensure you allow the ROC to rest a bit on longer mining sessions and ensure you repair the ROC at a landing pad (e.g at a mining outpost) every once in a while. You can check the wear by looking at an instrument panel, clicking items and then seeing the wear for the Frost-Star SL component. The wear value is the middle one which has a sort of snowflake icon. If you overlook this and the ROC does shut down and cannot be moved, it’s possible to grab the minerals you have mined from storage at the back at the ROC and transfer them to a backpack.