...

At the base of the Ware manufacturing chains are natural resources which have to be harvested and refined into useful products. Solar energy is converted directly into Energy Cells by Energy Cell Production modules while other Solid and Liquid resources need to be harvested by specialised Miner ships. Liquid resources are collected from flying in nebulae while solids require asteroids to be broken up and the fragments collected. The abundance of solar energy in a sector can be seen under the entry for the sector in the Galaxy category of the Encyclopaedia.

• Energy Resources (from suns):     Energy Cells produced by Solar Power Plants
• Liquid Resources (from nebulae): Helium, Hydrogen and Methane (also known as gases)
• Solid Resources (from asteroids): Ice, Ore, Nividium and Silicon (also known as minerals)

Trading

Price Development

The production and exchange of wares is key to any healthy economy and the X-Universe is no different. Despite fierce competition from NPC traders there are always gaps in the market for the player to fill and line their pocket with credits in the process whether it is using a small courier or a huge manufacturing complex.

...

Mining

Introduction

Ships with Solid or Liquid storage types can harvest asteroids and or nebulae, respectively. This generates resources (see above), which can be sold to NPC stations as a source of income that requires no operating costs. Alternatively, it can be fed into player-owned stations to act as the basis for manufacturing chains.

Resource Probes can be deployed at prospective mining sites to learn about the abundance of natural resources. In order to locate Solid natural resources, the player ship can use Scan Mode to help visually detect asteroids. Nebulae are represented as blue tiles, asteroid fields as red tiles and mixed collection sites as purple tiles on the Map. After use, Deployables like Resource Probes can be deactivated through the HUD menu, and collected by flying over them.

...

Mining ships

Small and Medium ships

...

:

• These

...

• ships collect their wares like other items and wares in space (on contact with the ship).

...

• Those with Solid cargo storage

...

• equip a mining laser

...

• turret to break up asteroids into

...

• small, collectable mineral fragments.

Large ships:

• These hulls collect

...

• natural resources through the use of specialised

...

• drones.

...

• Those with Solid cargo storage equip a mining laser turret to break up asteroids.
  • Once in range, mining turrets

...

• • automatically open fire on asteroids within line-of-site

...

• • .

Ordering ships to mine

All player-owned mining ships can be ordered to mine using the Mine order by right clicking a resource region on the map and selecting the Mine order before left clicking a resource to harvest from the list. They can then be order to sell their wares to stations. Player-owned mining ships that have captains with enough skill stars can be set to automatically mine resources and sell them at nearby NPC stations (see "Auto Trading and Auto Mining" section above).

Manual asteroid mining

Mineral mining with Small and Medium ships:

• The Container Magnet (hold the O hotkey) can be used to speed up collection of mineral fragments.

Mineral mining with Large ships:

• At this time, only NPC-piloted large mining ships will deploy and use their drones to collect mineral fragments.
• Handing over control of the ship to the Captain and ordering them to mine locally could work around this (unconfirmed).
• Where the fragments are small enough, they may be collectable on ship contact like small/medium ships (unconfirmed).

Crystal mining:

• Some asteroids have surface spots that can be individually mined away to release

...

• various types of crystals.
•  Depending on rarity, crystals can be quite valuable when sold to Item Traders (see "Items versus Wares" section above).

...

• As with mineral fragments, the Container Magnet can speed up collection.

Manual nebula mining for liquid resouces

At this time, it is currently not possible to collect resouces from nebulae while the player pilots the ship.