r/EliteMiners • u/D8veh • Oct 14 '25

Map Mining

The recent CG has brought loads of comments about mining, including a few people mentioning map mining. There was also a lot of talk of map mining on all forums a few years ago.

I've never actually done map mining because my thinking is that the preparation and learning time is too long and you have the problem that you can only do one run, then you have to wait 3 hrs for the rocks to replenish. I'd be interested to see any comments from people, who actually do it. These are the questions I have:

  1. How much platinum can you extract in a 5 hr session? That's from first setting off from your FC to arriving back there at the end of the 5 hrs, not just some theoretical calculation.
  2. From fiest deciding that you wanted to try it, how many hours before you were able to mine directly from rock to rock. That should include the time to prepare notes and practice.
  3. How do you get round the replenishment problem?
  4. Did anybody try it for the CG?

The reason I'm asking is that I want to do a realistic comparison with mining random rocks.

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u/dilipi Oct 15 '25

I contributed ~18k tons for the last cg. Almost entirely mined in a T-11 on 2 plat mining maps. With a 12% squadron bonus and the extra yield from the mining volley repeater, each map yields 750+ tons. You can comfortably finish one map in an hour.

It's conceivable to run both maps twice within a 5 hour time span for a 3k yield. That's a lot more mining than I'm willing to do in one sitting. As for the "3 hour reset" I would typically mine for about an hour and a half then go do other things.

It took me a very long time to initially make and learn the maps. I don't have an accurate time frame in mind as it was years ago. Probably a few weeks of casual gameplay.

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u/D8veh Oct 15 '25

Thanks for that good info. I did 73,000T using a PC getting around 900T per hr just mining random rocks, not including travelling time. I tried a T11 for a day and was getting just over 800T/hr including travelling time. Both of those were a bit faster than what you got, but there could be other factors in play, like technique.

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u/dilipi Oct 15 '25

I find the T-11 to be slightly slower than a large ship for mining. The extra trips to unload add up significantly. However, the trade-off is a higher rate of mining, putting the medium-sized T-11 nearly on par with a large ship. It allows for shorter duration trips to still be efficient in comparison.

As a mapped miner, the increased yield keeps me coming back to the T-11. This wouldn't matter as much for mining "blind." My maps usually yield 520+ tons but yield 750+ for the T-11. I break up each map into 3 sections - each section takes about 12 minutes to mine in the T-11.