Elite: Dangerous — mining a void opal motherlode
A demonstration of how to find and mine the so-called "motherlode" asteroids in Elite: Dangerous.
The Beyond 3.3 game update brought in a whole bunch of new mining mechanics as well as some rare but highly valuable minerals, the juiciest of these being void opals, which at present can fetch up to 1.7 million credits per tonne.
Here, I'm hunting for motherlode asteroids at a void opal hotspot in an icy planetary ring (Buluujja 3A).
Void opal motherlodes can only be found in icy rings and are medium-small in size and sort of popcorn-shaped. On the pulse wave scanner, they glow an intense yellow with patches of intense red. This colouring should not diminish on getting closer. Up close, you should be able to see fissures on the surface.
Once you find a motherlode, you to need fire a prospector at it, which marks the fissures on your HUD.
You then need to place seismic charges on several of the fissures. The aim is to plant enough to reach the optimum yield range, which is the blue section of the graph in the top right of the HUD. After planting the first charge, you have 120 seconds to place the rest.
After cracking open the asteroid, send out limpets to collect the void opal fragments and use the abrasion blaster to shoot off the surface deposits that spawn.
As you may notice in this video, collection limpets are both dumb and fragile so you make sure you have a decent supply of them!
This kind of mining is well-suited to faster, more agile ships (I'm using a Krait Mk II in the vid). Motherlode asteroids are relatively rare, so a faster ship can scan more rocks in a shorter space of time. The extra agility also comes in handy for visually checking roids for fissures and placing the seismic charges. That said, I have no problems doing it in my iCutter, it's just a slower process.
You can read more about the new mining mechanics in my comprehensive beginner’s guide to Elite: Dangerous at http://wp.me/p5eF9L-f2