3 tiers of cooling beams

Small cooling beam (sp)
Heat: -0.25
Grid: 6
Mass: 1000kg
Needs coolant refill after 1 minute
Buyable after Basic miner II + mining licence 5

Large cooling beam (lp)
Heat: -1
Grid: 4
Mass: 1000kg
Needs coolant refill after 2 minutes
Craftable (easy to obtain ingredients) after Basic miner III

Heavy cooling beam (lp)
Heat: -1,5
Grid: 50
Mass: 20000kg
Needs coolant refill after 10 minutes
Craftable (hard to obtain ingredients including Queen mining beam) after Basic miner IV and mining licence 15

Cooling beams must have limited working time to prevent AFKing and dumping ore. Refill would be cheap (like 100c/1minute of work)

"Rule #5 - Be Thorough in your Suggestion, with Each Idea in a Unique Thread.

Post the positives, the downsides or risks, the trade-offs and ramifications, and why you think the idea improves the game as a whole. Consider the likely development burden, and factor that into your thought process.

Include potential acquisition barriers (item cost, is it a drop, is it manufactured, what are the level requirements, etc)."

You got the level requirements, but the other stuff is needed.

I will +1 this, as long as the cooling is slow enough that it requires a group in order to bring down a boiled roid, at least in a reasonable time (20 minutes?)

This gave me an idea, what about "cooling mines", drop them near the hot roid and go mine a different one while you wait. Destructible of course.

I'm all for ideas that use more commodities. Moreso if the commodities have to be in your cargo. For example something like this where you have coolant in your cargo that gets used to either cool down the roids make your mining beams more efficient as it depletes your cargo of coolant, or do the same thing with repair guns where it will use hive nanites or something as a boost to it's efficiency.

There's literally a commodity called "Coolant" so I guess it could be used as an addition to regular mining beams instead of making a new class of beams altogether. Carry coolant in your cargo and activate "coolant mode" or something, and it slows down the yeild but drastically reduces heat, while using the coolant in your cargo. If used with HE beams or qbeams (both of which have very low heat) you can actually cool down the roid itself, otherwise it only reduces the speed at which it heats up.

+1

It is inevitable that something like this will be necessary as the player base grows.

Past threads about this idea:

Large Add-on for Cooling Roid Temps Faster
Tunguska Radiant Nanites
Changes to Mining Mechanic

Add Cooling Systems

Cooling Beams
Cooling beams to cool down roids and shards

And Inc's previous reply about this kind of thing:


"Heat" was my way of getting around the need for tracking resource quantities per asteroid and eventually having to magically "replenish" them somehow, as they became exhausted, or otherwise deal with resource exhaustion across large areas of the galaxy. I wanted something where player activity would substantially impact availability of natural resources, but in a way that would refresh itself automatically and (possibly) further promote exploration and prospecting. So, we went with "heat" as a thing.

I'm not opposed to some means to cool things as well. It's an interesting thought. Part of the value of heat, from a design standpoint, was making sure afk mining was basically limited by some parameter. Even if local risk (bots, pirates) was low, you would eventually heat up the asteroid and not generate an infinite amount of "stuff" by leaving your computer mining for a week.. or whatever.

A cooling beam raises the possibility of more lengthy afk mining (particularly with possible capship-based mining), with multiple accounts; but I guess if it's based on some limited resource ("coolant"), that does still place a bit of an upward bound on the process.

Dunno. I guess I'm not against it, but the balance would be in the tradeoffs. I could see this being more useful for relatively rare ores and minerals where there's one small roid somewhere that has a big percentage of "X", and a group of people re-cools it to keep working the area. That might need to be offset against some kind of diminishing returns.. cost of replacing "coolant", or value of re-applying coolant to a given roid, or.. whatever. Not sure.

We all float
"A cooling beam raises the possibility of more lengthy afk mining (particularly with possible capship-based mining), with multiple accounts"
That's my first thought. Second one was "how do i cut it off so it won't be just -1ed and ignored"
I suggested it after seeing all roids boiled in 4 sectors with a station in a row and not knowing about older suggestions.
My main idea was to sacrifice half of ports for heat neutral mining for strictly limited time