Mining Guide

Mining is recommended at level 3-4 (100 000 - 10 000 000 cr) for relative maximum profit/hour.

Expect an average income between 2 100 - 39 000 cr / t. (Maximized at 70 000 - 110 000 cr / t if you're turning mined resources in for missions.)

How to get started?

1. Get a ship, or a better ship, that is capable of carrying mining lasers, cargo racks, a refinery (Class 3 is enough, type A advised), and ideally a prospector (Class 1 is enough, type A advised) and a collector limpet controller (the best you can get, type A is advised).
2. I would advise maximizing cargo capacity to make these trips worthwhile.
3. Locate a system with a pristine metallic resource (a planetary ring) and a station that buys these resources. (Good example: Yan Musu system)
4. Move to that system, and stock up on limpets. Fill your cargo hold in the restock option of the station menu to about 70% of your cargo space ±10%.
5. Travel to the metallic ring at normal speed. Gradually slow down to the lowest possible speed before colliding with the ring. You will safely drop out of supercruise without having to press J.
6. Approach an asteroid, and launch a prospector limpet into it. (Limpets are assigned to the primary and secondary weapon discharge buttons in fire groups menu, and are deployed like firing weapons).
7. Assign 4 pips to weapons, and 2 to systems.
8. Once the limpet is flying towards your asteroid, target it with the T key.
9. Open your cargo hatch (Home key).
10. If either painite, platinum or palladium content is over 15%, mine it. If the field is low on these materials, mine gold or osmium or quit to the main menu and reload for another instance, and different ore distribution.
11. You can keep building up trace amounts of gold and osmium too if you wish, or eject them directly from the refinery bin along with any other trash ore. Preserve your cargo space for the good stuff.
12. Deploy the collector limpets with your assigned button. They will begin bringing fragments in. Once they are spent (they have a limited operation time, after which they will self destruct), don't forget to deploy new ones.
13. Once you've depleted the asteroid, close the cargo hatch, and go to line 6. Repeat these steps until  the cargo racks are full.
14. Assign 3 pips to engines and 3 to systems. Exit the ring above or below it. Charge the frameshift drive and enter supercruise.
15. Once on the way, target your unload station and head towards it. Check general tips for suggestions about interdictions and how to handle them.
16. Enter the station and start with repairing, reloading, and refueling. Then, enter the bulletin board and look for relevant missions that you can fulfill right now, with what you have on board, in your cargo hold. You can once again play with instancing here, and switch between open play and solo play to get different missions, but this is an exploit and should be considered cheating to some degree.
17. If all missions are fulfilled, sell everything in the commodity market.
18. Repeat from line 1, until bored.

Outfitting Tips for your Vessel

• Mining lasers and the refinery are essential to mining, the prospector and the collector limpets are very highly recommended as they improve the yield of the rock (prospector) and decrease the time spent with collecting the fragments (collector).
• Ideally you should aim to have at least 5-6 bins in your refinery, which will let you keep your progress on the painite, platinum and palladium reserves, while allowing the rest of the unwanted resources to be processed. You can eject these before a refined tonne is created.
• Don't forget to restock limpets at your departure station (up to about 70% of your cargo space ±10%)
• You need the best available class and type of collector limpets, which will allow you to haul the asteroid fragments in faster.
• Find a class 1, type A prospector limpet, and use that. There's really no gain in buying anything more expensive.
• D2 mining lasers are faster, but overheat faster too.

Metallic Ring Ore Selling Prices

Prices updated from Elite: Dangerous Database. As you can see, the PPP (as people call the three most valuable minerals, Painite, Platinum and Palladium) are by far the most profitable. I would recommend keeping small amounts of Osmium too, as they can be turned in for a large profit, if there are any missions requisitioning them at the station you're doing your selling.

Commodity	Avg. Price
Painite	33000 cr
Platinum	18814 cr
Palladium	13527 cr
Gold	9742 cr
Osmium	7031 cr
Silver	5088 cr
Bertrandite	2694 cr
Indite	2378 cr
Gallite	2101 cr

Mining Ship Progression

As you can see in the table below, you can start mining as early as you reach a Cobra Mk IV. The price below is the base price of the ships, so you should expect an upgrade price, which I cannot predict, as it is based on your personal needs.

I've included ships that cost more than the entry above them, and still have less cargo capacity, these however have other perks, like better speed, more agility, or a more attractive hardpoint distribution, that possibly make them appealing.

A friendly reminder: you currently cannot land large ships on small (outpost) stations. Consider this if you're usually mining in a system where there are no other types of stations to use.

You can locate both ships and modules nearby using this tool.

	Price	Armour	Max. Capacity	Speed	Agility	Size	Laden Range	S/M/L/H Hardpoints
Cobra Mk IV	747 660 cr	216	60 t	200 m/s	4	Small	7,62 ly	3/2/0/0
Type-6 Transporter	1 045 950 cr	162	92 t	224 m/s	3	Medium	8,54 ly	2/0/0/0
Asp Explorer	6 661 150 cr	378	84 t	254 m/s	6	Medium	10,88 ly	4/2/0/0
Type-7 Transporter	17 472 250 cr	216	204 t	181 m/s	2	Large	7,68 ly	4/0/0/0
Federal Dropship	14 314 210 cr	540	120 t	182 m/s	2	Medium	6,20 ly	0/4/1/0
Imperial Clipper	22 296 860 cr	486	172 t	307 m/s	2	Large	6,97 ly	0/2/2/0
Orca	48 539 890 cr	396	148 t	304 m/s	2	Large	6,18 ly	0/2/1/0
Python	56 978 180 cr	468	216 t	234 m/s	6	Medium	6,20 ly	0/2/3/0
Type-9 Heavy	76 555 840 cr	432	456 t	131 m/s	0	Large	5,73 ly	2/3/0/0
Anaconda	146 969 450 cr	945	392 t	183 m/s	2	Large	6,89 ly	2/2/3/1
Federal Corvette	187 969 450 cr	666	476 t	198 m/s	2	Large	4,87 ly	2/2/1/2
Imperial Cutter	208 969 450 cr	720	524 t	202 m/s	2	Large	6,47 ly	0/4/2/1

Tips for Locating Mining Sites

Check out this table or this image gallery for nearby mining locations.

Tips for Mining

• Get a ship, or a better ship, that is capable of carrying mining lasers, cargo racks, a refinery (Class 3 is enough, type A advised), and ideally a prospector (Class 1 is enough, type A advised) and a collector limpet controller (the best you can get, type A is advised).
• Always go for rings with pristine metallic resources, ignore rocky, and icy completely.
• Painite is the best resource to mine, next in line is Platinum, followed by Palladium. Mine these.
• There usually are missions for painite, platinum, palladium and osmium. When you return from a mining trip, check the bulletin board and accept the ones that you have the ores for, before you sell your stuff.
• Always find the rotation axis of the asteroids and mine those poles, collectors are dumb and will collide with the rotating asteroid otherwise.
• Don't mine at Resource Extraction Sites. They're usually full of pirates.
• Press the Insert button to toggle ship lights in dark areas.
• Try to mine towards the planet, and not away from it. It helps avoid running in circles.
• Asteroid size doesn't change the yield, using a prospector limpet does.
• If you prospected an asteroid with good ores, but you're full, start ejecting any trash you may have. If there is none, eject a few limpets. You can thrust down towards the jettisoned cargo with at least 30 m/s to destroy the canisters before your collectors bring them back in.

Safety

• If you get attacked while mining, don't panic. Assign 3 pips to engines and systems, retract hardpoints (U), close the cargo hatch (Home) if you have them deployed. Move out of the plane of the ring by boosting away until you can charge your FSD to supercruise. Don't target any stations or planets, just punch it.
• If you get interdicted on your way to a station or an in-system target, don't panic. Just submit to it, by slowing down, while still following the escape vector provided by the mini-game. Once you are out of supercruise, assign 3 pips to SYS and 3 to ENG by pressing the left and up arrows on your keyboard. Then boost away from your assailant by pressing TAB repeatedly. Once your FSD (frameshift drive) has done it's cool down, press J to charge it back to supercruise and away you go.