I propose making SSS drops more persistent.

Either by a factor of hours, or at least similar to ore in which someone (in this case, anyone) must stay in the sector or it activates a 30-minute timer before it disappears.

Reasoning: add variety to gameplay by:

1) Allowing more efficient farming of SSS. You can bring in a light fighter and kill bots until it really stacks up to a Behemoth, Goliath, or Trident, etc. load. Then get the larger ship to collect it. Those without capships could leave and return with a Behemoth.

2) Allowing it to stack up, and making it persist past the departure (or death) of the originating player, equals risking losing it to pirates.

In short, it takes some of the drudgery and grind away, and replaces it with more risk for the reward. More valuable cargo floating persistently in space will always create more variety of things to do in this game. This improves both solo and group gameplay, for traders and pirates alike.

+1

Meh, i'm not for it. It makes capital ships feel like less of an accomplishment. Plus, it's already *insanely* easy to acquire 1,000 SSS through farming in under 1 and a half hours.

-1

It does stack. So if you're consistently killing bots in a smallish area, the stack will grow and the despawn timer will reset. Often I will pick up a stray stack and drop it by my larger stack until I have a moth load. Then I'll grab a moth and swoop it up. Haven't had a stack disappear on me yet.

HighTechRedneck-
How do you farm 1000+ SSS in under 90 minutes without a capital ship? When was the last time you did this?

Rejected-
I have recently had them disappear. Granted, I was farming something else, with SSS drops being less common, thus sitting around much longer. I called in a guild mate to pick up a behemoth load, only to find half of it gone when he got there!

Let me clarify, with a capital ship you can easily get 500 in under an hour.

I farm in a centaur with plasdevs, I can easily get 1000SSS an hour just killing transport bots. Of course this takes some determination and concentration to get it right, but I hardly ever die. Btw all cargo acts the same, you get 15 minutes to pick it up, or it times out. It does stack, but it also times out while stacked (ie, the first bit times out first) even ores, so I dunno why you think there is a difference.

A good way to extend the cargo timer is to pick it up, and drop it again. This resets the time-out timer, and can be used to keep a bunch of widgets in space for hours upon end. Used to be a tactic I used in CtC when the voy had more cargo than I could carry. If you are waiting for someone to come pick it up, this is what you should do, not just sit there.

Anyway, I kind of agree, but only on the "all cargo times out too quick" - SSS should not get special treatment just because you need it for something, as it is easy to get (a lot more cargoes should be 'worth something' eventually). I'd be up for extending the entire range of cargo to 30 minutes - but no longer. Sooo

+-1

-1. When I used to sell sss as my main income, it was pretty easy to make decent credits. I would sector hop and kill transports and docile guardians, or kill fennus for hours. Come back through shortly after to scoop and unload, much as Yoda said.

I farm sss in a Behemoth, with a large port radar extender, Megapositron, and three Gemini missile turrets, and hop sectors with collector/transport bots. Inside 500m I use the megapositron, and at 1200m I use a plugin to fire the turrets at my current target. The down side is that you do not get any weapons xp for turret kills.

I may optionally log out in space and log in other characters, in other ship types, for other roles.

An Atlas X to run around and sort/separate/consolidate the cargo into larger clumps, for easy retrieval.
A tung mineral maud to move heavy clumps (ore/scrap) to a more accessible location.
A Behemoth XC to hold the cargo and transport to a station.

When the XC is full, I use the other ships to hold the excess, and then I transport the XC to a station. By transporting the cargo as it becomes available, I do not have much problem with it timing out. By using multiple characters, I do not have the down time of a character changing roles/ships.

Immediately jettisoned ore doesn't have a timer. I have AFK mined with an auto-jettisoning Hornet running three HE-Beams on asteroids that heat up very, very slowly. I've gone to bed and woken up 6 hours later with thousands (tens of thousands?) of CU stacked up and ready for someone else to come collect.

Always someone else, because the moment I leave the sector, it all disappears :P

Making the timer start after the originating player (or all members of their group) has left the sector, makes much more sense.

It shouldn't require capital ships and/or multiple accounts to farm efficiently.

I just picked SSS because it's useful, valuable, and would make a good test-case item for this change.

Immediately jettisoned ore doesn't have a timer. I have AFK mined with an auto-jettisoning Hornet running three HE-Beams on asteroids that heat up very, very slowly. I've gone to bed and woken up 6 hours later with thousands (tens of thousands?) of CU stacked up and ready for someone else to come collect.

Imagination dude, all cargo times out after 15 minites, no matter where it comes from or when it is dropped, or there would be little blobs of cargo all over space. SO I really do not know where you are getting this from.

Autojettison isn't some magic device you know, the cargo still goes into your hold, and then is jettisoned. There is no such thing as "immediately jettisoned", it is in your cargo hold then in space, there is no middle ground here. I would suggest, right now, going mining and autojettison your ore. Stop mining after a few are in space and then wait 15/20 minutes. I will bet you 30 million credits that it is gone, you can even make a video if you like.

P.S. You owe me 30 million c anyway.

Yoda, he is infinimining. The ore stays active as long as it continues to stack. The moment he stops mining, the ore times out quickly. When group infinimined, stacks of 10-20k of helio and lanth can be achieved.

Yeah, I get that, so my point is, don't stop; or if you have to then juggle the cargo. If waiting on someone to come, then regardless of cargo he should be moving it about, not just going "oh stuff this, not my problem".

Still -1 and he still owes me 30 million creds ;)

Actually, I don't think you guys are right about how it works. That was also how I thought it worked, but I've been sitting here staring at the same two stacks of ore for an hour, without doing any mining at all, and they have neither expired nor shrunk.

I can at least confirm that Risk Everything is wrong about the whole "immediately jettisonned ore" nonsense. I enabled autojettison and mined a single unit of ore, then sat back and watched. Shortly after 15 minutes had passed, the ore vanished as expected. (The only oddity was that it wasn't exactly 15 minutes; not sure if the exact number is just bigger than 15, or if this was an artifact of a polling frequency, or what.)

I then mined continuously for 14 minutes and 45 seconds. At that point there were two stacks (15 Lanthanic and 12 Premium Ferric) as well as a dozen or so individual crates. The individual crates timed out promptly (I didn't pay close attention, but they'd all vanished within 10 minutes of stopping), but the two stacks have remained unchanged. It has currently been an hour since I stopped mining, and they're still floating there with 15 and 12 units each.

So, autojetted ore does not have an infinite timeout, but stacks of ore do not simply reset the standard 15 minute timeout with each new addition either. Something else is going on. Maybe the timeouts stack, or maybe stacks just get longer timeouts. Or maybe this is a fluke and my sector is broken.

The only oddity was that it wasn't exactly 15 minutes

Yeah, that's always been the case. I say 15 minutes, but it is always around that long; hence that "wait 15/20 minutes". Could be a polling/timing/whatever difference.

I then mined continuously for 14 minutes and 45 seconds. At that point there were two stacks (15 Lanthanic and 12 Premium Ferric) as well as a dozen or so individual crates. The individual crates timed out promptly (I didn't pay close attention, but they'd all vanished within 10 minutes of stopping), but the two stacks have remained unchanged. It has currently been an hour since I stopped mining, and they're still floating there with 15 and 12 units each.

Errm that does sound kind of broken! Historically, or at least the last time I tried it (a year or so ago? probably) the stacks didn't time out as long as new cargo was added to the stack. I suppose the newly stacked cargo is treated like a new object so the cargo time out would be (or was at least) started from when the last new stack was created. This is why when dropping 2 (of the same) ammo based weapons together (a chaos swarm for example) one empty, one full - they stack and now both are fully reloaded.

I suppose it would be nice if the timer stacked too, but I don't think that would be the case either as an AFK miner could quite easily reach stupidly long time-outs.. hmm, to the bugs forum batman? I'll try the same and if I can reproduce I do think it might be worth a cross-post.

As far as i knew the timer reset as long as more widgets were being added to the count. Through experience that's how it went. May have changed - i don't know.