Mining can get boring, repetive, time consuming and really not that profitable. But what if we had let's say gold ore, diamond, ruby, copper, etc. Having a off chance of spawning around 0.5% to 1% when you mine a ore out. It would make mining much more interesting and add a economy around for miners to really shine and give it a more "miner looking for valuables" and not just "I'm slowly ripping this roid apart for the same thing over and over"

its a cool idea, may be not so common as to give more incentive to mine but as a rare reward with substantial value along the way when you do.

alternatively, may be a mission which you can process ore.. which would consume ore from a station with the chance of discovering something within it. even to the point where you wouldnt have to dock a ship load of it, but that it would take it right from the station continuously, perhaps to a specified level.. kind of like gambling really. you could burn a stack of 1000 ore and get nothing, or something worth more than the stack itself. may be more rare ore gives better odds, or better rewards.. something like this wouldnt require a new feature added to the game, just someone to create the mission.

dunno, an off the top of my head thought.

I think it just needs to be made more profitable, bump up their prices, and not subject them to the same sell price curve that all commodities have.

It makes sense for ores to become more valuable since a lot of people are making capital ships these days.

first of all, you can sell desirable ores to players for double the top market value: good profit there.

second, having rare "prizes" randomly show up while mining will lead to a LOT more roids cooked into the 1000s of kelvin.

-1 to "valuables" in ore.

however, i do like the idea of more missions to refine/process ore into items of more value, but not by burning it up into nothing for the hopes of a rare prize. rather, something like, ore "A" + ore "B" + ore "C" = widget "X" ... widget "X" + ore "D" + ore "E" = widget "Y".

oh wait...that's called "manufacturing" :P

Just imagine if mining and trading were profitable enough to hire afford full time security force for protection. Just imagine if we had enough players interested in PVP to participate in said force.

Well such gambling would cause many players (especially newbies) would fry roids to unusable levels
I seen soo many times even now the large roids the station is in Dau G-11 boiled to very very high temperature
Once I seen them fried to 8k Kelvin.
But well yes, mining is tend to be repetitive. I agree getting rare stuff with a low chance, but every single cu of it worths much more than the ore you mine
Roids with rarer ores could have higher chance of giving a rare mineral (even simply could be a rarer variant of the given ore).
There should be even missions to get these rare minerals for much higher profit.
Plus I agree that group mining with defenders would be very cool. With even rarer ores this would be interesting. Could make mining less boring.