reinvigorate mining

[ferriswheel1]

Give the mineral magnet some complexity.

Have an asteroid field that's generated at round start. Rather than being a physical location you visit, you input coordinates at the magnet that corresponds to the field, and pull the thing located there to you.

Finding ores and loot would be a bit like Battleship. You pull in an asteroid that is full of gold, you can search nearby coordinates to try and find a "vein"

Occasionally you can pull in weird stuff like abandoned ships, unique merchants, deadly traps and mobs, or find hints of places you should look.

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Also, the magnet area should be expanded to incorporate larger things that can be pulled in.

For some of the more unique things that can be pulled in, I'm thinking something like Urs Dungeons. Some kind of way to submit user made mining dungeons and locations would be nice

This is exactly what the mineral magnet should be, with all sorts of derelicts with cool loot being brought in as well as having agency over what minerals are pulled in.

I feel like the mineral magnet loses the feeling of exploration and discovery that would otherwise come with mining, especially as most of the "loot" It produces are easily found locked crates or artifacts.

Having to sort minerals by hand is extremely tedious. I would recommend having a processor that ore satchels can be directly emptied into, with the minerals being held inside and ejected using an interface similar to the one for fabricators. Some way for the miners to easily process minerals into useful sheets is essential to the resources actually getting used.

Removing the pod tools for mining doesn't change the fact that hand-mining tools are incredibly boring to use, with all of them having uses that are variations on "click on rock till it disappears" and they have to be constantly charged to boot. I'd propose a little more variation in how the mining tools work (have the laser drill be an actual laser?) and lower their power usage so they don't have to be constantly recharged.