Apologies, I might have been unclear in my description: That Habitats move is perfectly fine and even rather cool. The bug is twofold:
- They never actually move, that is: While tracked by the Astrogator, their position is constant relative to the rings.
- Yet, even though they never move, they just appear from nothing in a new position when exploring. If you can turn away fast enough (before the PoI updates), you can fly right back to their tracked position - and there they will be!
I find that this eventually discourages exploration a lot: For every habitat found close to a beneficial position - say, right next to a mass concentration - the risk increases that we might accidentally relocate said habitat into the middle of nowhere. There is a lot more nowhere than everything else, after all.
As soon as we'd actually track an actual course of habitats, the disincentive disappears: Today the habitat might be in a sweet spot, but by the time we return from our current dive, it will have moved considerably and by the next dive it will almost certainly be in an uninteresting position - until it finally approaches the next interesting position and thereby informs the next dive destination.
With less capable Astrogators (or with slow enough travelling speed, in general) this might also motivate the player for repeat visits (to refresh tracking) before the habitat reaches an interesting place, because it moves towards one.
(Side note: For the habitats in particular, it sure seems odd that we cannot just request a flight plan - maybe for a fee - and get a fixed time of not tracking but "knowing where they are supposed to be"... could then be a nice event handle, when they are not, too.)
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Bug Report: Beryllium ore - and only Beryllium ore is imparted with a large impulse on spawning, if anything but engine exhaust is used to make it spawn. This impulse is often too large for the ore to be caught even by the 2x drones of Eagle Prospectors.
Several issues here:
- Only Beryllium does this, even if the ore is 10x or even 100x as much water than metal.
- Only exhaust as the extraction method does not (always) do this.
- Other ores already behave quite consistently by the rule "energy imparted ~ impulse of ore spawned", so a better functionality is already in the game.
- Technology meant to counter this issue (and otherwise quite useless / merely mildly convenient) does not manage to actually manage to counter it.
In combination, this makes for a very frustrating experience. I myself have begun to mostly ignore Beryllium ore given that it behaves as it does "just because". Picking up ubiquitous tungsten is much less of a hassle and in terms of time-to-profit, risk-of-accident often just the better money maker.
Feature Request: There are probably means to make Beryllium harder to mine than other materials, which would be much less arbitrary:
- being very brittle, it could be especially reactive to mass accelerators (starter gear)
- being diamagnetic, it could be especially reactive to microwaves (cheap upgrade, very low mass and power requirements, as point-defense the most convenient mining weapon)
- having a high heat capacity, it could be especially unreactive to lasers (heavy, expensive, power hungry mid-to-end game equipment)
(Note: I have not checked how these attributes measure up relative to those of the other metals in the game. Even if Beryllium would end up being one of the easier mined minerals, though, I personally would consider it worthwhile to have such different reactions to different mining techniques, as it will encourage specialisation. For balancing one may always adjust the relative abundance, given that abundance is this game's point-of-diversion from reality anyway.)
