How does one turn OFF pooled experience in 0.716, or is this even possible? I do NOT want this feature, and nothing I've done has been able to disable it. Turning it off in the options doesn't stick - and even though the sav_dat.xml file shows SHARED_EXP="FALSE" it still divides up the experience between all my characters.

Is it necessary to roll the game back to 0.714 before this feature was added, or is there some workaround to edit a game file or something so that only the characters that actually EARN experience receive it?

I did confirm that a character that took no actions whatsoever in the combat received experience and that all team members received the same exp award despite only one team member taking any action. I also confirmed that I had turned shared experience off in the options despite the fact that it kept showing up as being active. I also confirmed that the sav_dat.xml file showed that option turned off.

I wouldn't know if it's working in 0.722b because I was testing 0.716 and have since rolled back to 0.714 as the easiest way to definitely get rid of shared experience. The old mining system much reminded me of Eve Online, which I used to love (except for all the jerks that got their joy from screwing with other players) and since this is single player, and I didn't need to deal with them, it was a perfect fit and one of the deciding aspects of buying the game.

The new mining system ruined all that for me. I'm not interested in micromanaging the mining process nor am I in the least interested in learning a system that makes MY skill in operating mining lasers more important to the outcome than the character's. It's my understanding that the basic premise behind an RPG is that the main character acts as a proxy for the player - and this new system makes ME the proxy for HIS skill. No thank you. I'm saddened, because I really enjoyed the direction your game was taking, and had hoped to see it through to the end, but since you've decided that the game and your customer's best interests were better served by re-inventing systems that were already completed instead of finishing the story line, that seems unlikely now.

That being said, I still feel that I have gotten enough enjoyment from playing the game up until this point that my money was well spent. If at some point you should decide to make the original mining system an option for players, I'd love to see how this all turns out. If not, I wish you the best of luck with your game and thank you for taking the time to listen to (and implementing some of) my QoL suggestions.

I'm not a fan of pooled experience either, but I found that disabling it did seem to prevent other characters from benefiting from the main character's actions, at least in combat where most of the XP is picked up.

For mining, I'm rather mixed - the previous system was pretty much "go away and have a hot drink" so any level of interaction/skill would be a plus. However the new system really just comes down to adjusting a slider and leaving it there for each asteroid. It would be better to be able to focus on specific minerals somehow (currently iron seems rarer than gold...) especially for crafting purposes.

However what really does need work is the refining system. If mining was "go away and have a hot drink" then refining is "go away and read a good book" since you can't do anything while it is taking place, and refining a full hold can take several minutes. Having it run in the background with a significant energy drain (impeding travel and definitely hobbling combat ability) would be an improvement.

You can't do anything while refining is taking place if you leave the refining window open. There are a couple other tasks that pre-empt the game this way as well - notably crafting and salvaging. If you close the active refining window without stopping the refiner, the game will un-pause and you can do whatever you want while the refining continues in the background. That allows you to explore, resume mining, or carry out mission (either in space or on the ground) while the refining is going on. The only thing that refining WON'T continue in the background is if you're doing one of those other pre-empting functions. i.e. you can't refine in the background while actively crafting or salvaging.

[ahem - caveat... unless that feature has been removed since version 0.716. I can't honestly say how features work in the newest revision since I'm not running it... but refining has worked this way since I bought the game, which was a day or two after GoG added it to its library]

Thanks for that info.

It is pretty counter-intuitive though, that you can only do background refining by closing the refinery window. I was using the keyboard shortcuts (including Esc to exit) and these don't work with the Refinery window open, so this maybe should be a more general UI issue?

Thanks for the update.

Since we're talking about the refinery screen, I'd just like to mention one other problem - this is more of a display glitch than a bug, but when the amount remaining of an ore hits zero during refining, the value shoots up to nearly 5,000, see attached screenshot (where it happened with Silica and Potash).

I hope this helps: When refining with NO extra ore, I encountered something too odd to be coincidental. The final ore that I refined had a calculated value of 112. As soon as it completed, all the numbers went weird, with the first one having a calculated value exactly 28 times the last one. The second was 28 times the first, the third exactly 28 times the second, and so on until the number got so large it just reported "infcr" which I assume stands for "Infinite Credits".

I also notice that the calculated value of a refined ingot is 28 times as high as the base value of the ore from which it's refined - so that's likely where the 28 comes from. But instead of multiplying the base value by 28, it wrapped around from the end and multiplied the ingot value of the previous entry until it exploded. As I said - weird.

Of course, the numbers don't always increase exponentially... it may have only done so in this case because no ore had any left-overs. Having a non-zero value in the final column may halt whatever bug is causing the display glitch and having NO non-zero values causes a catastrophic error.

I also notice that in the previous attachment, the potash and silica calculate at 4984, which is exactly 28 time 178 - the value of Praseodymium, which would not have shown up in the list since it cannot be refined. However, if it was in the cargo bay after Zeolite, the glitch might be using the value of the last ore in the cargo hold instead of the last ore in the refiner list.

A confirmation: the next batch had all my ingot values with zero remaining ore calculated at 3388 which is 28x121, and Scandium was the last ore in my cargo hold, which has a listed value of 121. I had NOT clicked the "refine all ore" button since the last time I loaded the cargo hold, and while it's possible that Scandium was the last ore in my hold the last time I DID hit that button... the odds are only 1 in 50 that it's the case.

So it's multiplying the last ore value (whether it's being refined or not) by 28. Still not sure why the error compounds sometimes and not others, and haven't been able to reliably reproduce the compounding effect. If I can figure out how to reproduce that effect, I'll post again.