Discovery Gaming Community

Some of you are quite familiar with this commodity, but for those of you who literally don't care about this thing, it's probably Discovery's worst mining commodity when compared on credits per minute/hour. So here we go: Currently, Azurite mining grants 165 gas per minute with the most optimized options, which if you do the math, that means it takes almost half an hour just to obtain 5,000 units. Then once your train/transport is finally full after watching the full dialogue-free portion of Pixar's "Walle," you can finally move it to it's best sell location, for approximately 14,600 a unit. So you finally sell your 5,000 Azurite Gas, and you pocket a maximum potential of 73 million. Not a bad paycheck, except it also took 26 minutes on your A game to get there. Oh, and you best have guard reputation with Bretonian Armed Forces, because that's also a guard base. And another thing, you best have licenses or a moderately covert route, because it is a both pirated and contraband item, but that means your delivery time is up. Then you have to return back to Omicron Delta again, not taking anything below profitable, for another ~18 million. But wait! You just spent another 28 minutes going back including your stop to the best commodity. So after you finally return to Delta, and get back to the field, 90 minutes have passed (Super convenient number).

So finally we come down to the profit margin: ~60 Million/hour given everything goes perfectly. Now most of you know that basically every other harvested commodity is better than this (Yes, including helium in Penn only), and taking the route to the highest sell point isn't always the highest profit per hour. So given you have docking rights to dock 5k's in Kusari House space, you can increase that profit margin to ~70 million per hour. If you're using 3,600 transports (Zoners) that value is down to ~57 million.

With this being said, I highly recommend we increase the price per unit for this commodity. With low yield you cause a natural rarity, and with high sell prices, you incentivize cargo reclamation, but that also means you can be pirated for a ridiculous maximum credit amount. I'm not asking this to be the best commodity, but for the risks involved with carrying it and mining it (Spending 30 minutes in Nomad space can result in a lot of unpleasant encounters) it doesn't properly fit the high risk, high reward build. This should be in insanely high demand for researchers, and extremely limited supply (which it currently is). I personally don't mind the length of the route, but the measly paycheck at the end makes me wonder why I spend the time gathering the resource, when there's an ore one system away that has much shorter a route and takes about 4-5 minutes to mine.

Thoughts?

Well, to start with, what is the point of azurite? What's its lore?

I must admit that I've always had the impression that this resource would only be used by IRG. I tried once to mine it, but, as you mentioned, it takes a lot of time.

Edit: Azurite engines would be nice.

Both the Core and Order have use for it, and it's lore is that it's a gas-based superconductor, ideal for power systems. It's essential for IRG, but by no means useless for other factions who want/need it for "reasons."

I'd imagine the LSF would also likely have use for it.

AFC would have a use for perhaps a commodity that is gas-based supercondutor for powering systems... why not.
I think any faction that is dealing with R&R one way or another will maybe think to make use of it.

Azurite Arrows - Can I patent this?

I concur with the OP, making it a high risk, high reward commodity would be the best course of action.
Again, nothing really OP, just a profit equal (or up to 5% higher) to other stuff you can mine around Sirius. It should bring some more people to Delta and that's always a good thing.

Normal mining commodities are balanced with a static mining time of 480 seconds aka eight minutes, while Azurite is balanced for a 50% higher time, 720 seconds.
Unfortunately, it doesn't take 50% longer to mine, it takes like.....200% longer to mine, minimum. When I reported this long ago I got told that it "wasn't intended for profit". Well, if something isn't intended for profit, nobody is going to do it.

I agree that's it's preferable to increase the buying prices rather the mining rate, to keep the unique characteristics of the commodity. With the formula adjusted to, say, 1600 mining time, the price at Sunderland would be around 21000.

Speaking from the perspective of a Nomad faction: It would also behoove us if people actually had an incentive to mine Azurite, so we can play our part and harass them.

All Mining has to be standardized. There is no alternative.

Filling a transport with whatever ore commodity has to take the same amount of time (it should be 4 minutes for a 5ker) for an optimised miner with the best multiplier. Half an hour for a transport is just ridiculous. No one in their right mind does that.

However, it was a mistake to add more mining commodities and more spread of activity just because everybody wants to have something to mine these days. Of course I understand that there is no way to take away ores from people again without causing massive poopoostorms, the complete system has to be centralised. So that would mean for Azurite: it has to be in a place, grouped up with other Omicron ore, in visible range of the other fields where every faction goes, mines, pirates, fights.

But... hey... I was part of making a draft that would have worked towards this... but... ye. Let's not even...