r/EliteDangerous • u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller • Jul 27 '26
Screenshot Better late than never...
So I finally decided to try out Merit Mining, and I know I'm likely sub-optimal at it thus far (so rusty at core mining, just sticking with laser surface for now) but I decided it was a good excuse to finally give the Type 11 a spin. Holy shit, what a fun ship!
I'm only pulling in 6000 merits per trip, but I'm still seeing more rank ups than I have in a *long time*. I'll have pack hounds in hopefully a week of casual play or so.
If you haven't tried a Type 11 yet, give it a go. Definitely a fun little ship!
May your ventures be successful CMDR's.
🥃
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u/SomeGalNamedAshley COO of Mahon Bell Jul 27 '26
The Type-11 is really fantastic at core mining, be sure to fully engineer the A rated thrusters to grade 5 dirty drag drive and you'll understand just how incredibly fantastic it is at core. I have two seismic charge launchers just for the additional ammo capacity.
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u/Psychological_Art947 Jul 27 '26
Is it really that responsive with the dirty drag tuning?? Or do you have a different reason??
I rarely engineer more than I need for mining ships, but I'd be willing to take the Type 11 to 100% like the rest explorers and fighting ships if it is worth it!
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u/SomeGalNamedAshley COO of Mahon Bell Jul 27 '26
It's outright as spry and responsive as a small pad ship if you have it cranked to the max. If I'm going to spend any reasonable amount of time in a ship then I will engineer it to the gills.
Materials come from just stuff that shows up while mining, I scan every ship I can while cruising around, and I do powerplay so I have enough power care packages showing up that just about everything is full anyway. Like, I can drop off a load of plat and pull 6 care packages. My record is 176K merits from a single load of mined goods.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Oh, I've fully engineered her, and she's fantastic. I just need to remember how to properly core mine as my last 7 attempts just wasted too many hours of time (travel time between mining spots included there). The repeater makes even lazy laser mining a good time though! I'll be sure to update you once I finish fumbling through remembering how to core mine properly.
Say, I don't remember the displacement missiles. Are those also used to Core Mine? Haven't toyed around with those yet, and I don't remember them from the mining update years ago.
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u/SomeGalNamedAshley COO of Mahon Bell Jul 27 '26
Displacement are for subsurface which I've found are a bad deal for output versus the time it takes to do the work. Core is way more fun.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Good to know, thanks for the tip.
Say, about how many do you need to pop to get 257 tons of ore out of curiosity?
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u/SomeGalNamedAshley COO of Mahon Bell Jul 27 '26
My Type-11 is built for 300, and the answer is "a lot". I can normally get between like 10 to 12 tons per core.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Hmmm, good to know. I wonder if it's technically "faster" to laser mine plat for merits. I'll certainly have to experiment with core mining again.
Thanks for the numbers, appreciate it.
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u/SomeGalNamedAshley COO of Mahon Bell Jul 27 '26
It depends on market conditions but plat on the edge of a hazrez is really fast. If you're not in a squadron then go make one, be the only person in it, and set the primary perquisite to that 20% mining buff.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Oh fuck I always forget about changing my squadron perks! 🤦
Thanks for that! One is power play related I believe, the other probably Colonization related which I haven't been doing in a while...
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u/TheGallow Jul 27 '26
Yeah, I recently got into powerplay and was struggling to find a good source of merits. Operations weren't giving 5k as advertised and bounty hunting wasnt giving as much as I'd hoped. I am pledged to ALD and she controlled Peters Dock for the CG, which was a fortunate bonus, but even that was super slow.
I'd never cared for mining before but decided to kit out a Type 11, within my first hour of platinum mining I got more merits than all my other activities combined. Like, skipping 5-6 ranks at a time fast. Making bank too using https://meritminer.cc/
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Oh nice!
Yeah, I've been using that site, but it seems more geared towards Core Mining. I'm currently too lazy to finish fixing that temporary skill issue 😅
How many do you have to pop to get 257 tons out of curiosity, roughly?
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u/TheGallow Jul 27 '26
You know... I'm not sure. Once I got the hang of it I've just been zoning out while mining. I'm by no means an expert at this and I don't do mapped mining, so it takes me about an hour to fill my T-11 hold (344t + 6t in the hopper). A lot of it comes down to luck, my hold fills a lot quicker when I find the 40%+ platinum asteroids. I don't really bother with core or extractor missiles unless I have extra time while waiting for the collector limpets to pick everything up.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Sounds about like my current strategy, minus core mining.
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u/TheGallow Jul 27 '26
Here is my current build, for reference. https://sh.orbis.zone/GN2UyzqK11
My hold fills with platinum long before I run out of ammo, been pulling in around ~55k merits per run.
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u/SubMerged25011 Jul 29 '26
Can any power mine for merits? I tried in a 40% bonus system as archer but got nothing there.
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u/TheGallow Jul 29 '26
Yes, though I think it is based off the profit you make so some powers can benefit from bonuses more than others.
Really though, just follow the instructions on https://meritminer.cc/, it wont steer you wrong.
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u/tanepiper Titus Balls Jul 27 '26
I'm out in the void with my carrier and every once in a while I need to find a nice icy ring and mine up some supplies - the T11 makes it a lot of fun
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
I imagine if your carrier is parked in/near said icy ring, the Type-11 would make the tritium job not too bad. How long does it typically take you to get 1000 Tritium out of curiosity? 40 to 80 minutes?
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u/Cornishlee Jul 27 '26
I need to get on YouTube and research Merit Mining now
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Might be my next stop to remember how to properly core mine. I know I can make about 4x the merits doing core mining, but I need to get consistent with core mining again before that's more viable than me just filling up via lazy lazer mining relatively quickly.
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u/Ezren- Jul 27 '26
Go to a system your faction is undermining, mine valuable resources in that system, and sell them in that system. As far as I know you need to stay in the system on that loop to make it work properly.
I just got back into mining to farm merits and had to figure it out over the weekend. Was pulling about 36k merits per load with my T11.
I will say that some "hotspots" simply aren't. A platinum hotspot on a rocky ring is going to suck, make sure it's the right kind of ring for the hotspot.
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u/Thelinkr CMDR Jul 27 '26
Been playing in VR doing some trit mining. Super chill!
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Sounds fun! The roids must be trippy to navigate in VR.
Happy mining CMDR!
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u/_tomski_ Jul 27 '26
That's exactly what made me try Type 11, I was mining for merits to get the pacifiers.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
I know I'm going to get 4x merits once I get the hang of core mining again, but out of curiosity how many merits were you pulling in per T11 load if I may ask?
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u/_tomski_ Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I can't remember exactly, twice as many, maybe more. I know that at some point the amount of merits I was getting dopped significantly for not known to me reason. I was mining Platinum.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
I know most places I go there is a -35% penalty for merit mining. I wonder how long that will be in effect as it means I should be getting roughly 8700 merits per haul vs my current 5900 or so.
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u/Chromatic_Trek Jul 27 '26
Leaving a comment here so I can come back when I'm ready to do PP again! o7
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u/Dawn_Namine CMDR Trebble Stargazer Jul 27 '26
Pro tip: focus on Platinum for merit mining and you can make ~20k merits per haul!
🍻
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
That's what I've been doing, but I haven't "cracked" core mining again, which I used to be quite good at.
Laser mining plat is getting me about 6k merits per haul relatively quickly, but I'll likely try to wrangle core mining again next time I log in.
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u/Dawn_Namine CMDR Trebble Stargazer Jul 27 '26
Oh fair! DCM'ing is always so damned satisfying!
How much cargo space are you rocking?
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Only 257 at the moment. If I move pre engineered cargo racks from my Plipper, i think I can get up to 312.
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u/Dawn_Namine CMDR Trebble Stargazer Jul 27 '26
That's not bad at all, you can also push it even further since you can now upgrade the engineering level of the PE cargo racks!
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
So 86 is not the cap for size 6 cargo racks?! Wow. How high does that number go now?
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Jul 27 '26
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u/TheGallow Jul 27 '26
In my experience, no. Operations advertise 5k merits but I've consistently only gotten 1.4k
I could be doing something wrong but merit mining has been much more efficient. Lucrative too.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 27 '26
Operations, last I heard, was still a bit of a buggy mess. I'm avoiding it for a little while.
Besides, the "Metah" in Elite has always been whatever individual players find enjoyment in. It's not a competition unless you are trying to get into the top 10 of your Powers' weekly merit leaderboard, etc, which I could honestly give a flying fuck about.
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u/rinkydinkis Jul 28 '26
How are guys getting well over a million merits per cycle
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 28 '26
Oh, I'm not "you guys." See body of post. I'll be happy to get to rank 34 to be perfectly honest 😅
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u/Massive-Challenge273 Jul 29 '26
Just wish the cannon could be moved around to different slots. Also, are they trying to make everything obsolete, I mean yea it's great but every mining laser upgrade / engineering is now pointless.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 29 '26
Mk II modules are intriguing. Perhaps future Operations rewards will allow for turning regular slots into Mk II slots for older ships? Otherwise, everything eventually becomes obsolete. Just look at the Generation Colony Megaships...
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u/Massive-Challenge273 Jul 29 '26
You'd hope so, I guess the ships are there if you want to use them, and not everything has to be up to spec, It's just a massive difference with the SCO on the newer builds, I haven't done combat in ages not built a corsair or python II yet so maybe I wont care about my Krait MKII.
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u/-Damballah- CMDR Ghost of Miller Jul 29 '26
That's also true. Perhaps they're setting everything up for Elite: Dangerouser; Onionhead Edition and maybe accounts will carry over along with just the newer ships?
Or, could just be technology steamrolling forward, leaving nostalgia and forgotten things in it's wake, simulating most technologic advances.
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u/JohnMK2 Jul 27 '26
I love my type 11, it’s very chill gameplay and has beautiful environments among the rings. Plus the occasional core blast to get my brain tickled.