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Mining

Mining is the entry point of the Starbroken economy. You shoot a beam at an asteroid; ore comes off; you sell it or refine it. From there the whole tech tree opens up.

How a mining beam works

Equip the Mining Laser module's hotbar slot (it's on your starter Frigate by default). Right-click while pointing at an asteroid: a continuous beam fires, drawing ore out of the asteroid in pulses.

Each pulse is one "mining operation" that:

Targets one block in the asteroid
Consumes one tick of laser cooldown
Adds ore to your ship's ore hold (specific cargo type; see below)
Tracks asteroid depletion (asteroids have finite ore)

You see the beam in space. The asteroid block visibly vanishes after each pulse. When the asteroid is dry, it stops yielding.

Laser tiers

Mining lasers come in 5 tiers (Mk I → Mk V). Higher tiers mine faster by yielding more per pulse (Mk I = 1 unit → Mk V = 5 units), not by firing quicker. The per-pulse cooldown actually increases with tier (1.2s → 1.4s → 1.6s → 1.8s → 2.0s). The net effect is still proportionally faster mining, since the bigger per-pulse yield outpaces the longer cooldown. The Mk I is the free starter; you craft or buy higher tiers.

Risk zones: where you mine determines what you get

The galaxy is painted into 4 security zones, each with a different yield multiplier. Higher-risk zones pay more per pulse:

Zone	Display name	Yield ×	Risk	Ores available
CORE	Patrolled Lanes (§a green)	1.0×	Safe; NPC patrols deter PvP	Iron, Copper
MID	Outer Lanes (§e yellow)	1.5×	Some pirate spawns	Iron, Copper, Titanium
FRONTIER	Frontier (§6 orange)	2.5×	Heavy pirates, light PvP	+ Platinum
NULL	Wild Drift (§c red)	4.0×	No NPC protection; full PvP	+ Iridium

Each higher ore tier is gated to a zone: Titanium needs MID+, Platinum needs FRONTIER+, Iridium needs NULL.

So the basic deeper-zone tradeoff is: more yield + better ores, but you might get killed.

Ore tiers

Five raw ores, each with its own zone gate:

Iron ore: CORE+; cheapest, most plentiful
Copper ore: CORE+
Titanium ore: MID+
Platinum ore: FRONTIER+
Iridium ore: NULL only

Mining the same asteroid type in a higher zone gives both the higher multiplier AND access to higher-tier ores. Plan your routes accordingly.

Refining

Raw ore isn't directly useful for crafting; you refine it first. Build a Refinery module on a station (or rent a room and put a refinery there). The refinery:

Reads from a buffer fed by depositing ore from your ship
Processes ore on a timer (one batch every few minutes)
Emits refined metal into the refinery's output hold

Refined metals feed the fabricator for module crafting (see crafting wiki for the full tree).

Refining Flux (T3+ reagent)

Refining the higher-tier ores (Titanium, Platinum, Iridium) consumes one Refining Flux per batch in addition to the raw ore. The two basic ores (Iron, Copper) don't need it.

Flux comes from two places:

Mining drops. Every successful mining pulse has a ~5% chance to deposit one flux straight into your general hold (any zone, any ore). Passive supply just from playing the mining loop. (Keep a general hold with free space: if it's absent or full when a flux rolls, the drop is lost.)
NPC vendors. Sold at a fixed price (80 cr each). If you mine faster than you collect drops, buy the difference.

Flux is also an input on the higher-tier alloy recipes (Steel, Aerospace, Iridium Composite), so refining + alloy specialists are the two main consumers, generally a steady low-value trade good.

Tritanium Crystal (NULL-only)

Mining in NULL zone (Wild Drift) has a small chance (~4%) per pulse to deposit one Tritanium Crystal alongside the ore. Tritanium is a required input on every T5 manufacturing recipe and the Dreadnought shipkit. It's the mining-side gate on the endgame, mirroring the combat-side gate (Void Fragment from Reaver kills, see NPCs and Shops).

Tritanium drops straight into your ship's general hold (not the ore hold), which is exactly where T5 fabricator recipes read from, so there's no transfer step. Just keep a general hold with free space: if you have no general hold, or it's full when a crystal rolls, the drop is lost.

Silica (any zone)

Every mining pulse also has a ~6% chance (any zone) to drop 1–2 Raw Silica into your general hold alongside the ore (same as flux and tritanium: the general hold, not the ore hold). Silica is the feedstock for the electronics components (Circuit Board, Focusing Lens) and the Iron Chelate crop supplement, and the electronics gate the entire T3+ fabrication tree, so it accumulates passively as you mine and you'll rarely run short. Vendors only buy silica from you; there's no buy path, so mining is the only source.

AFK ore: Drone Miners

If you'd rather not babysit the beam, a Drone Miner module deploys autonomous mining drones near an asteroid belt that mine to your ore hold while you do other things (within range, while you're online). See Drone Miners for the full loop, tiers, and how to get one.

Planet deposits

Asteroids aren't the only place to mine. Landing on a planet lets you mine surface mineral deposits that drop materials found nowhere else (carbon, oxidizer, cryo-salt, lodestone, planetary cores), the feedstock for the T4 fabrication web. See Planets.

Passive fuel: the Fold Wave Harvester

The Fold Wave Harvester is a special module that passively trickles Drive Cells (warp fuel) into a buffer while you (the owner) are online, with no active mining required.

The Mk I ships free in your starter kit — the early Pull From the Fold story step just has you place it on your ship to start the trickle. The Mk II is fabricated.

How it works:

Trickle rate: ~6 Drive Cells per minute of owner-online time (Mk I).
Buffer cap: 200 cells (Mk I); accrual pauses when the buffer is full (about 33 minutes to fill from empty).
Collecting: right-click the module to sweep the buffered cells into your cargo hold.
Reconnect grace: a disconnect of up to 5 minutes still counts as online time, so a brief drop doesn't reset the trickle.

Mk II Fold Wave Harvester

A higher tier roughly doubles the throughput:

Trickle rate: ~8.34 Drive Cells per minute (≈ 500/hr), tuned to fund one Cruiser warp (500 cells) per hour of owner-online time.
Buffer cap: 500 cells, exactly one Cruiser jump per collect (about 60 minutes to fill from empty).

Drive Cells are the catalyst for warping between regions, so the harvester is the main "earn fuel passively while you do other things" loop. (Cells are cheap bulk fuel: a Frigate warp burns roughly 100.)

What can go wrong

Depletion + regen. Asteroids have finite ore, but they regrow on a per-size timer once mined out: roughly 8 min (Pebble), 25 min (Boulder), 3 h (Cluster), 48 h (Mega). Mine a belt dry and it refills; bigger rocks hold more but take much longer to come back. Move to a fresh belt while one regenerates.
Pirates. Outside CORE, pirate ships acquire you. They'll fire while you're mining. Either out-pace them, kill them, or carry a shield.
Hold full. Returns the "deposit failed" message in chat. Either fly back to base or jettison the lowest-value ore.

Commands you might use

There aren't many; mining is mostly UI. The TAB menu and the in-game chests cover everything. No /mine command exists.