Science & Industry

I would assume it depends on the game engine. A dev would probably be the best person to comment about this.

However for my own 2 isks, I would love to see different color mining lasers based not on what you're mining, but what crystal you're using.

There used to be different effects for mining lasers a long time ago.

The beam from regular mining lasers and regular strip miners were colored yellow/amber and the sound effect from them was much, much louder than it is now.

The beam from deep core mining lasers was colored blue and was also quite loud.

Now they all look the same.

It would be both visually pleasing and useful if you could make the lasers change appearance based on whether or not the asteroid is depleted.

For instance, you are a super uber miner dude in highsec shooting asteroids that have less total volume than one cycle of your lasers. If the lasers changed when the volume mined so far in the cycle is greater than the actual volume present, that would offer an interesting cue to mining efficiently without having to spam your survey scanner II, check all the asteroids you are mining, look at the volume remaining, calculate the volume of said ore in your head, visually estimate how far around the timer on your lasers in in proportion to your maximum mining yield per cycle and then manually disable the lasers based on that esitmate for 3 characters at once.

I usually dont bother with that.

It would be even better if your lasers would just turn off when the asteroid is depleted. Mining empty space is annoying.

When I first got mining crystals I thought it'd be the same as the laser crystals. But sadly no. Been waiting to see colored mining lasers ever since.