EVE General Discussion

If you're talking about where your extractors are sitting, they're using up that resource (and putting it into your storage/factories). That's how it's supposed to work.

If you're talking about scanning planets to find out where you want to place your extractors, it could be that someone else is digging there already. Right-click the planet surface (assuming you're in Planet Mode), and show the other players. You can see their command centres, and if you click it, it'll show where they've placed their other buildings. If there's too many other players there, they could be sucking that part of the planet dry.

Edit: Resources naturally recover over time, assuming you (and others) are not constantly digging there. Also, hotspots may show up once in a while, then disappear.

Too dumb to live, too weird to die, too common for me to want to put effort into this response

In general:

- The shorter ECU cycles that you run, the faster that you deplete the location where your extractor heads are placed. Longer ECU cycles are gentler on the underlying resources since they extract less.

- Densely packed ECU heads drain an area much faster then a setup where the heads are spread far apart.

- Planets refill at an undetermined rate (every day, a bit of material gets added to the planet at downtime). Lower-sec systems have planets that refill at a faster rate then higher security systems.

- Planets in lower security space tend to have higher average densities of resources then higher security space.

So if you don't want to move your ECU all the time, spread your heads out and run a slower extraction schedule (such as only once per day, once every 2 days, or maybe a 3-day / 75h cycle ). Eventually, the amount of materials that you'll suck up with your ECU without moving the ECU all the time will be equivalent to the planet's refill rate.