Science & Industry

It will happen if you forget to click install after setting up the program but I haven't experienced it otherwise.

I don't know how much experience you have with extractors. I will assume you are newish to PI as I have not encountered this problem.

The default program is 1 hour. Meaning extracting will stop after 1 hour. You can set extractor program to 24 or 48 hours and it will run for that length of time then stop. Increasing extractor program time will increase the radius of your extractors - so if you are mining a hotspot and have a flower pattern of extractors covering that hotspot, your 'petal' extractors will extract less than the center extractor. If you set the program to 1 week, your petal extractors may be so big they are well outside the hotspot and mining less.

I wish the default program time was 48 hours.

Also. If on one extractor, you set the program to 1 hour, a second extractor to 2 days, and both are set on exactly equal concentrations, after 1 hour, the first extractor will have extracted about 40% more. This is the reward for micromanaging your extractions more frequently. With many accounts/alts, this will drive you crazy. I use 2 days 1 hour incase I miss a day and don't log in... I will still be mining up to the 2nd day.

Note the graph on the extractor program. You will start mining at a high rate, then about 15% into the program you will mine at higher rates (the peaks on the graph), and gradually as you move to the end of the program, you will be mining about 40% of what you initially started mining at. Which is why you restart the program (if possible/convenient) after you have moved past the peaks so you can keep up high extraction rate. I would not restart when you are currently in the peaks as you will be mining more than the initial mining rate.

If you are mining in hisec and have not found hotspots (everything is dark), then in your scanning window (top left of screen) you will see a rainbow from dark to white. There is a little arrow next to the white... slide it left and you will increase the sensitivity of the scanning, so as you increase sensitivity (sliding left), the darker concentrations will start to appear red, then white circles. These white circles are the highest concentration of R0 material on that planet.

The skills for planetology/adv planetology increases the accuracy of your scans. AFAIK, without these skills, you may see hotspots but since you are low skilled, these spots may be in a different location than what appears on the map. I've wondered about this so may test this out with a high skilled char and low skilled P/AdvP char and see how the scan results differ.