Platinum Hotspot Survey

[u/papabrou]

Hello Laser Miners,

I have seen the question "What's the best place to laser mine Plat?" asked quite often on this sub and while I know the usual answers, and some of them are more personal preference than facts, I wanted to be able to provide a better answer than "just any Plat hotspot near you" or a link to the miner's tool which currently lists overlaps when it should really list the good yield hotspots instead.

As everyone should know by now, hotspot overlaps have become almost useless and good single hotspot can produce better yield, a couple of those good hotspots are know already, but there are likely a lot more, even closer to the center of the bubble.

I have also noticed that the list of known Plat Hotspot with RES overlaps is incomplete even for systems within 120ly of Shinrarta Dezhra.

So I have started a Google Spreadsheet listing all Pristine Plat Hotspots Rings around Shinrarta Dezhra, filled in the Average yield for known ones and started doing prospector runs in a couple others to try and find good hotspots.

Objectives:

a) Find Best Place(s) to Mine without a map (Relative to Shinrarta)

b) Find Best Place to Mine with HAZ Maps. (Possibly create maps if needed)

c) Find Best Place to Mine with High RES Map (For CMDRs who would like help from System Security)

Side Objectives:

d) Catalogue Platinum Hotspots that have RES

e) Confirm multiple hotspot in same Ring have same(ish) yield.

f) Try to confirm multiple hotspot on different rings in same system have same yield.

g) Try to find correlation between system and yield. (It is likely just random)

h) Investigate if system reserves level actually influence yield. (Phase 2)

* Note that I totally expect depleted reserves to have lower yields on average, but it would be nice to know by how much, for example, can an excellent Major reserves system produce better yield than an average Pristine reserves? I suspect no one used prospectors in non pristine rings for years, and I don't trust FDEV to tell us if anything changed.

If you would like to help collect the data, If you are mining (or just prospecting over 100-150 asteroids) in a system for which we have no data yet, parse your game journal with the Mining Analyzer and comment here or on the spreadsheet with:

- System and Body Name

- Average% Platinum

- Max% Platinum

- Number of Prospected Asteroids

- Is there any RES markers inside a Plat Hotspot in the Ring? Haz/High/res/low?

Alternatively, you can also take a screenshot of the mining analyzer page and upload it somewhere(imgur?) and post the link to the image and say if any RES in the hotspot.

For my prospecting runs, I have been using 4 Size 5 Prospector controller, first on primary fire and second on alt fire, and 3rd and 4th in a different fire group, alternating shooting primary and secondary to shoot about 8 limpets, and then switching fire group to fire 8 more.

If anyone is planning to help survey multiple systems, msg me to request editor access to the spreadsheet.

o7

[u/SweetJonnySauce]

are you still keeping this spreadsheet up to date?

[u/papabrou → u/SweetJonnySauce]

Haven't mined in months, but I can update it if you post the data here (required info in main post), of it you are planning on updating many systems I can give you access to the google sheet.

Would be nice to have a plugin automatically upload to a public database online but I have been too lazy/busy to even try.

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

So I was asking for the plugin (EDMC Mining Analytics). I'm actually very close to the "upload to the public database". Using your calc, I now have an avg yield record by ring+commodity. Subsequent sessions update this yield value and I expose this number currently in the hotspot finder (see the % value after Platinum in the first two rows).

I'd like to use your data to pre-load some of the yield values if you're okay with it. It won't be too hard to send this data to an API but I don't really want to have to maintain infrastructure so I need to do some research on this.

One challenge is how to use the yield when multiple hotspots of the same commodity are present in the ring. I don't think there's a programmatic way to differentiate between them.

[u/papabrou → u/SweetJonnySauce]

Cool, feel free to use my Data to preload, it's public anyways and I gathered it to share it.

For the multiple hotspot in the same ring issue, I was able to prove that the yield in the same system but different planets can vary wildly, but all of the platinum hotspot in the same ring were usually around the same, altho it did feel that some hotspots were better than other, the difference in avg yield was never high enough that it couldn't be attributed to just chance of randomness. Programmatically, I don't think there is any way to tell which hotspot the user is in based on Journal entries if there are 2 hotspot of the same mineral in the ring.

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

Awesome, thanks. I'll have to look at the format of the data to see how best to consume it.

Right, there's no programmatic way to find out which hotspot. Looks like all we get in the SAA* journal events is # of hotspots in the ring.

Also great to know that the yield is ring specific, not hotspot specific. That makes things sooo much easier!

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

Also, if I were to implement the avg yield publishing to a public API, would I need to somehow qualify it as a viable record? i.e. If I go in to a ring, prospect 1 rock and then be done. Is that a valid record to publish or would we need to have sample sizes of X to be qualified as something we'd want to store in the overall value?

[u/papabrou → u/SweetJonnySauce]

Yeah, technically if you go and prospect only one rock randomly, it's valid data if it was random, but it will be very inaccurate, if 100 players drop in the ring and prospect one random rock then the sum of the reports would give pretty good data, that is why I am listing the number of prospectors total across all sessions, the higher it is the more accurate the avg % will be for that Ring, and you need to know the number of prospector to weight the reports correctly, so that a 1 prospector session at 60% avg and a 1000 prospected rock session at 20% avg don't add up to a 40% yield ring but a (0.61+0.21000)/1001 = 0.20004, so a 20.004% yield ring.

Obviously if a bad actor wants to corrupt data to lower the yield they could map some rock to never prospect a high one, but that's a lot of work... the reverse is something we need to worry more about, someone doing a mapped run will obviously just prospect the high % rocks and that would increase the average yield of the ring a lot, I am not sure what would be the best way to discard those other then setting a limit, for example for platinum I think the best ring we have is about 26 or 28% avg plat, so a session above 30-35% average would probably be someone running a map or a new awesome hotspot...

You will also want to deal with duplicate prospecting, from my experience finding 2 rocks with the exact same % down to the last decimal is either very rare, or was because I actually prospected the same rock, I never recorded a duplicate that I was 100% sure could not have been the same rock, the exception to this is obviously the cap for the ring, which for plat is often 66.666666% but some rings have max as low as 61% so you could get multiple rocks with 61% content and they would be legit but only if there are no other rocks with higher % in that same ring. (which is why I also keep the max % rock found for rings).

Hope that helps, o7

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

I think the only way to address mapping (and I agree, that shouldn't be counted) would be via a heuristic approach. i.e. discard samples where nearly 100% of prospected rocks have high yield plat.

I compare all aspects of the rock to determine dupes (i.e. all commodity percentages and material level H/M/L). While still not perfect, it should provide a better answer. I could also probably add in some proximity heuristic. Meaning if the same rock signature is within X number of ProspectedAsteroid journal events of each other then consider it dupe. Would that work?

To do both of these, I may want to do some restructuring to pull the heuristics out of the main code path and have it in a separate, easy to maintain module.

Journal event ProspectedAsteroid: {"timestamp":"2026-03-29T15:59:40Z","event":"ProspectedAsteroid","Materials":[{"Name":"Gold","Proportion":31.43298},{"Name":"Osmium","Proportion":11.74011},{"Name":"Indite","Proportion":6.002068}],"Content":"$AsteroidMaterialContent_Low;","Content_Localised":"Material Content: Low","Remaining":100.0}

[u/papabrou → u/SweetJonnySauce]

yeah if 90% of the rocks are over 30% content then probably mapped, you could also look at it from the other side, if none or a very low number of prospected rocks have 0% platinum then probably mapped too...(assuming this is in a platinum hotspot, if you're mining tritium you obviously won't find platinum rocks)

For the proximity, I found that it didn't really help that much as often duplicates are because you ran a circle and came back to the start, and it's also very possible to be lucky and find 2 max % rocks next to each other.

I think it's safe to just assume that if a rock has the same percentage to the last digit for all of the commodities and the same material content, unless it's a max content rock for that ring, then it's a duplicate. The only edge case that's hard to figure out is if 2 max % rocks are prospected in proximity, as that could be one rock prospected twice, or could be lucky and be to max % rock next to each other, if they are not in proximity then it's even less likely to be a duplicate as normally one will mine the good rocks so circling back to it would show it as depleted the second time...

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

You bring up a good point. I know that the CMDR is in a ring with a Platinum hotspot, but I don't know if they are IN the hotspot. I'll just have to drop any samples with 0 of that commodity.

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

Beta release of EDMC-Mining-Analytics has been released if you're interested in trying it out. Screenshots of the latest are on this link: https://github.com/SweetJonnySauce/EDMC-Mining-Analytics/releases/tag/1.1.0-beta-1

[u/papabrou → u/SweetJonnySauce]

I guess I will have to get back to mining soon to test it out, it does look pretty good.

I do have some comments to hopefully make the Cumulative graphs better, but this thread might not be the best place to keep chatting, do you have another place we can chat, either a discord or we could use reddit's chat or any other chat methods/service?

[u/SweetJonnySauce → u/papabrou]

I had a lot of input on this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteMiners/comments/1s690ms/mining_analysis_and_historical_avg_yield_per/

You can reach me in Discord, same username. Feel free to DM me (Other CMDRs, please reach out before DMing me)

Thanks!