Feature Request: Max Approach Distance (DONE)

[fastabenj]

Yesterday I checked in on TM to see how it was doing and saw it was in a belt with one single asteroid left. That one roid was 71km in the distance, and TM was zeroing in on that distant hunk of veldspar with all the speed and agility that my Hulk could muster. With the Hulk's dazzling top speed of 60m/s, it would have taken it about 15 minutes to get into mining range. And that's only from the point where I noticed what it was up to, no telling how long it was already approaching.

That's an awful lot of wasted time. So I was wondering if it'd be possible for TM to eventually include feature to limit how far away distant asteroids can be, and if they're further away TM won't approach them and just start a new run instead or warp to a new belt.

Just a thought
Thanks

[VanGoghGaming]

Well I guess I could add a new feature that when warping to a belt and not targeting anything within 2 or 3 minutes then mark that belt as empty and move to another one. However I am not so sure about the benefits of this feature. Due to the randomness of warping, sooner or later most of the belts would be rather thin so if they are all marked as empty that would end the mining session and waste valuable profits that could be made by approaching far away roids. I'd say in the meantime, just train Navigation 5.

[DaCapo]

It could be useful as a selectable option for peolple like me who bookmark both ends of the belt.

[ryerrams]

To address wasting valuable profits internally in TM could it have two levels of belts?

- By default when TM starts all belts are marked as Level 1
- TM will always prefer warping to belts that are level 1
- If none exist at level 1 it will then fallback to warping to belts that are level 2
- If none exist at level 1 or 2 it will give up, dock and quit

When at a Level 1 belt, if TM can't start lasers on any targets after 2-3 mins it deprioritises the belt to Level 2. Meaning I will come back to that one later as a last resort.

This way it will exhaust the profitable belts first (level 1) before spending time on the lower profitable belts (level 2).

I often find that in my list of 10 belts, 1 or 2 (not necessarily the same 1-2 every time) become thin and TM spends a disproportionate amount of time at those belts when better options were available that it didn't know about.

[guzzi75]

I agree.
TM could also count the number of asteroids visible in distance.
If there is less than 5 asteroids, it will become a lvl2.

About distance, when < 10km, the m for meters is always at the same position. You can also count the number of m.

[VanGoghGaming]

This feature has now been implemented in version v4.3. If the asteroids are not within targeting range when TinyMiner arrives at an asteroid belt then it will mark that belt as "Undesirable" and it will return to it only after mining the other more "healthy" belts.