This guide is just a list of items and personal strategies that I like to do when I’m a miner, especially an antagonist miner. Just a heads up, some of these tips and things you can get might not always be available because of RNG/what antag you are/incompetent science staff. Also be wary of admins who think you’re powergaming, just don’t do everything mentioned every round and things will probably be fine on that front.
Section 1: How to take Advantage of the Science Department and Tribal Crafting
In between screaming at science to research advanced mining or upgrading the ORm (seriously, upgrade it ASAP, you get more ores per smelted ore and the miners get more points per ore), there are other things you can get from science to help you mine.
The first tip is to get augmented. It makes you pressure and ash-storm proof as well as making it much harder to kill you in lavaland, especially if you have fully maxed out goliath plates on the hardsuit or the explorer suit. It’s also a bit easier to heal. The main cons is that you now have to carry around a welding mask to heal yourself (unless you have the mining hardsuit, which the helmet is flash/welding protected) and all normal healing items miners have access to no longer work with your metal body. Also, EMP’s will fuck you up. Generally I would try to do this after a couple of loads of ores, and give science a heads up so they can print parts a head of time. Mining mechs can also be really useful if you get them early in the round, I’d always go with the firefighter mech because of better stats and it’s lavaproof. Remember that you can put goliath plates on the mech itself, up to three. Gives extra defense along with scaring the crew if they don’t know. Just remember to upgrade the mech charger in lavaland, you’ll thank me later.
The second and main tip is take advantage of Xeno-bio. The potions and slime extracts you can obtain can give you so many possibilities. Chill potions can make you fire proof so you can be the rare people to take advantage of the goliath boat and get all the ores safe from mobs from the gulag. Chill potions also make you ash storm proof, which is a easier and cheaper way than getting augmented. You can get speed potions that you can splash in your pack by accident on the mining hardsuit and make the mining hardsuit viable on lavaland. There is even a pressurized potion that can pressurize your explorer suit, but I’ve only used this once on a explorer suit and you have the better choice of just using a speed potion on a hardsuit. You can get slime cores that can passively heal and give you a speed boost (make sure you are lavaproof, don’t need to move at Mach 3 and then run 8 tiles into lava). These are the main things I’ve requested and used, probably able to take advantage of other cores and potions but I haven’t tried too much.
Tribal crafting is probably something most have only looked at to make bone axes and such for cargo bounties, but they are a valuable toolset. Both talismans give you a minor defense buff when attached to your jumpsuit. The bone axe does one less damage than a fire axe, no other explanation on how that can be useful. Bone cleavers give minor armor to your arms (I think, don’t quote me on that). The bone sword and sheild can also come in handy, though the sword isn’t as good as the axe and the shield doesn’t last too many hits and it’s not quite worth the materials used for it. The goliath cloak can come in handy as a secondary explorer suit, it’s got decent defense and is fire proof though you can’t upgrade it with plates.
Section 2: Antagonistic mining and you
This is where the real fun begins, to get prepped try to obtain as much as mentioned in section 1 as you can.
Personally, when faced with objectives to kill non-miner targets I like to use explosions. The first thing you should do is go buy a can of grey bull along with hacking gear. Grey Bull will make you immune to shocking for a short time, allowing you to check out all the wires inside a door. With the mason goggles you are able to see the layouts of rooms along with a slight bit of night vision, use this to your advantage. Either buy explosives with TC or start mining gibonite until you have at least 3-4 gibonite with 2-1 reactions left. After you gathered the gibonite go to science and try to get a BOH, return to lavaland and stuff it all into the bag. Then return to the station, make sure your target is in the area you want it to be, then move to maintance and set off some gibonite. Even with the nose of what ever you use to set it off, you should have enough time for the other person to not figure out what is happening and get caught in a explosion. You could also use gibonite to make a better explosive, though you’d also need access to high tier matter bins+ beakers+ chemicals and it’s easier for me to use gibonite.
Gibonite, combined with TC bought explosives along with the sonic jack hammer and other items you can obtain in mining/xeno-bio can allow you to cause utter chaos for sec and the crew. I personally love doing this because if you are robust enough and smart enough, sec will be forced to use a large amount of sec power in order to take you out. When I get a hijack objective, I personally like to try to get the shuttle called as much as possible. This can be done quite easily (mainly if you have anything to increase your speed permanently) and to great effect. The gibonite and explosives can be use to take out the ORM, cargo, the armory, gravity, and any source of power with ease and the prep work. Make sure you make space for the armory weapons to fly out into space and target HOS’s room. Make sure to take out his hardsuit, one less hardsuit for sec to use to kill you with. The sonic jackhammer can be used to take out walls and open the station to space, and if you have something to increase your running speed to faster than normal (combination of speed potion on a hardsuit and the speed slime core) you can take out walls within the station to explore more people to pressure. You’re PKA’s (should get two if you want to fight sec) will make quick work of anyone who gets in your way in low pressure if someone tries to act all hero. One major tip if you want to do this start of station-wide terrorism is to get EMP grenades. Sec will be helpless with mainly using energy based weapons while you are fully able to murder them within a couple of hits of your PKA’s. Even you want, you could also either force your way and compromise the AI or kill it upright, just use explosives to break through the glass walkway and then jackhammer your way into the upload or the AI. Use EMP’s to disable turrets or kill the AI and force open the upload window and upload away. Personally this is my favorite way to spice up the round, I rarely kill anyone doing this and 90% of the time sec isn’t prepped for this attack and will believe there are multiple people doing this.
Other fun things to do is to use space pods as hidden bases in space, you can either set them up in another Z-level and set a extract beacon there or even just a little out of sight from the station on the same Z-level. Those hidden bases are pretty nice for heretics and cultists, and any antag that needs to hide or take a breather.
I’ll probably add more to this in the future. This is just all I could think of right now and mainly made this as a response to people thinking that mining isn’t worth it anymore because of the nerfs. It is, you just have to take advantage of all the other things you have access to.