Extracting Resources

Overview

Ships can extract resources from asteroids and other celestial bodies. The amount of resources extracted is based on the ship's mounts and modules, such as mining lasers and mineral processing bays.

Typically yields from an extraction will be a random quantity of those available based on the traits of the location. However, if you have a surveying mount installed, you can survey the location and find more targeted locations to extract from, which will yield more of the resource you are looking for.

Extracting resources

You can extract resources from a location by calling the following endpoint. After an extraction, your ship will be on a cooldown. You can still navigate while on a cooldown, but you cannot perform most other ship actions.

curl --request POST \
 --url 'https://api.spacetraders.io/v2/my/ships/:shipSymbol/extract' \
 --header 'Authorization: Bearer INSERT_TOKEN_HERE'

Surveying

You can survey a waypoint to find more targeted locations to extract from. Surveying a waypoint will yield a list of locations that are more likely to yield the resource you are looking for.

curl --request POST \
 --url 'https://api.spacetraders.io/v2/my/ships/:shipSymbol/survey' \
 --header 'Authorization: Bearer INSERT_TOKEN_HERE'

To use a survey result, you must call the extract endpoint with the full survey result. Surveys have a limited lifetime, so you must use the survey result before it expires. Surveys also have a limited deposit size, and will eventually be depleted.

curl --request POST \
 --url 'https://api.spacetraders.io/v2/my/ships/:shipSymbol/extract' \
 --header 'Authorization: Bearer INSERT_TOKEN_HERE' \
 --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 --data '{
    "survey": ":survey"
   }'