Depends on what you enjoy. Personally I use mining when I'm having trouble sleeping and greatly prefer to acquire my resources through raiding. Abandoned bases (other than workshop or landing pad) and Zirax POI (drone base or higher) will be your source of quantum processors to bring in your first core-9s (superior cores take 1 (small) or 2 (large) quantums to make) to start taking on the ships.

Things that can only be acquired through loot:
Improved (3 mod slots) or Advanced (4 mod slots) armour
Advanced armour mods (red)
Tier 2 and 3 Weapon Mods (green and orange)
Unidentified schematics
Tesch Blasters
epic Red tier hand weapons
access cards (bypass hacking)

Some things that can technically be bought but rare or limited quantity
Nav Data
Data Pads

Granted, most of those have noting to do with mining other than nav data and possibly some of the schematics, so if that's your game, you can progress quite well by being an industrialist rather than a privateer.

edit: I should note that much of the higher end loot in abandoned POIs will be in biopods instead of the usual cargo or alien containers. look like oversized black Alien (the movie) egg pods.

edit2: if you're single player, add a core to the defeated POI to claim it, you can then use the inventory management (f4) to go through all the containers to see if you've missed any

POI are still a great way for players without a powerful ship to gain resources to build those ships. Yes you can also play trading tycoon and just buy a majority of it too. The scenario allows for many ways to get your resource to advance.

Abandoned POIs and high tier Zirax military POIs both have POI-only resources needed to get higher tier CPU extenders and other devices, but you have to make sure you actually loot the containers that have the loot. Every non-starter abandoned POI will have quantum processors at a minimum.

Originally posted by ravien_ff:

Abandoned POIs and high tier Zirax military POIs both have POI-only resources needed to get higher tier CPU extenders and other devices, but you have to make sure you actually loot the containers that have the loot. Every non-starter abandoned POI will have quantum processors at a minimum.

I tried attacking a supply depot (zirax) and got absolutely clowned on. I'm still trying to figure out what poi's I can actually do now since I have ships with missles..and shields...The shield really didn't matter all that much against the supply depot. This was done in space and I was using a sv, my cv isn't a great warship yet. My cv and sv need quantum processors to improve but so far every poi (other than the first few I brute forced in the way beginning) just absolutely annihlates me. What are some good poi's for someone with limited combat capability?

Originally posted by Thegallowman:

Originally posted by ravien_ff:

Abandoned POIs and high tier Zirax military POIs both have POI-only resources needed to get higher tier CPU extenders and other devices, but you have to make sure you actually loot the containers that have the loot. Every non-starter abandoned POI will have quantum processors at a minimum.

I tried attacking a supply depot (zirax) and got absolutely clowned on. I'm still trying to figure out what poi's I can actually do now since I have ships with missles..and shields...The shield really didn't matter all that much against the supply depot. This was done in space and I was using a sv, my cv isn't a great warship yet. My cv and sv need quantum processors to improve but so far every poi (other than the first few I brute forced in the way beginning) just absolutely annihlates me. What are some good poi's for someone with limited combat capability?

Space POIs tend to have way more weapons, longer range, greater converging firing arcs, and internal - regenerating - shields when compared to their ground counterparts. Unless you have a really high end SV, or are looking for a challenge run, you are better sticking to planet POI until you can get a decent combat CV in.