There are two ways to fill your hold in a contested sector, and they play completely differently.
Extract
You find an asteroid field, deploy the drone and it starts extracting in batches. You aren’t the one mining: you’re covering the drone. Every batch it delivers is money, and every minute that passes is a minute you spend sitting still in the middle of a sector that belongs to nobody.
That’s exactly the problem: Custodian hunters exist to punish looting. They don’t care about your flag, they care that you’re pulling something out of the rock.
Raid
The alternative is going after Custodian structures. More incoming damage, more risk and a fight you can’t call off halfway through — but the loot is in another league, and it’s split by what you contributed, so nobody steals your work with the last bullet.
The interesting part is you don’t choose once
Nothing forces you to decide. Most sessions end up being both: you mine until something worth breaking shows up, or you raid until the hull asks for a break and you head back to the asteroid field.
