You mine asteroids for The Company.

The map

The map is endless.

There is no edge to it. Everything you have not explored yet is under a fog, and the fog lifts around the ship as you go. You can explore by hand, or switch on auto-explore and let the ship do it. With auto-mine on as well it explores, mines whatever it finds and goes on exploring. Zoom out far enough and the sector turns into a map of everything you have explored, and you can give the ship its orders from there.

The further out you go, the more radiation there is, and it wears down the ship's shielding. Out there you also find two kinds of asteroid that are not near the start, Radioactive and Rare-earth. A Radioactive asteroid gives off radiation of its own while you are close to it or mining it.

Some sectors are dangerous. Out there a Volatile asteroid can discharge while you mine it, which pushes the ship back, and the ship waits for it to settle and then goes back to mining on its own.

Mining

Asteroids break apart as you mine them.

Pick an asteroid and the ship flies over, circles it and the laser goes on. The asteroid glows red along its cracks, then it breaks up, and the pieces come away and shrink until there is nothing left of it. At the very end it heats up and bursts. Once you can survey, the ship tells you what an asteroid is made of before you mine it. The Ordinal, the Hopper, the Tender and the Crucible have more than one laser, so they mine two or three asteroids at the same time.

The giant asteroids do not break up. They shed smaller asteroids as you mine them, and those you can mine as well.

When the hold is full the laser stops. Drop a container where you are and a collection vessel from The Company jumps in, picks it up and pays you for what is in it. It comes on its own after a while, or you can call it in straight away. The first container on a contract is free and after that they cost credits. The bigger hulls also have a refinery that turns the raw material into something that takes less room and is worth more, and it runs by itself while you mine.

Drones and raiders

Every hull after the Surveyor carries drones.

Every hull after the Surveyor has a drone bay, and the hull decides which drones fly from it and how many. You buy drones in the Market and load them into the bay, and the mining drones fly out to the asteroids around the ship and mine them into its hold. Some bays take sentry drones as well, and they stay with the ship and shoot at raiders. The Kestrel's bay only takes survey drones, which go and find out what the asteroids around you are made of. The Warren is built for it: its bay flies up to 21 mining drones at once.

In the dangerous sectors raiders jump in, go for the containers you left standing and fly off with part of what is in them. If they come close to the ship your lasers and your sentry drones shoot at them. For the containers further away you can build a turret out of refined plate and leave it next to them, or next to your station.

The station

You can build your own station.

Once you have researched the Station Core you can put a station down wherever your ship is, and it stays in that sector. You build it up one module at a time, paid for with refined material out of your hold, and every module goes up piece by piece while you watch. There are sixteen modules, the core among them: storage bays for your drones to deliver into, solar arrays and reactors for power, and quarters, air, water and food for a crew. Then the modules that do the work: a refinery, a cradle with mining drones of its own, a fabricator that builds modules and drones, a laboratory, an exchange that sells the surplus while you are away, a berth to dock at, an isotope reactor that burns Isotopes, and a shield plant that takes the radiation off a ship docked there. Repairs at your station are free.

Everything you build claims the ground around it, and you can see your claim on the map in your colours. Research the Sector Charter and the claim reaches further, and every contract you sign off pays you for the ground you hold. And when fuel and shielding run low out in a sector, you can call a service vessel out to you instead of going back to the dock. It costs a bit more.

Music

The music is made while you play.

The game plays its own music with its own instruments, a piano, strings, a choir, brass and bells, and every career gets its own key and theme. It follows what the ship is doing, so exploring sounds different from mining, a raid or sitting at the dock, and it keeps going without repeating itself. The sound effects are played in the same key, so the laser coming on is a note in the song. It is off by default for now, you switch it on in the Sound tab.