I was thinking the other night that Asteroid Mining could be an interesting mechanic, when coupled with Fuel Consumption.
For context, I’ve checked out a previous DEC-2021 concept around Asteroid Mining, and believe this isn’t a duplicate suggestion due to the mechanical differences.
The core idea here involves 3 key considerations: Ships with a Mining Component in their blueprint, Asteroids that orbit in generally distant systems, and Ships that are doing mining needing to expend fuel to do their mining.
- Ships with a Mining Component
- As a component of shipbuilding, there could be a wide range of Asteroid Mining Rigs, suitable for collecting different material types. For example, an Asteroid Ore Mining Rig could collect metals, while an Asteroid Gas Extractor Rig would be specific to cracking and harvesting gasses trapped inside of asteroids.
- Asteroids Orbiting in Distant Systems
- Asteroids with valuable things to mine would only spawn in systems below a certain population threshold. Asteroids spawn in Clusters of a certain resource type (eg, Nickel).
- The game design rationale here is that the more populous systems already mined their nearby asteroids long ago.
- This puts a high upfront fuel cost on doing asteroid mining, which leads me to my next point…
- Asteroids Require Fuel to Mine
- Asteroids have low gravity wells at best, and aren’t always solid chunks of rock – many are clumps of dust, ice, and loose sediment. They’re also flying through space at high speeds. This means ships need to match the velocity of their mining targets, and generally cannot actually land a full-blown ship on an asteroid.
- So, ships need to engage their reactors to do any mining. This puts an a drain on SF-type fuel for as long as the ship is doing the mining.
- It’s up to players how far to push their mining. If you take it right to some emergency fuel threshold, your ship’s reactors will barely have enough fuel for the return trip. If you don’t mine long enough, it might not be worth it. Depending on where the asteroid is you’re wanting to mine, the journey itself will cost a lot of fuel.
In terms of the UX of this, I could totally imagine any ship fitted with a Mining Rig getting special controls when it’s flight destination is an Asteroid Cluster in a system:
if(hasMiningRig) && if(destination.isAsteroid()) -> Show Asteroid Mining Controls
^ Those controls could inclue the fuel-cost “duration” of mining an asteroid, after which the ship would be “done” with it’s journey and just floating in space, in some sector. Similar to regular flight, if a ship is mining and is cancelled, then they immediately disengage and are left floating.
The overall goal is to add mid-to-late game ship mechanics, create a new industry around ship parts (Mining Rigs), add a new economic driver for Fuel Producers, and create a new kind of incentive to building bases in remote parts of space, away from Faction borders.
Ok thanks for coming to my TED Talk 