Thirty rocks drift through the system carrying metal and credits. Finding them takes a telescope. Working one takes a freighter that has to sit still — and a freighter sitting still is a freighter somebody else can take.
What is out there
Every system carries thirty meteoroids, and they are not scattered at random. They come in three populations, each worth a different kind of trip.
You will not see any of them until you find them. A rock stays off your map until your own sensors sweep it — so a rock nobody else has surveyed is a rock nobody else can reach. That is what the Deep Survey Telescope buys: it widens a station's sensor reach, and finds a rock outright the moment it finishes.
Reading a rock on the map
Rocks carry no orbit rings, and their names sit below the planets in the map's label order. Thirty rings and thirty shouting labels would bury the worlds you steer by, and a rock's ring tells you nothing you can act on: you never plan around where a rock will be, you send a freighter to where it is.
Click one and you get its own panel — what it is made of, how much is left, how many freighter loads that is, and where it sits right now.
Working a rock
- Survey it. Build a Deep Survey Telescope on a station and let it sweep.
- Fit a Mining Rig. A freighter part from the ship designer. Without one, a hull cannot work a rock at all.
- Send it out. Add the rock as a stop on a trade route, or fly a rigged freighter there and start the dig by hand from its ship panel.
- Wait. 50 a tick into a 400 hold — about eight ticks parked, and it cannot leave until the run ends. This is the whole cost of mining.
- Carry it home. Nothing is banked until it is delivered: automatically at a route's drop-off, or by hand with Deliver to Pool.
A parked freighter is a target
A hull working a rock is stationary, in the open, and usually unarmed. If somebody finds it there they can kill it — and a destroyed freighter's cargo goes to whoever killed it. Everything dug and not yet delivered is worth exactly as much to them as it was to you.
Guard your runs, or keep them quiet. A rock you found and nobody else has is safe by obscurity. A rock in contested space is a standing appointment your rivals can set a watch on.
Nothing can be built on a meteoroid — no city, no station, no shields. A few hundred metres of rock on a loose orbit is worked, not held.
The numbers
| Thing | Value |
|---|---|
| Freighter hold, per resource | 400 |
| Extraction rate, per rigged hull | 50 / tick |
| Ticks parked to fill a hold | 8 |
| Mining Rig unlocks at | Society 7 |
| Deep Survey Telescope unlocks at | Construction 7 |
| Telescope is built on | stations |
| Orbital Shields are built on | cities |
A freighter holds 400 of a resource, which is the number every run is planned around: a rock holding 800 metal is two trips, and a hull that fills in eight ticks spends eight ticks unable to move.
The telescope belongs on a station because it is passive infrastructure: if the station falls, what you lose is vision rather than a defence, and a station sees further than a city to begin with, so the bonus compounds on the better platform. Orbital Shields sit on the city for the opposite reason — stations fall first, and a shield pool that dies before the city it protects is decoration.