The centerpiece tech in Stars Reach is the world simulation. We know the material, temperature, state of matter, flow rate, adhesion rate, and humidity for every cubic meter of the world. Among other things, this means that you can modify the terrain. As in, make holes in it.
Yup, I’m talking about diggy holes!
NOT LIKE OTHER MINING…
Lots of games have deformable voxel terrain, of course. You might be wondering what’s different here.
In our simulation, each material has its own properties. Different kinds of stone might be more or less fragile, or harder to dig through. Some might form sturdy ledges you can walk on, and others might be more inclined to give way. Sand and other materials flow and collapse, and pumice actually floats in water.
The temperature also affects these things. Heat up rock enough, and it’ll melt to lava. When it cools enough to solidify back as rock, it might have undergone metamorphic processes – a fancy way of saying that when you melt rock, it can turn into other kinds of rock. Melt sand, and you’ll get a patch of glass.
All of our materials can also have chemical or physical reactions between them. Contact with water can erode rock away. We don’t have to add tons of detail along the edges of our rivers – the simulation actually generates it all through natural processes.
Unlike most MMOs (and more like most voxel games), if you dig a hole and grab a diamond, it’s gone. It’s entirely possible to mine away all the minerals on a world and scrape the planet down to bedrock.
You’ll probably regret it, though. It’ll be ugly, and you won’t want to live there anymore. The planet will be basically unable to support life. It might become a net import economy, if you end up building there anyway. And lastly, the Servitors, guardians of the ecosystems left by the Old Ones, will probably be pretty pissed off.
ASSAYING
Materials also have varying stats per planet. The iron you find on one world may not be as strong as the iron on another, but might be lighter. This matters, because the varying stats in the raw materials affect the stats of the items you craft with those materials.
One of the first things that player Mineralogists can learn is assaying, which is essentially being a rockhound: taking samples of various minerals. As you level up skills on this track, you can learn more and more detail about the sorts of minerals you find. You have a collection of these, with tabs for each planet or space zone you visit. We tell you how many there are to find, so you can try to locate them all. And there are a lot of them.
You can also go prospecting for specific minerals. Right now in the playtests, we have short-range prospecting, which lets you see the locations of minerals underground within a relatively small distance. We’ll also be working on a longer range scan that gives you a much lower precision search, sort of a hot/cold search tool.
MINING
The mining tool is currently called a Terraformer. It shoots a beam as you hold down the button. Aim it at a spot on the ground and it starts tunneling. It’s a round-ish tunnel – if you want to make nicely carved walkways, you are looking for a different skill set altogether, found over in Civil Engineering.
As you dig, the ground you dig through is dematerialized and nanoscanned. Worthwhile materials are “skimmed off the top” and land in your inventory. Depending on your skill level, you can get more efficient at this, learning how to extract more value from the same cubic meter of stuff.
The rest of the stuff has to go somewhere, though! It fills up a hopper, a nanocontainer on your tool. When the hopper is full, you need to eject the surplus material – the tailings – onto the ground somewhere. As you skill up, you can upgrade to larger and larger hoppers. Right now, it’s automatic, but once we have fully fleshed out crafting, you will want to have both the skill and tools with more capacity.
When you eject the tailings, you could fill in the hole you just dug, or ferry the gravel out from the depths of the mine. You could even form bucket brigades, if you are doing a collaborative mining project. Just watch out – we’ve seen people die to being buried under their own gravel pits!
HAZARDS
Getting buried alive is the signature hazard of mining, of course. Ceilings collapse, especially if you are tunneling through softer material. Lots of testers have died to accidentally digging straight up into loose dirt, and suffocating in the resulting cave-in.
Players can prevent this to some degree by shoring up their tunnels. In testing so far, we’ve tended to give very large values to stability of rock, so tunnels have actually been quite safe. But at some point here, we are going to need to start making rock more fragile.
Pretty soon, you will also start running into hazardous gases. Some sorts of soils trap ammonia; uranium might release dangerous radon gas, and many types of rock harbor gas pockets of corrosive fluorine, or poisonous chlorine or nitrogen. Heck, if you run into a pocket of hydrogen or methane gas, you’ll need to watch out that you don’t cause an explosive conflagration!
All of these gases (and more) are also useful in crafting, and there’s a mining subspecialty specifically for gas harvesting.
ORES, GEMS AND REFINING
Right now, testers have been just harvesting minerals directly. You see a vein of gold, you point the beam at it, and you extract gold right from the ground. But gold is often found in trace amounts in sulfide ore too. And sulfide ore is found in a few sorts of rock (gneiss and schist, for example). Heck, you often find gold nuggets in plain old alluvial soil.
As you skill up in mining, you can start “skimming off” these ores as you go. You’ll need to refine them before you can use the gold, though. This is a crafting process done at a refinery station. You can not only refine ores into specific metals or minerals, but also create alloys with distinct properties for crafting. Testers will be trying this system out for the first time this weekend.
Right now, for testing purposes, we are rolling out over 400 new crafting recipes and the refining station, and putting it all in the general mining tree. In the final game, it’ll be under a crafting track in Metallurgy. Just because you enjoy mining doesn’t mean you want to be a crafter, after all.
In addition to ores, there’s also a Gemology track for finding precious gems and the like. And if this system all works well, someday we may stack more on top, like finding archaeological items buried underground.
CHRONOPHASING
All that is still not taking full advantage of the simulation though! Remember how I mentioned that you can sometimes change one rock into another by melting it to lava and then letting it cool back down? This is the same process that changes rock in the real world, over the course of millennia. But “millennia” sounds awfully slow!
Thankfully, we have Old One technology to lean on! The Chronophaser tool essentially lets you accelerate and rewind geological time on materials. It has three different ways it works.
The first, I already mentioned, is extreme heat. Sure, Rangers in Stars Reach have a flamethrower. The Chronophaser is way hotter than that. Hot enough to melt limestone back into marble!
The second speeds up erosion. Most rocks will erode away to various types of soils and then to undifferentiated sand, over time, but there are some rock types that turn into other rock types, and also certain minerals which are easiest to extract by eroding away the landscape.
The third is the fancy word lithification. This is the process by which particulate sand and soil turns back into rock. If you’re digging through a sandy desert, you might want to turn some of that sand into sandstone as you go to hold back the inevitable dunes. Several soil types turn into specific sorts of rock.
It’s all part of the cycle of life, even for inanimate stone.
SWISS CHEESE FACTOR
I mentioned that the holes you dig all persist. The ground doesn’t “heal up” like in other games. The majestic mushroom rock formations of Pyromycis are destined to be toppled by eager players who love wrecking the landscape.
This might leave you reasonably worried about the “swiss cheese” factor. And indeed, during testing, one of the largest hazards on the landscape has been the pits left by players absolutely everywhere. There are also unsightly gravel piles all over the place.
We’re currently working on bringing those things into that same cycle of life. Piles of tailings will erode away to dirt over time, grow grass, and become hillocks. Hole edges will slowly erode and slump away, and so on. We want players to see the marks they have left on the ground – and even wince a bit at how much they changed what used to be pristine wilderness. But we also want to show how nature can heal once your temporary footsteps have passed. And of course, players can help that process along.
Image from playtester MrScott
STILL FOR THE FUTURE
Most of what I have talked about today is in the game right now. But there are some decisions we still need to make. Players craft stone blocks using dug materials. Do we move that to a dedicated quarrying skill tree? How fragile should tunnels be, and how do we display that fragility to players? Are we going to allow industrial mining, where you can drop a bot and have it harvest stuff for you while offline? It’s in our design, but after testing, we are less sure we want it. Does it make sense to allow miners to filter what they extract, leaving everything but the desired mineral in place? Originally, we limited prospecting to minerals you had an assay for – but that’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, because it means you need to find one example of a ruby before you can search for more. Unless you can trade assays…
We welcome discussion of all these sorts of topics either on the subreddit or in our Discord. Mining is, pun intended, a deep deep rabbit hole, and there’s lots to dig into.
In the meantime, we hope this glimpse into mining in Stars Reach whetted your appetite for more! Please take a look at our upcoming Kickstarter and click Notify on Launch for updates.