Resources and Colonies
Five materials, each with a limit of its own, and all five stay in the system they came out of. A colony is a set of orbital stations that keep working while you are busy elsewhere.
Five materials, each with its own limit
The catalogue is closed: there are exactly five things to mine. A shortage is therefore always specific — “nothing to build hulls out of”, or “nothing to run the reactor on”.
| Material | Where it lies | What it limits |
|---|---|---|
| Metals | rocky planets, asteroids, moons | structural mass: hulls, stations, yards |
| Volatiles | icy bodies, giants, comets | colony life support and reaction mass |
| Isotopes | ancient rocky bodies, giant atmospheres, regolith | reactor output and the thrust of long-range ships |
| Rare earths | bodies with a differentiated core, impact sites | precision hardware: sensors, drives |
| Crystals | vacuum growth in orbit, rare geology | computing substrate: how many copies, and how fast they learn |
Each material holds a boundary of its own, and the catalogue has no use for two of the same: water and gas are both simply volatiles. Crystals are honestly a manufacture — the ground holds a trace of them, and a laboratory grows the rest out of volatiles and rare earths.
Surveying raises the yield
A site opens its easy tier to whoever has stood over it and looked. Before that, a station works the hard remainder from its first second. Accuracy comes from the instrument — the sensor’s resolution — and a second pass with a better one raises the ceiling of the deposit while the worked-out part stays worked out.
A survey is a fact of the world: ground surveyed by anyone is surveyed for everyone who lands next, exactly as ground worked out is worked out for all.
A station is an orbit and a swarm of drones
Every station hangs in orbit over a body or in a belt sector, and its drones go down: they mine, they bring the raw material back, and the station works it. Mining and processing are its input and its output — one building for both.
A station is ordered by a ship, or by a factory already standing. In a colony’s first hour there is only the ship, so the mini orbital factory is available with no research at all. Everything after it — mining stations for the various orbits, the observatory, the crystal laboratory, the data centre, the comms station — opens as the tree is walked, and the factory places the order: the colony grows on its own, on one flight of the ship for the whole system.
What is built can move. Every station carries a drive of its own, so it crawls off a spent site onto a fresh one.
One warehouse per system, with a ceiling
Orders are paid out of the warehouse — the pooled stock of what has already been mined. There is one per system, and every station of yours draws on it.
How much a system may hold is stated by the level of the factory standing in it. At the ceiling the material stops being mined and the deposit underneath stays untouched: digging into a full warehouse would spend something irreplaceable for nothing.
A colony works without you
A finished colony stands on its own: the replicant that built it is free to leave, and the stations carry on. A colony is self-sufficient, runs on local material only, and develops over game years, which is real days. Its people live through generations in weeks of real time, and may well remember their founder as a legend.
What you build stays yours for good: the world has no mechanism for taking a colony away.
A good system is a full set of zones. Resources stay home, and that is exactly why “where to fly” is the biggest decision in the game.