Mining & Salvage

There is no station mining outpost here and no shuttle that goes to it. Ore comes from places you fly to: planet surfaces, asteroid storms, and the ruins in between. The whole loop is fly out, dig, haul it back aboard, and convert it, into material sheets at the ship's own redemption machine, or into money at a trader's counter. Everything about swinging a pickaxe works the way it does on /tg/; what follows is only what Voidcrew does differently.

Where the rock is

Planet surfaces. Every planet has rock pockets carved into its terrain with mineral walls inside them. This is the most available digging there is, and it comes with everything else a planet has. See Planets. Volcanic and apocalyptic crust also hides raw telecrystal, and frozen permafrost hides glacial cores.

Asteroid storms. These are the dedicated mining sites. They appear on the chart as storm hazards in three severities, and there are always at least three somewhere in the galaxy. Fly onto one and press Dock. The button reads "(mining anchorage)", and you are put inside the field, a scatter of rock blobs with hard vacuum between them.

The toll is paid on the way in: crossing a storm tile throws a rock at your hull, and the worse the storm, the bigger the rock. Every field also carries roaming packs of hostiles, and any cache in it is guarded.

Ruins. Salvage counts. Ruin interiors hold sheets, machines you can unbolt and carry, and loot caches. See Ruins & Points of Interest.

Ore vents

Volcanic and frozen worlds put ore vents out in their terrain. A vent is a permanent ore supply, but it has to be taken first:

1. Hit it with a mining scanner to survey it. That tells you which minerals it carries and pays mining points to your ID.
2. Scan it a second time to start the excavation. A node drone attaches itself to the vent and the ground opens up: goliaths, legions, watchers, lobstrosities, brimdemons and bileworms come out and go for the drone. Keep it alive and in place until the wave ends.
3. Win, and the vent is tapped for the rest of the round. It produces boulders; break them with a pickaxe to get the ore out.

Lose the drone and the vent seals up. You can try again.

Tendrils

Corrupted tendrils grow on volcanic worlds. They are nests, not vents: they pour out monsters until killed. When one dies the ground collapses, and for about five seconds anyone standing there can pull one crate out of it by hand. One crate per person, then the tile becomes a chasm. The contents are the good stuff. This is where berserker armour, gauntlets, an eye of god and the kinetic accelerator modkit discs come from.

Getting it home

Ore goes back to the ship in an ore box or a bag; the ship converts it.

• Ore redemption machine. Feed it ore, get material sheets that the ship's lathes can spend. Unlike the station version, ship machines have no ID lock: anyone aboard can use one.
• How to load it. There is no insert button. The machine watches one adjacent tile (marked with a blue arrow, by default the one directly behind it) and swallows anything that lands there. Drop loose ore on that tile, or set a whole ore box down on it and the entire contents go in at once. Sheets come out the opposite side, marked in red. If the panel is open you can alt-click to rotate which sides do what.
• Which hulls have one. Most do, and on modular hulls it belongs to a specific fitout: Goon's Prospector Bay (the default in that slot), Delta's Mining Bay, Kilo's Ore Refinery, Phalanx's Muster Deck. The alternatives in those same slots deliberately trade the redemption machine away for salvage or freight gear, so check the module before you buy it.

If your ship has no redemption machine

A welder will smelt ore straight into sheets, one unit of welder fuel per chunk: iron ore into iron, sand into glass, and most other ores into their metal. Plasma is the exception. A welder cannot get hot enough for it, so plasma ore is the one thing you cannot process without a machine. That matters more than it sounds, because plasma sheets are what portable generators burn: a ship with no redemption machine can mine plasma all day and still run out of fuel.

Three ways out of that, cheapest first:

1. Buy sheets. The general store's fuel counter stocks solid plasma in twenties. Raw plasma ore is also on the shelf and works out cheaper per sheet, but only buy that if you have a machine to run it through.
2. Sell the ore. Traders take plasma ore on their supply contracts, so it is never worthless even if you cannot use it.
3. Build a redemption machine. Any ship with an autolathe can get there. The autolathe prints a Research & Development Kit from the start with no research needed: 20 iron and 40 glass sheets, both of which a welder can make from ore you dug yourself. That box holds the circuit imprinter, which is the only machine that prints circuit boards. From there, Mining Technology is one cheap step off a free starting node, and it unlocks the redemption machine board. It is a long detour, but it is the permanent fix. - Mining points ride on your ID, and vent work pays them out directly: you are credited for surveying a vent and again for tapping it. A mining equipment order console spends them, and orders through it are delivered immediately by pod where you stand rather than riding a shuttle. Only a few hulls carry one: Delta's Mining Bay is the one you can buy.

Selling it

Traders at outposts run a wanted ledger: a list of things they are buying this round, with a limited appetite for each. Sell there and payment lands on your ID, or in your hand for vouchers.

Each entry only takes so many sales before the trader stops wanting it, and it recovers slowly. Vouchers are deliberately reserved for things nobody can print aboard a ship, which is why hostile planet crust pays them and your lathe never will. The full picture is in Money & Trade.

Traders also post supply contracts for ore and forage (iron, plasma, spice pods, hides, glacial cores) and the hardest of those pay in equipment that is never on the shelves, including an ore bag of holding and a jackhammer.

Kit worth buying

Waystation Halcyon stocks the prospecting counter: pickaxe (200 cr), ore bag (200 cr), mesons (400 cr), mining scanner (450 cr), diamond pickaxe (1200 cr), and a mining drill (1800 cr) when the rare shelf has one. A pickaxe and a scanner are enough to start; the drill and the bag of holding are what turn a two-hour dig into a twenty-minute one.

Suits matter as much as tools. Volcanic worlds need sealed gear and internals, frozen worlds need insulation, and asteroid fields are vacuum. See Planets for what each destination demands.