Making

Mining

Three ores, three bands, and a rock that is exactly one starter's hold.

A belt is five asteroids on a ring about 14 km across, scattered so that no two are ever inside one mining laser's reach at once. You fly to one, point a laser at it, and it comes apart into fragments you collect by clicking them.

A full rock holds 140 m³ — exactly a Fighter's hold. That is the pacing of the whole loop: one rock is one trip, so "this one is finished" and "I am full" arrive at the same moment instead of interrupting each other. A rock is about 6 900 points of hull and takes near three minutes to empty with the weakest laser in the game.

It breaks into eleven or so fragments that float at the rock's own surface. A mining drone can collect them and so can you — fly to one and it goes in the hold.

The three ores

The rock you can see is the ore you get. The server reads which ore a belt holds off the same field the client draws the mesh from, so a rock that looked like one thing and paid another is not a bug that can happen.

Why anybody leaves the harbour

A harbour belt refills over about five hours and pays roughly a thousand credits an hour. A shore belt refills in ten minutes. The rate is not a knob somebody turned: a belt regenerates at exactly the rate its own band is supposed to supply, so the shore pays a hundred times the harbour because the shore has things in it that shoot.

The Vadum pays more again, and it is the first belt where another pilot may fire on you.

Anomalies

Every so often a richer field opens somewhere near a belt and stands for about forty-six minutes — which is exactly how long one pilot with the weakest laser needs to strip it. One pilot can just barely take the whole thing; the moment a second arrives, neither can. It carries the band's own ore at three and a quarter times the usual rate, and it does not come back: an anomaly is a windfall, not a field.