Mining and selling

Ore is the only wealth in the game - because the world that made everything else is the ore. The economy is one chain: ore → credits → equipment → deeper sectors → rarer elements → tempered tiers → siege cannon → territory. No item appears from nowhere; somebody cut all of it.

Where the rock is

Home has none. Rock is in the belt zones: your colony’s Shallows (the nursery, no PvP ever), the Compact’s own Belt, and the Cinder Belt in the middle that is nobody’s. A deeper belt scales the size of its rocks, never the price of the ore.

The rock

Four ores, rolled when the belt is seeded:

Ore	cr / unit	m³ / unit	Hardness	Share of rocks
Iron	4	1.0	1.00	46%
Silicon	7	0.8	0.80	28%
Ice	3	1.4	0.55	21%
Platinum	46	0.5	2.40	5%

Platinum is a find, not a resource: slow to break, small, and worth the trip.

Cutting

Close and hold Left click / F. Mining Laser I cuts at 150 a second from 400 m and keeps everything; the ladder runs to VI, each tier faster and a little further. The Fracture Bore is the other tool: a fraction of the reach, enormous hits, and it wastes a fifth of what it breaks. A gun shatters rock too, and keeps a third of it or less.

Breaking a rock books a small assay duty - 7% of the rock’s declared yield - against the pilot who fired.

The scoop

The rock does not go into your hold; it comes apart into chunks, at most six, and you fly into them. The magnet reaches 1.2 km and the piece is taken once it is inside the ship. For fifteen seconds the chunks are yours - nobody else’s magnet takes them - then the first ship there has them. Litter nobody collects is gone in 75 seconds. A full hold leaves the rest floating rather than destroying it, and the meter goes red.

The hold

I opens it. The hold is the only storage: no warehouse, no vault. The hull carries 60 m³; the issued Cargo Bay I adds 90; Cargo Bay II adds 160 for 1,800 credits, and the family runs to VI. K jettisons a stack into space - you are refused it for 25 seconds, so you cannot pull it straight back; anyone else can. If you die, the whole hold spills where you died: Death.

Selling, and the scissors

Docked, G sells. The kind of station sets the price, and the rates are the same in every zone:

Where	Pays for ore	Sells
Trade port	×1.35 - the best	nothing
Mining post	×1.10	lasers, bores, bays
Arms wing, Shipyard	×0.85, the floor	guns and shields; hulls

The Trade port pays the most because it sells you nothing: worth the trip with a full hold, worth nothing with an empty one. Leaving a berth costs a flat 20 credits whatever the station. An hour in flight also costs a small overhaul, a fraction of the hull’s value.

A Mining post’s rolls post standing sale writs for an ore, and the chart’s THIS WEEK line can name an ore a post is calling for. Stations.

Elements

There are fourteen materials; the common ones come out of any rock, the rare ones out of deep and particular rock. cryo_salt, for instance, is ice-rock only; void_glass, starmetal and null_shard are fragments of the old world and belong to the deep belt. A belt heart is a piece of the old world’s core: no shelf sells one, no bench pours one, only rock gives one up - and it is spent only on things that end. Elements.