Mining and Art

One of the goals of Traffic is to add more Dynamic Art. Art which is integrated into the game play.

When you visit an asteroid mine now, it tends to be surrounded by floating asteroids and rocks and stuff. Those other asteroids are just for show. They have no game purpose. They cannot be mined (even if some of them are larger than the asteroid mine itself).

EricMan64 had a nice mining simulation. It had lots of floating rocks. Some were valuable, and some not.

We might consider doing something similar. Basically, a mine would be surrounded by chunks of floating rock. Some have ore, some do not. A prospector ship can tell the difference by docking and looking for metals. Once it finds an ore rock, the rock can be “processed”.

Mining rigs process ore rocks into cargo pods of ore. Rigs move from rock to rock chewing them into nothing. Better mining rigs convert rocks faster.

A mine starts with a limited number of ore rocks depending on the “richness” of the mine. When they are gone, the mine is “dead”. You cannot tell a dead mine from a valuable one without spending time looking at the rocks. And the game economy progresses, the inner system mines will be depleted, pushing miners into the outer systems.

A prospecting player has several ways to earn funds from prospecting. They can sell the claim to the whole asteroid mine. The value of the claim will be based on the number of ore rocks found. The more ore, the more money.

A prospecting player could also locate the ore rocks, and then haul smaller ones to a mining rig to get processed. The player can thus make some funds, but not as much as by hiring his own rig.

A typical mining operation would have a cental processing ship, and then some tugs (or drones) that prospect and pull in ore chunks.

It would also be possible to steal ore using your tug. And possible for others to steal yours.

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