Out there in space are all the resources a planet could ever hope for aside from air, food, water and all the other necessary bits needed for Earth life to survive. Minerals are available in endless abundance, though, and what’s scarce on Earth is merely inconveniently located far beyond humanity’s current reach. That may not remain true forever, though, so someday a lone engineer may find themselves excavating a huge mineral-rich rock for every potential resource it can provide, breaking it down into its component pieces and stashing them away to be used in an endless cycle of upgrades to build the warp gate needed to connect home with the far reaches of space.
Space Mining Is Like Terrestrial Mining Except With A Laser Rather Than A Drill
Exoviais a mining game with no threats, hazards, dangers or other potentially astronaut-ending elements. It’s just you, a laser and a vacuum/tractor beam, breaking up a massive asteroid into its component elements and sending them back to the processing facility at the entrance. Initially everything is done by hand, with the mining laser cutting through the three element types of rock, metal and ice with just a few seconds of zapping. Once destroyed the solid sections of asteroid turn into floating rocks, which the tractor beam can hoover up to the maximum extent of the inventory, and if you leave the beam running it can act as a secondary storage with the rocks hovering in the direction the beam is pointing. Bring the haul back to base and it’s added to the inventory, initially fueling research so you can do more mining better.
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SteamWorld Dig 2 is a huge, expansive and utterly fantastic mining/platformer, with a great variety of challenges and plenty of tools to attack them with
The engineer’s space suit has slots for modules that can upgrade its abilities, but they need to be first researched and then constructed, both processes having a mineral cost but paying off nicely for the effort. While there are more suit slots than upgrade types they all stack, so fitting three +50% mining power and four +10 inventory slot upgrades makes for a much more effective operation. Faster travel, a longer mining laser and quicker mineral processing area all also worth investing in, but it’s the conveyor belts that really get the operation running.
Belts come in four types, three of which are for either rock, metal or ice and the fourth covering everything. Back at the entrance to the depths of the asteroid are three separate processing units, one for each element type, and it doesn’t take much configuring with the belt types to get everything divided up correctly. A rock will float harmlessly through a metal-sorting belt, for example, so it’s just a matter of pointing everything in the right direction and letting it take care of itself. After that you’re able to either plot a straight course to the asteroid’s heart or drill to whatever vein of ore catches your interest, although the straight path has the advantage of letting you drop the occasional everything-belt and sending all mined resources its way.
Real Asteroids Have Gravity Because Everything Has Gravity, But Let’s Ignore That
The reason the belts work with just a single one here and there is thatExovia’sasteroid has zero gravity, which we’re all going to pretend makes sense because it’s more fun that way. Everything has basic physics, and the lack of both gravity and atmosphere means that when an element is sent in a direction it keeps going in that direction until something changes. Whether that’s a wall or another chunk of mineral in the way depends on how busy you’ve been with the mining, but even on a clear screen there are a few ways a well-planned system can go astray. If the engineer is moving when firing off a rock from storage that momentum is added to the direction of fire, making it easy to miss if you don’t hit the stabilizers first to stop dead in your tracks. Alternately, large chunks of rock move more slowly than the common tiny ones, and it can be easy to have a nice, clean conveyor-belt run back to base turn into a bunch of stones bouncing everywhere as a small pile of high-speed stones bounce off a boulder.
The biggest threat inExoviais a little light chaos when an orderly plan doesn’t quite work out or you get your buttons backwards and accidentally fire an explosive charge rather than a laser. The game is a low-pressure mining adventure with no real failure state so long as you keep moving forward, meant to be a nice relaxing task to chill out to. There’s a nice curve towards powering up, and mysteries buried in the heart of the asteroid that are so far only being hinted at, but the demo at least is pleasantly relaxing enough that, after my PAX East appointment, I downloaded it at home for another play-through. Which turned out for the best, seeing as I’d have otherwise missed the gold-volcanoes entirely. The PAX East demo is identical to the one thatshowed up on Steamthe day before the convention started, so if you need a little low-pressure activity,Exoviais shaping up to be a nicely relaxing way to unwind an overly-spinning brain.
