[RFE] Mining, lockers mini-games?

[Brazilian Joe]

I think that mining is too boring as is.
It would be interesting to, besides having harvestable ores, to have purity levels on them.

There is one game I like a lot in my iPhone, Galaxy On Fire. it has a mini game where the asteroid drill is wild and randomly swings on any direction, with variable force. You must center the drill to the inside of a circle, and if you let it slip outside you start damaging the asteroid 'hit points'. The circle progressively shrinks, as the drill speeds up. If you manage to stay inside the smallest possible circle for enough time - each mini-game runs takes around 1 minute - , you find a 'core' of the material being harvested. Like finding a mother lode.

Being a more complex game, I think the things could play a bit differently on Evochron.

I think that mining ore could have different mechanics:

An optional device would be an ore scanner, which would be able to estimate the amount of precious metals on asteroids. There would be very very cheap materials, like graphite, which would fill up with very little value, and the more valuable ones, like platinum, which you currently have.

The mined ore would then not be composed of a single material, but a dust composed of various materials found on the asteroid.

An ore container in the cargo hold could show various compositions, like:

Diamond 7%
Platinum 3%
Gold 1%
Aluminum 27%
Silicon 46%
Iron 14%

And the ore value would be averaged.

The asteroid itself would have a reading of the estimated composition, and there would be a mini game for the player to attempt to gather the desired ores.

Possible mini-game:

Dancing discs

The ore scanner displays the readings of detected materials at the tip of the tractor beam based on the reflected energy.
It is then displayed as graph. composed of concentric dancing lines, not unlike a music visualization graph. Each disc between one and other line represents one ore. the position of the mining reticule inside the graph tells which ore is being mined. Rare ores should have a tiny disc, while common ores would have larger ones.

Add a whack-a-mole to that

Every now and then a cluster of a single ore would be found. Unfortunately, the beam tip is high energy and will quickly vaporize and disperse such clusters, meaning you wouldn't be able to collect it all.

A bright spot of the same color of the ore would show up every now and then inside the dancing discs, and the player would have to move the mining reticule over it and 'shoot' to capture it, adding a large amount of that material to the mined ore.

That is just one possibility of making mining more interesting.

Another feature which could be added is the possibility of finding locked containers scattered throughout the universe, or inside ships. Those would require beating a mastermind-like game to unlock, for instance.

[Ravenfeeder]

There's already containers scattered throughout the system.

As for mining. Not really worth the bother to do all the extra coding. It's something that we all start using to make some dosh, then we learn about trading, and, never touch mining again. Why stick to making 3m a run, when you can make 100m, or over?

There's loads of moles to whack, only problem is, they whack back.

Have fun!