With Mining Expedition Alpha just around the corner, May 10th (Moved from the 4th), we thought this would be a great time to go into more detail about the MEA mini-game event and discuss one major aspect of our industrial game mechanic, resource mining.

MEA Mini-Game Overview

Let’s start off by talking a little about MEA’s purpose. MEA was designed to be a mini-game experience that provides our early commanders with the ability to use their ships/vouchers to gain resources and lucrative knowledge about the in-game locations of resources.

From a game design and development standpoint, MEA was developed separately from the rest of CSC. We did this to make sure our core team stayed on track to deliver our milestones on schedule. In short, MEA has been semi-independently developed by a small group of our CSC devs with the express goal of giving our early commander community a fun and opportunistic gaming experience.

All that said, I do want to emphasize that the visuals and functionality of MEA should not be considered the end goal or final launch state of CSC. With that clarified, let’s cover more details on Mining Expedition Alpha.

MEA Resource Pools

The Galactic Federation has capped the total number amount of resources that can be collected by early commanders. The limit has been set to 100,000,000 tons of ore. Once the limit is reached, MEA will officially conclude. In a normal mining operation, this amount of ore wouldn’t last long, but since you, the commanders, are hard at work preparing for “Operation Radius” later this year, prospecting these systems will be limited to automated drone-piloted ships.

Resource Index for Mining Expedition Alpha

Utilizing the Galactic Federation’s FTL Drone Command Network, you’ll be able to keep track of and monitor your ships as they travel as far as 30 light years away from Sol. In MEA, mining resource pools have been allocated to each star (multi star systems will have multiple pools, one for each star). Each star has a fixed amount of resources seeded, approximately 1,000,000–2,000,000 tons each. Once a star/system has been depleted, commanders will no longer be able to send ships out to prospect and mine it.

Resource Distribution for Mining Expedition Alpha

MEA Gameplay

Commanders will be able to launch into MEA from the Hangar on the CSC website. Ships capable of participating in MEA will have a “Launch” button. Interacting with this button will bring commanders to the MEA Mission Interface page (MEA will be utilizing Unity WebGL). On the mission interface page, select a destination system (and the specific star if it has more than one), then select “Engage” to start your mission.

Selecting Engage will execute an ETH Transaction (network fee only) that will command your ships to embark. After that, a mission countdown timer and progress meter will indicate how long it will be before your ships return. Upon returning, you’ll see the results of your trip and the resources you have collected. Resource distribution is based on universal scarcity, star system availability, and the total tonnage your ship is able to mine.

MEA Concept UI

Every time you send out the same ship, it will gain AI Mining Efficiency (AIME). AIME will affect your overall efficiency at mining and increase the amount of tonnage you can collect in a one-hour mining window. 1 AIME is equivalent to a 1% mining improvement. For each trip made, your ships gain 25 AIME (25% multiplier) to your mining amount.