Names

We collectively call all star system objects “system bodies”. Every system body is given a random name, based on the body type. Stations have names like “Einstein Station” and “Graham Center”, whereas rocky planets have names like “Brizo” and “Plutus”.



Loot

All system bodies are created with a random amount of loot.

Asteroids: Ice and Ore

Rocky Planets: Ice and Ore

Stations: Biomass, Metal, Food, Water (a little bit of everything)

Gas Giants: Nothing (yet)

Anomaly: Nothing (yet)

The amount of loot is dependent on the size of the body. The current sizes are small, medium, and large. Planets have an unlimited amount of resource.

If you remove all loot from a system body, it will be destroyed. The idea is that you can completely scavenge a derelict station or mine out an asteroid. Planets, on the other hand, are massive, permanent parts of your star system. You can go to the same planet forever.

Eventually, we’ll add rare resources, like uranium or "dark matter”. If those resources are on planets, they won’t be unlimited, but we would most likely spawn rare resources on a non-permanent body, like an anomaly.

Respawning

One asteroids and stations will spawn every 12 real minutes, up to the maximum allowed count. This value will definitely change based on how long it takes the player to discover and destroy bodies.

Stations and asteroids will despawn after 5 game days of inactivity. This is to remove objects that the player doesn’t care about (and the lore explanation is that other factions are mining or scavenging on those bodies). If you ever create a mission to a system body, it will never be automatically despawn.



Discovering

By default, every system body has a 10% chance of automatically being discovered by the player when it spawns.

You can discover new locations by building an exploration probe.

Once discovered, you can perform missions on them. They’re also added to the skybox.

Mission Recap

“Mission” is the term we use when the player orders his/her crew to perform an action at some star system location. You could think of them as “expeditions”, “orders”, or “jobs”.

The player selects the ship(s), crew, and the locations.

Multiple ships and locations can be assigned to the same mission. You might do this if want to collect a large quantity of ore or if you’re trying to save time by visiting multiple asteroids at the same time.

The current mission types are:

Survey Mining Salvage

Survey

By default, the contents of a location are unknown to the player. In order to reveal those contents, you have to send a ship out to perform a survey.

You can still mine on an unsurveyed asteroid, you just won’t know what you’re going to come back with.

The intent is that the player should feel like they’re exploring their own world.

Mining

Mining is performed at rocky planets or asteroids. The player sends out crew, and they come back with ore and ice

Salvage

Salvage missions are performed at other stations in your system. The idea here is that the player is sending out crews to harvest loot from derelict stations, and possibly that loot is being stolen from active station (piracy).

Stations can have any item: biomass, food, metal, fuel, ore, etc.





Ship Stats

Missions are performed by ships, and they have 3 primary stats that you care about:

Speed

Cargo Space (add multiple ships for more cargo space)

Crew Space

Speed influences how long it takes for the ship to travel from 1 location to the next. The balance intent of travel time is to encourage the player to adjust their playstyle based on the system bodies that they are close to.

You can play more efficiently if you select multiple mission locations that are near each other, because your ships don’t have to travel from your station to each destination multiple times.

By the way, travel time is calculated based on the current mission location to the next location, and we automatically arrange the travel order so that it’s always the fastest possible.

Other Stats

There are some other ship stats that I think are interesting:

Fuel Type (some ships could require biomass as fuel source, for example)

Fuel Efficiency (how much fuel is required to travel X distance)

Crew Food and Efficiency (the type of food that the ship can provide)

Crew Need Restoration (how quickly crew needs are restored)

By the way, ships don’t require a pilot. From a practical standpoint, this allows your ships to return to the station if all of the crew dies. The lore explanation is that the ships are flown by an autopilot (this is why your ships have a name, by the way).



Difficulty

Planets have an unlimited amount of resources, which makes them way better to use than asteroids.

To balance this, we added different difficulty and duration values on each body type.

A planet takes much longer to mine at than a small asteroid, and the success chance is much lower.

In the future, we want to lock body types behind some sort of technology or skill wall. So you might need “heat shielding” on your ship in order to survive atmosphere entry and mine on a planet.

Mission Failure

When you fail a mission, a few randomly selected “bad” things can happen:

Lose loot

Damage crew members

Kill crew members

Bad memory is created

Requirements

Missions can also require certain things:

Minimum crew count

Minimum skill count

Sacrificed crew (if your own colonist is “donated”)

Minimum loot free space (if something is produced)

Minimum crew free space (if a colonist is created)

Required items

So we could create a mission that requires medicine and a level 5 doctor, or a mission that will sacrifice a colonist in exchange for a rare resource.





Quests

Internally, quests and missions are almost the exact same thing. So everything that I previously said about missions will apply to quests (requirements, travel time, multiple ships, etc).

The only difference between missions and quests is that missions are created by the player and quests are created by NPC’s.

Quests are things like “We need help! Send us food and a farmer”, or “I’m looking for a new home, please pick me up”.

System Citizens

Our quest givers are called “citizens”. The same citizens will exist in every playthrough.

An example would be “Doctor Guts”, the always present mad scientist who bravely pushes the bounds of research and technology—he just always seems to run out of test subjects.