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New Stars Reach Deep Dive into Mining Covers Resources, Design, Tools, and Not to Explode and Trigger a Cave-in

Christina Gonzalez Posted:
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The Playable Worlds team has a new deep dive into mining, related tools, skills, dangers, and what’s to come in Stars Reach.

In the game, you’ll get to shape the world, including in the very literal sense.

“Diggy holes”, as the devblog puts it. That's going to be a big part of how you affect and shape the world. Currently known as a Terraformer, your basic mining tool, lets you aim at the ground, press a button and a beam begins tunneling. This will be good enough to start finding resources. The system is designed to skim off any worthwhile materials into your inventory and separate out the rest, which you’ll have to eject when the container is full. 

There are all kinds of hazards, like hazardous gases and cave-ins. You might dig into trapped ammonia or even uranium. Proceed carefully, as testers have apparently died buried under their own gravel pits and rock collapses.(This while the devs actually made rocks more stable on purpose for tests.)

You’ll want to avoid blowing things up unexpectedly, but also know that these hazards will also present opportunities for new materials. After all, there's even a skillset for gas harvesting and something like uranium is pretty valuable. You can also just wind up digging up some gold. One of the features of Stars Reach will be the diversity of worlds, and that means materials too. Each planet's materials can have distinct properties that carry over into crafting. 

Another tool, a Chronophaser, has a few purposes. The “chrono” in the name should offer a hint. You can Essentially manipulate geological time on materials you find. It can offer extreme heat to melt limestone into marble. The second option can speed erosion. Maybe you're looking to extract certain minerals or you just want to erode the landscape to do something different. 

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Some rock types will turn into other rock types, and some rocks will just erode into sand. Speaking of sand, the third option is something called lithification which means sand and soil can turn back into rock. So maybe you are digging in a desert and you want to create some sandstone, which can offer some defenses and shelter from sandstorms or dunes. 

When you want to tunnel and carve something more organized and pretty, pick up skills from the Civil Engineering tree.  For the purpose of playtest, they added lots of crafting recipes to the mining tree but when it's released, you can expect that to move over into a dedicated option in Metallurgy. They are still asking a ton of questions that are informed by playtests, but there are decisions they haven't yet made on how some of this will work, which is all part of game development. 


Seshat

Christina Gonzalez

Christina is MMORPG.COM’s News Editor and a contributor since 2011. Always a fan of great community and wondering if the same sort of magic that was her first guild exists anymore.