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Earth. It’s a great place to live, as far as you know. You’ve never been there, but all you have to do is earn a quick 600 million bucks and you’ll be guaranteed your own little residence on that big blue marble.
That’s gonna take a while because it turns out space-capitalism is even harsher than regular capitalism. As an asteroid miner in Astronomics, which is now in early access on Steam, the precious resources you collect from mining space rocks will make massive profits for the Cube Corporation, but you’ll receive only the tiniest sliver of the profits.
On the plus side, mining those asteroids is tons of fun. Jump in your space freighter, blast off to one of the asteroids passing through your claim, then land on it with your shuttle craft. It’s a little too dangerous to walk on the asteroid yourself, but you have a command bot you control as if it’s your own body. Use a scanner to find the most valuable resources hidden across the asteroid, shoot a mining laser to break up rocks, and use a gravity tether to yank resources free and carry them to your ship.
That’s a lot of manual labor (well, remote-controlled manual labor), but where Astronomics gets fun is in the automation. Slow-moving little worker bots that look like Roombas will trundle out to collect any resources you tag for pickup, saving you the trouble of dragging them back to the shuttle yourself. Problem is, asteroids are craggy, jagged places and those little wheeled bots can’t always get where you need them them be, so you’ll need to set up cranes on top of cliffs or across chasms that can lift your little bots and place them where they’ll need to go. It’s pretty satisfying to have four or five cranes lifting and placing your small army of carrier bots, all trundling back and forth across the asteroid you’re mining, carrying precious metals to your cargo hold.
What turns Astronomics from a chilled-out automation game to a rather tense affair is the ticking clock. Asteroids aren’t just sitting there motionless waiting for you to stripmine them for spare parts. They’re hurtling through your space-claim at untold speeds, so once you’ve landed you need to get to work if you want to haul off as much as you can. Once an asteroid passes beyond your claim, it’s no longer yours. It’s pretty exciting to land on an asteroid, set up a full conveyor system of cranes and bots to move all its resources into your ship, then disassemble it all and blast off just before the asteroid speeds out of your claim.
As you return to the space station with your hold full of precious metals, you can sell some for cash to spend on upgrades (more bots and better tools), invest some into improvements for your freighter and shuttle (like increased cargo space and fuel capacity), and sell the rest to Cube Corporation—with a small sum being added to that $600 million goal that will get you to earth.
What I like most is how Astronomics provides a nearly seamless experience. I can run from the space station to the captain’s chair on my freighter, plot my trip to an asteroid, fly there, then leave my captain’s chair and enter my shuttle, navigate through the asteroid field to the main asteroid I’m going to be mining, land, then take control of my mining robot, and start running around on the asteroid’s surface. Only one part of that is a loading screen, which is the trip between the space station and the asteroid. All the rest is seamless, which makes everything more satisfying.
The seamlessness is pretty important. I’d set up on an asteroid but with only eight minutes left I realized I’d filled my shuttle to capacity, but there were still more minerals I wanted to carry off. I left my cranes and robots working, jumped into my shuttle, flew back to my freighter (zigzagging through the asteroid field), dumped out my cargo, then flew back to the asteroid. I had just enough time to gather the rest of the resources, get my bots back into the shop, and disassemble my cranes before the asteroid passed out of my claims. Fun stuff.
Astronomics is still in early access and I’m pretty keen for March to roll around because its development roadmap shows that’s when Steam Deck support will arrive. I’m loving it so far, but would definitely love it if I could take my mining enterprise from the desktop to the couch. You’ll find Astronomics here on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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