Getting to work proved harder than I anticipated. The most important challenge was that I had no clue what I was doing in the first place and what all the controls were for. After nearly 3 hours of messing around with everything I managed to get a handle on it though. To be fair, I would have turned the reactor off twice, decoupled the mining laser from my hardpoints and opened the airlock if it wouldn’t have been for the confirmation requests from the system. 

After that I nearly crashed the whole ship into one of the asteroids as I was trying to figure out how to fly this bucket. My shield was still down to 28% and slowly recovering but I had the main engine and the navigation thrusters figured out now. I wanted to take it on a spin around the field but the screen blinked like crazy and warned me that hand navigation should be avoided due to the unpredictable movement patterns of the asteroids. Later then.

And finally the mining portion. Apparently the mining lasers were configured for this particular kind of asteroid and did several things simultaneously. They cut the rock into smaller chunks, melted the tiny chunks and transported the molten ore into a container that was clamped to the ship’s hull. When the container was full it would send a signal and a collection vessel would come by and transport the ore from my container. 

The downside was that the mining process was all in all extremely tedious. I needed to make sure that the asteroid got broken down correctly, that the chunks weren’t too big and that the transporter worked correctly. I constantly needed to readjust targeting. While not difficult, once I figured out how to do it, it was tedious and time consuming. 

The next hour I fully focused on the mining operation. First I tried cutting off small chunks of asteroid with one laser and melting them with the other one. I guess that was what you could call your standard mining pattern. While it worked, it just wasn’t feasible because it was very hard to control the size of the chunks and often I had to recalibrate and cut them down further to get all the ore out. I could melt chunks the size of a fist or thereabouts and extract all ore from them, twice that size allowed about 90% extraction. The result was mental drain and about 80 ore in an hour. 

Once I figured out that I could calibrate the width of the lasers from needle point to something about the size of a dinner plate I tried focusing both lasers on one spot of the asteroid, letting them run and basically drilling a hole into the rock. This was even slower because the waste material got in the way and after a certain depth the process would simply stall. Probably a good method when you had a big ship with like eight or ten mining lasers as you could probably strip mine the asteroid - basically melting them away leaving nothing but dust in your wake.

After about 15 minutes of that I received the message that the collector had been called because my container was nearly full. Which meant that while this approach didn’t need much focus I would only mine about 60 ore an hour and I guessed that with this method the returns would diminish even further. 

My sensors showed the approaching colossus. I craned my neck to get a look at the collector ship as it passed by closely to my ship. Wow, this thing was HUGE in capital letters. My screen showed the contents of my container and it suddenly jumped from 100% to 0%. 

New Skill unlocked: Basic Space Mining

Current Skill Level: 1 / 100

Ah, cool. Doing stuff gave you skill. I did not know what that meant in the long run as there was no button in my interface to use an active skill but right now I care more about the fact that my character was progressing than about using the skill.

But now I had an idea. I zoomed my screen to a section of asteroid surface. Then I overlaid that section with a square of 2 meters length. Finally I added a grid about 10cm apart. Next I set the mining lasers to full focus and started cutting first the outline and then the grid about 10cm deep into the rock. Check time: about 90 minutes. 

I reconfigured the lasers to the same 10cm width burn point and focused them on the first two sections I had cut. Check time: about 5 minutes for full extraction of about 15 units of ore. Now we were talking. Another 25 minutes later I received the message that the hauler had been called again. 

I kept going. 30 minutes later I saw the collector message blink again on my screen and once the ore was picked up my interface informed me that my Basic mining skill had increased to 2 / 100. Nice work. 

I ran the numbers quickly and had to smile. With the standard approach I harvested about 80 ore an hour or about 800 in a 10 hour shift. I could also see that 10 hours was the max I would have been able to keep fiddling with the lasers under full concentration. My new method took some time to set up but then it took me nearly no concentration or effort and I could mine roughly 200 ore in an hour. The same 10 hour day would now give me 1800 ore and leave me with 160 squares left. Production more than doubled. Ha, take that labor camp starting scenario.

* * * * * 

An hour and two ore pickups later I my stomach started rumbling and I noticed my mouth was extremely dry. 

Hungry and Thirsty

All stats reduced by 30%

Oh great, a game where you needed to keep your character nourished. I mentally gave the developers a thumbs up for realism and the finger for the annoyance of the mechanic. Swiveling my chair to grab some food and water I promptly banged my knee again on the console. 

I cursed, kicked the offending corner and walked into my bunk room. I grabbed the cup that hung on the wall next to the fridge door looking thing and filled it with water and emptied it in one drag. How had I gotten so thirsty without noticing it? The debuff changed from Hungry and Thirsty to just Hungry. The stat reduction remained though. 

I opened the drawer and found stacks of green and brown bars stacked in it. I took one and smelled it. No smell whatsoever. I took a careful bite. A slightly sweet taste but nothing I could place. I guessed that not having a smell interfered with the taste. It seemed edible though and after I finished that bar I felt quite full on my debuff disappeared. 

I contemplated the debuff for a moment and was sure that this could impact me badly in all kinds of ways. 30% stat reduction was quite a lot. So I made a mental note to keep an eye on the time it took my character to get hungry or thirsty again and went back to work. 

After another 7 hours I decided to call it a night. My basic mining skill was up to 5 and I had delivered a total of 1500 ore to the collector. I also figured out that the thirsty debuff happened every 6 hours and the hungry every 8. I was curious if different environments or levels of activity would change that. Or if I could eat before the timer was up and that would reset it.

Now to the thing that felt weirder than anything else. Going to sleep in game. I mean I had spent nights in the game. My longest session ever was 36 hours. I even enjoyed sexy time in leisure locations in the Hub. But I had NEVER consciously slept in an online environment. It just wasn’t done. Why would you? The games were meant to be played, the online worlds to be experienced. You logged out to sleep. So I felt completely weird when I crawled into my bunk not bothering to get undressed. 

As I lay there staring at the ceiling I thought about my day. I found out that I would be able to mine about 1k ore more than the daily quota. That by itself was really awesome in terms of quickly getting out of this asteroid belt. However… This ship and equipment was charged to my account at 15k ICU.

Taking previous gaming experience into account, I assumed that about 10k were for the ship itself and another 5k for the equipment. If I wanted to do more in this game then sitting in asteroid belts and cutting up rocks, I needed money for better equipment and a betteror at least a different ship. Since I lacked all knowledge of prices I had no clue how much I would need. 

I remembered that I could exchange any mined material above the daily quota could be sold to my ‘slave masters’ at a rate of 1.5 to 1. That meant I could make about 600 ICU a day. But that would also mean that I needed to stick around here for the full 12 days I had previously calculated for the 10k requirement.

“Personal Log. New Entry.”

The personal log section of my interface flashed open.

New Entry: Malcolm Solo. 

• • • Get an idea what an ICU is worth in terms of living and gaming expenses.

• • • Get an idea how much new equipment and possibly a new ship costs.

• • • Decide how much ore I want to exchange for credits.

• • • Keep raising my skill level in case it proves to be a worthwhile money making scheme.

• • • Mine my ass off to get out of here. 

I closed the personal log. Then I contemplated my mining skill increases. It seemed that for every new skill point I needed to mine previous requirement + 100 ore. Which meant I could probably raise this to a decent level. The question remained, what would that give me?

At that point I must have fallen asleep to the slight humming and vibration of the rust bucket. I dreamt of asteroids and lasers digging into space rocks.