Now that I have decided on a space mining game, the next question is, what shall I be mining? After quite a lot of research on asteroid mining on Wikipedia, I had initially decided on sticking to real ores. Real metals that are definitely found in asteroids.
Then after some conversation with friends, the overall thought was that just mining known metals might be a little boring for the average gamer. This I conceded, after all Adamantium ( and even more so Adamantine 🙂 ) and Mithril are both fantastic made up ores. As the game itself is a sci-fi game, it allows my imagination to run quite wild with various ideas for ores to be found within an asteroid.
However, after looking at a long list of made up ores, there was a problem. How did I know which one would be more valuable than another? How do I even know what they are? They could just be made up strings for all I know ( well, they were, but you know … ). Generally, in the game the deeper you would go inside the asteroid, the rarer the ore, but there was no real world value attached to them. I couldn’t imagine if one tonne of kore would be as valuable as one tonne of copper. So I decided to combine both real world and made up ores. The real ones help show how much the made up ones are worth – everyone knows that gold is more valuable silver, and silver more valuable than copper, by inserting my made up ores between these, you can instantly see that Tyronic crystal is worth more/harder to find than copper. Lavatile in it’s ore form is not as rare as gold, but lavatile in crystal form is rarer than gold. Must be some pretty funky stuff!
Adding the real world ones in different places in the list instantly made it seem more real. These weren’t just random strings now, but had their place in an ore hierarchy of sorts. Seeing real metals/ores instantly creates a mental association – I guess that Dense Yeanite is similar to copper, silver and gold as they are on the same list. So below find my first set of ores for SpaceOreMiner. I would love to add hundreds of them, and then write detailed things about them, but, I have to remember my realisitic goals for the project. So currently, there are only 15. They are in order of value, from least to most.
- Copper
- Tyronic Crystal
- Silver
- Kor
- Titanium
- Lavatile
- Gold
- Lavatile Crystal
- Dense Yeanite
- Omicronite
- Diamond
- Trivonic Crystal
- Platinum
- Mythite
- Talpanite
Now that has been decided, I will need some physical characteristics, not really aimed at producing lore, more because I need to find some way to represent them in game 🙂 That should be fun!
tl:dr; I made some ores up.
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