CSC Mining: MEA Mini-Game Overview
With Mining Expedition Alpha just around the corner, May 10th (Moved from the 4th), we thought this would be a great time to go into more detail about the MEA mini-game event and discuss one major aspect of our industrial game mechanic, resource mining.
MEA Mini-Game Overview
Let’s start off by talking a little about MEA’s purpose. MEA was designed to be a mini-game experience that provides our early commanders with the ability to use their ships/vouchers to gain resources and lucrative knowledge about the in-game locations of resources.
From a game design and development standpoint, MEA was developed separately from the rest of CSC. We did this to make sure our core team stayed on track to deliver our milestones on schedule. In short, MEA has been semi-independently developed by a small group of our CSC devs with the express goal of giving our early commander community a fun and opportunistic gaming experience.
All that said, I do want to emphasize that the visuals and functionality of MEA should not be considered the end goal or final launch state of CSC. With that clarified, let’s cover more details on Mining Expedition Alpha.
MEA Resource Pools
The Galactic Federation has capped the total number amount of resources that can be collected by early commanders. The limit has been set to 100,000,000 tons of ore. Once the limit is reached, MEA will officially conclude. In a normal mining operation, this amount of ore wouldn’t last long, but since you, the commanders, are hard at work preparing for “Operation Radius” later this year, prospecting these systems will be limited to automated drone-piloted ships.
Utilizing the Galactic Federation’s FTL Drone Command Network, you’ll be able to keep track of and monitor your ships as they travel as far as 30 light years away from Sol. In MEA, mining resource pools have been allocated to each star (multi star systems will have multiple pools, one for each star). Each star has a fixed amount of resources seeded, approximately 1,000,000–2,000,000 tons each. Once a star/system has been depleted, commanders will no longer be able to send ships out to prospect and mine it.
MEA Gameplay
Commanders will be able to launch into MEA from the Hangar on the CSC website. Ships capable of participating in MEA will have a “Launch” button. Interacting with this button will bring commanders to the MEA Mission Interface page (MEA will be utilizing Unity WebGL). On the mission interface page, select a destination system (and the specific star if it has more than one), then select “Engage” to start your mission.
Selecting Engage will execute an ETH Transaction (network fee only) that will command your ships to embark. After that, a mission countdown timer and progress meter will indicate how long it will be before your ships return. Upon returning, you’ll see the results of your trip and the resources you have collected. Resource distribution is based on universal scarcity, star system availability, and the total tonnage your ship is able to mine.
Every time you send out the same ship, it will gain AI Mining Efficiency (AIME). AIME will affect your overall efficiency at mining and increase the amount of tonnage you can collect in a one-hour mining window. 1 AIME is equivalent to a 1% mining improvement. For each trip made, your ships gain 25 AIME (25% multiplier) to your mining amount.
MEA Example Scenario
You have a Vulcan Harvester that’s been out on 20 trips. It has a total AIME of 500 which translates to 750 tons (150 x 500%) in a single trip. On your next flight, you decided to send it 20 light years away to the Neverland Star. After 11.42 hours it reaches Neverland, spends 1 hour mining, then heads back to Sol. So after a total of 23.84 hours, your Harvester has returned with 750 tons of ore. After processing and tallying up your haul, you realize how RICH of a system Neverland is…
Collected Resources from Neverland in (Tons):
240 Iron, 172 Nickel, 97 Cobalt, 18 Allurum, 10 Platinum, 80 Quartz, 71 Lucinite, 37 Cosmethyst, 25 Trilite
This is an OUTSTANDING haul compared to other 35 systems you prospected. In those 35 systems, you’ve only ever collected 1 Trilite combined! This gets you thinking — maybe now’s the time for you double down and send out your whole fleet before other commanders discover this goldmine of a system and mine it all out!
That’s all for now, commanders! We’ll have more on MEA a few days before the Expedition begins next week! Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to reach out to us anytime with questions or feedback.
If you missed our introductory post about Mining Expedition Alpha, you can read about it here!
The CSC Pre-launch Ship Sale is going on now at https://www.csc-game.com/sale.
Feel free to join us on Telegram or Discord to discuss this upcoming mini-game event or CSC in general. Safe flying, commanders!
