I recently wrote a short essay for MMO Gamer, intended for a general audience, giving a brief overview of the system being designed for mining in Jumpgate Evolution. Upon my request, Scorch and Draker authorized me to also produce a similar sketch specifically for the Jumpgate Classic audience, comparing the new plan more directly with mining in the Classic game.

Please be aware that the new mining system is just now being designed, and will have to go through our standard process of iterative refinement. Details probably will change a bit over the next several weeks, so this information really only describes our starting point.

Here is a list of major differences between the JGC and JGE systems:

• Most asteroids in JGE are MUCH larger.
• The asteroids won't turn blue anymore!
• We will mine ore objects on the roid surfaces, instead of the roids themselves.
• Each ore object will contain maybe 1-3 ore types, instead of fractions of dozens of commods.
• There will be more than five kinds of ore.

This system also eliminates any business of having asteroids vanish and magically reappear, which some other games do. We like avoiding that because asteroids represent a lot of the game's "terrain". We don't want them to disappear or change color in some weird way.

The ore objects will respawn, but they won't always be in the exact same place, or be of the same type. The parent asteroid will define the possible kinds of ore, of course, and the physical asteroid types themselves will remain easy to identify. Right now we're still planning to use the five old familiar asteroid types: Common, Ice, Precious, Radioactive, and Semifluxor. We're looking at a wider variety of ore types, though. The tentative list includes such things as Industrial Metals, Exotic Metals, Precious Metals, Minerals, Semiconductors, Crystals, Radioactives, and Volatiles ores right now, and we will probably add more, perhaps a lot more. Ores will be converted into the game's raw materials at Refinery buildings, giving us the root of our production and manufacturing tree.

We're actually planning to use, of all things, the AI system to spawn the ore objects; it inherently does everything we need. The ore objects will be destructible static bots (you'd use the new equivalent of the mining laser to destroy them), and we'll just use a loot handler to provide the ore, exactly like dropping salvage from a destroyed ship. Re-use of systems like this is one technique letting us roll out JGE so quickly with such a small team.

Basic mining will just require opportunity and a mining tool (i.e. mining laser), and we intend for it to have stronger exploration and treasure-hunt elements than the mining did in JGC. Although areas near major stations might be pretty thoroughly mined out due to population, we do plan to have JGE equivalents of Ore Depots and Refineries scattered in more remote locations, convenient for miners working well away from high-traffic areas. Haulers will be needed to move material from those waystations to other, central points of exchange. All details of quantities, rates, distances and times will depend on testing, economic needs, and population estimates as we plan other areas of the game economy.

I hope this provides a reasonable overview of where we're starting with mining. It promises to be a fairly simple system, yet hopefully sophisticated enough to provide the interesting and fun gameplay we're demanding from every part of the Jumpgate Evolution design. More updates will follow as we implement this set of features and prepare them for beta testing.