Gathering

Status: draft v0.4, 2026-11-09. Hangs off ECONOMY.md §2–3. Numbers are shapes, not balance.

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1. The spine

Four verbs, and they are the entire early game:

A player should understand the whole loop in their first session and still be playing it in year three, with better ships, better information and more dangerous destinations.

Nothing in that loop runs without a player inside it: there is no verb here on a timer (§6).

2. Two kinds of scanning

These are different mechanics with different costs, and keeping them distinct is important.

	Sweep	Ping
Scope	Other systems, at range	The system you are sitting in
Duration	Minutes to hours (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §7.3)	Instant
Cost	Locked in place, loud, movement cooldown	Your position, announced to everyone here
Answers	Where should I go?	What is in this system, and exactly where?

The sweep is strategy. The ping is the opening move of a knife fight.

3. The ping

You arrive in a system and ping it. Immediately you see what is here and precisely where — every deposit your equipment is good enough to detect.

• It is instant. No commitment, no lock, no cooldown.
• It is not free. The moment you ping, every ship in the system knows your position.
• What you see depends on your gear and your training. Better scanners reveal rarer and better-hidden deposits, and skill in the domain sharpens whatever array you are carrying (SKILLS.md §3). A poorly equipped, untrained pilot in a rich system simply does not see the good rocks — they are there, and someone better prepared will find them.

So arriving somewhere and finding out what is in it means announcing that you have arrived. That is the price of knowing, and it is paid up front.

This matters more than it looks: gear and training buy you access to destinations, not bigger numbers. Two pilots at the same rock pull at a similar rate. The better-prepared one can see rocks the other cannot, which is pillar 6 — power plateaus, options don't.

3.1 You can mine from someone else's chart

A deposit location can be shared. Hand it to a friend, sell it on the market, attach it to a contract, trade it for something you want more.

Which means the silent approach exists: arrive already knowing, go straight to the rock, never ping at all. You announce nothing. The system never learns you came.

This is the payoff for the whole intel economy (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §7.4) landing in the moment-to-moment game:

• Bought intel is immediately, tangibly more valuable than your own eyes, because it is silent and your eyes are not.
• A prospector who finds and sells locations is earning from work they already did, twice.
• The well-connected careful player can operate in dangerous space without ever advertising themselves — exactly the Rust-style solo path we promised.
• And charts perish: a shared location is worth less the more hands it passes through and the longer it ages, because deposits deplete and others may already be working it. Selling a location is selling a decaying asset, which keeps the market honest without a single anti-abuse rule.

4. Mining, and the hunt

Once you know where a deposit is, you go and work it. Mining is quiet.

• Nobody knows your exact location while you mine. The system may know somebody pinged a while ago; it does not know where you went.
• You can stop and leave at any instant. No lock, no cooldown, no penalty. Abandon the dig mid-second and go.
• You can also stay, or pack up and move to a different deposit in the same system.

4.1 Hunting a miner

To find someone mining, you have to scan for mining activity — and that scan broadcasts your position to everyone in the system, exactly like a ping.

So the moment a hunter finds their prey:

• The hunter learns where the miner is.
• The miner learns they have been found, and by whom, and from where.

Detection is symmetric and simultaneous. There is no stalking someone who does not know they are being stalked — looking costs you the same secrecy you just took from them.

4.2 Why this is the right shape

• No lock-in, no punishment for being careful. A player who pays attention and leaves early simply gets away. We are not taxing people for playing well.
• The tension is nerve, not reflex. You have been detected; the deposit is half worked; the hunter is somewhere in the system and closing. Stay for one more minute, or go now? That decision is interesting on a phone, at any latency, in any time zone.
• Hunting is a real job with a real cost. You cannot sit invisible and ambush. You have to reveal yourself to find anybody, and every ping you throw tells the system a predator is working it.
• Area denial is a legitimate strategy. A hunter who never catches anyone but pings relentlessly still ruins the system for miners. That is a perfectly good way to hurt an enemy's economy without winning a single fight.

4.3 So how does anyone ever get caught?

Leaving the deposit is instant. Leaving the system is not.

They now know where you were and which way you went, and crossing to a gate or beginning free burn takes time (TRAVEL.md). A faster ship, several hunters, or a gate already watched turns a clean escape into a chase. And a full cargo hold is slow.

Which is the same truth as everywhere else in this design: getting away is about not being pinned, and a loaded hauler is halfway pinned already.

5. Rare materials

Rare deposits — Exotics above all — are mined by a person, in a dangerous place, and never by anything automatic (ECONOMY.md §2.1).

Nothing in the game produces on its own (§6), so that is not a special rule for rares: it is the rule everywhere, and rares are where the price of it is paid. Wealth is never a function of how long ago you started — a veteran accrues scale, never rare things. Those are taken by someone who went out there, pinged, exposed themselves, and worked the rock with a hunter possibly inbound.

The risk is not a mechanic bolted onto rare mining. The risk is rare mining: it happens where security is low, which is where pings go unanswered by any navy.

6. Nothing extracts itself

Every unit of raw material in the game is mined by a player who is present, in a ship, at the rock. There is no passive extraction: no structure works a site you hold, no drone fleet runs standing orders, and nothing accrues while you are away. Close the game and the number stops moving.

Stated as a rule, because the rest of the economy rests on it:

• Wealth follows what you do now, never how long ago you started. A veteran who stops flying stops producing, and the only path to volume is more pilots in more rocks rather than more elapsed time.
• Every atom has a miner behind it — someone who scanned, travelled, exposed themselves and hauled. Nothing on a market arrives from nowhere.
• Raw material supply is bounded by how many people are actually out there flying, so it rises and falls with the playerbase instead of piling up forever. A quiet week is a tight market, and that scarcity is a reading of the world rather than a curve on a chart.

A colony is downstream of this, not upstream: it refines and fabricates what somebody hauled in, and it does not dig (COLONIES.md).

Drones exist, and they are ship equipment, not infrastructure. A drone is launched from your ship, works the deposit beside you while you are there, and comes back. Several drones in the water is what lets one pilot pull more in a session than one hull would alone — that is the whole of their value: more output per hour of your presence, and none in your absence.

They are still property. A flight caught by a hunter, or caught while you were working an exposed rock, can be destroyed or taken, which makes losing drones to a raid a real and survivable loss — an operating cost paid in the same fight your ship is in.

7. Salvage

Wrecks, ruins, derelicts. Returns intermediates directly, skipping refining (ECONOMY.md §3), which makes it disproportionately valuable per unit of cargo.

• Found and worked like any other site: ping, go, take, leave when you like.
• The sites exist because something went wrong for somebody — a battle, a lapsed empire's ruins (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §3), a structure decaying on the frontier.

Salvage is therefore the vulture's economy, and it is self-generating. War debris and collapsed empires are content nobody had to author, and following a war around is a legitimate career.

8. The dangerous part is the trip home

Cargo is volume-limited. A full hold means you must go somewhere to empty it, and that leg is where everything bad happens.

• Mining itself is quiet and escapable. Leaving with something is not.
• A loaded hauler is slow, fat and worth attacking. Piracy does not need to catch you at the rock; it needs to catch you on the road.
• Which makes the route home a real decision (TRAVEL.md §8), and gives escorts, convoys and hauling contracts an obvious reason to exist.

The emotional shape: getting it was work, keeping it was the gamble.

9. Depletion

Sites are finite (ECONOMY.md §2.2).

• Common deposits deplete slowly and are everywhere. Nobody will ever run out of ore.
• Rare deposits deplete permanently, and richness re-emerges elsewhere in unsafe space. Securing a system kills its rare yield without touching a single rock: the deposits already there are worked out normally, and no new rare richness ever surfaces in secured space, so the system runs dry for good (ECONOMY.md §2.2).
• So the map of where wealth is moves, charts rot, and prospecting never runs out of work.

A worked-out system is visible history: somebody was here, and they did well.

10. Implementation notes

• A site is a delta row on a body. Untouched bodies have no row; richness is a pure function of the galaxy seed until someone takes from it.
• A ping is a read, not a job: it resolves against the seed plus deltas, filtered by the pilot's detection capability, and writes one broadcast event to the system.
• Mining is rate × time actually spent at the rock, clamped by remaining richness and cargo, and it advances only while the player is present. No last_collected column, no catch-up on login: a body's delta moves when somebody is there, and at no other moment.
• Yield is deterministic from site, equipment, skills and time on site. No random rolls. Uncertainty in this game belongs in intel, never in dice.
• Detection events are the only realtime-ish thing here, and they are cheap: one row per ping, visible to ships currently in that system.

11. Open questions

• [ ] Does a ping reveal who you are, or only that something pinged from a position? Position-only is more frightening and keeps identity something you have to work for.
• [ ] How long does a broadcast position stay current? If it is a single instant, a hunter must be quick; if it lingers, the miner is in real trouble. This is the dial that sets how deadly the hunt is.
• [ ] Can a ship ping continuously or on a timer, trading constant exposure for constant awareness? Tempting, and it risks collapsing the mechanic into a stat.
• [x] Can you mine without having pinged, from someone else's chart? Settled: yes. Locations are shareable and sellable, so the silent approach exists. See §3.1.
• [ ] Do common deposits regenerate slowly, or only deplete? Leaning slow regeneration for commons, permanent depletion for rares.
• [ ] Can several players work the same site at once, racing? Good drama, possible grief vector.
• [ ] How far from the ship can a drone work? They only operate beside you (§6), so the question is whether drones widen your reach inside one system or concentrate you on a single rock — a wider net, or a faster hole.

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Changelog

• 2026-11-09 — v0.1. First draft: four-verb spine, the skill being site choice rather than execution, three gathering tiers with rare extraction reusing the deep-space sweep.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.2. Extraction-as-sweep rejected. Replaced with Jonathan's mutual-detection model: an instant in-system ping that reveals every deposit your gear can detect and broadcasts your position to the system; mining that is quiet, interruptible and cooldown-free; and hunting that requires a scan which exposes the hunter and warns the prey simultaneously. Escape is free at the deposit and costly at the system edge. Equipment buys which rocks you can see, not how fast you pull them.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.3. Deposit locations are shareable and sellable, so a player can arrive already knowing and never ping — the silent approach. Detection quality now depends on training as well as equipment (SKILLS.md).
• 2026-11-09 — v0.4. No passive extraction. Nothing accrues while you are away, no structure works a site you hold and no drone runs standing orders: all raw material is mined by a player present at the rock, so supply is bounded by who is actually flying instead of accumulating forever. Drones survive as ship-dispatched helpers that raise one pilot's session yield, still destroyable and stealable property. §5, §9 and §10 reworded to match — no last_collected, no catch-up on login — and the drone open question now asks about reach from the ship.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.5. §9 corrected: securing a system does not remove the rock and does not drive the miners off. Deposits deplete as they are worked and new rare richness never surfaces in secured space, so a secured system runs dry permanently and is never replenished (ECONOMY.md §2.2).