Raw Materials

RAW MATERIALS

A planet has a finite supply of raw materials available to it, as no resource lasts forever. Your scientists can estimate this figure very accurately, and it is shown on each colony you have simply as "Resources". For ease of handling these resources are split into two main types; Heavy Raw Materials and Light Raw Materials. The former of these vague categories includes all metals and silicon-based materials that may be useful for construction of advanced units, while the latter covers any and all gases, oils and other more biological based resources. Once a world has used up all the stocks of these items, it can be stripped of them no more.

There are other places to find raw materials though; mining them out of asteroid belts and using strip-mining methods from planets that may not be suitable for colonisation, but are rich in raw materials.

To mine an asteroid is simplicity itself. You need to simply send empty freighters to an asteroid belt (normally found at orbit 0) and issue the "Mine Asteroid" order on your Movement Sheet, as can be seen later in the rulebook. Any raw materials that are recovered from Asteroid mining are just that - unprocessed, raw materials. To turn this mass of ore into useable HRM it must be passed through your HRM Mines in the same way as planet-found HRM ore is. Once this unprocessed ore is dumped back onto a planet's surface it is treated no differently from the other resources that are found there.

Once you have the technological level to build them, strip-mines may be set up on planets you have NOT colonised. Massive machines, they traverse the planet surface, chewing everything up before them, and extract the useful raw materials while in turn devastating the planet. They might not be termed "eco-friendly" but they will produce fully processed materials on a constant basis, until the world they are based upon is mined out.

To construct a strip-mine you simply drop off enough Construction points to build on the chosen world (it is assumed that this con takes the form of self-building, automated components), and sit back. They are completely automatic in use, requiring no crew, and will leave stockpiles of ready-processed materials upon the world for your later collection. You may NOT build these on occupied planets (for obvious reasons?) but they are available for use on any planet type except molten, gas giants or ringed gas giants.

All processed HRM and LRM - be it processed by either conventional mines or strip-mines - is shown just beneath the total available resources for the planet on your results sheets.