Attention unidentified spacecraft, this is the USS Asteroid Paper Railgun. Please maintain your current heading and velocity. I am about to rotate 34 degrees and jettison a new early access space strategy game from my cargo hold. If my calculations are correct, the package should arrive in your airlock in precisely 14.7 seconds. If my calculations are incorrect – well, I'm not sure if Starminer simulates damage from loose storage modules, but it's probably better avoided.
Commencing transfer! Contact in 10 seconds! 5 seconds! She's in the pipe - transfer successful! Now, please watch this lengthy video explainer. It is a symphonic display of the many ways in which bundles of ore can travel from one vessel's hold to another. All it's missing is the Strauss.
The work of Slovenian developers and former Paradox Arc collaborators CoolAndGoodGames, Starminer is a ponderously beautiful, physics-driven experience in which you clip together 150,000 ton drilling platforms in order to laser the bejazus out of the final frontier. While I find the modular ship design quite familiar, it's a visual feast. You've got six degrees of freedom (which means you also have the freedom to collide with rogue boulders) and look, you can see the reflections of nearby ship components in your solar panels. Gorsh.
A lot of love has gone into the logistics element, with players able to jettison their haul for traders to collect - perhaps because the recipient is surrounded by grumpy rocks, and you don't want to scratch your lovely reflective solar panels. It's not just a resource gathering and trading sim, however: the more asteroids you guzzle, and the mightier your mercenary fleet becomes, the more your heat signature will grow. When it reaches a certain threshold, you'll be pounced upon by unspecified aliens.
Ugh, aliens! Always conspiring to steal the fruits of honest terran graft. Why, those arseholes wouldn't know a perfectly optimised station-to-station resourcing loop if the associated crates of iron ore clattered off their hulls. On which note, I really do hope this game lets you destroy ships by petulantly flinging your cargo at them. I want to take out the alien mothership with a surgically aimed barrel of ball bearings.
The launch early access version of Starminer will have a tutorial, campaign mode, survival challenges, and a sandbox mode. The full version, out in roughly a year, "is intended to have more units, construction options, a dynamic campaign, and improved mechanics from player feedback.”
Read more on Steam. I think this could be a solid companion piece for the comparably nerdy Nebulous: Fleet Command (which is due to get a campaign mode soon, incidentally), but only time will tell if it can match rival rockduster ΔV: Rings Of Saturn, of which Sin declares that "physics and realism offer flavour rather than undermine the raw joy of flight and space hoovering".