Idle Planet Miner

Here is another little app from Tech Tree Games.  This one is Idle Planet Miner.  I have always liked the space mining and trading games, going way back to when the original Star Trader insert appeared in Ares magazine back in the 80s.  They are a natural match for computers to handle all the number crunching for us.  Anyway, this one has a neat mix of game mechanics while remaining very simple overall.

You start out with a ship, a planet, and a little shuttle that zooms back and forth, bringing back copper.  The tutorial was very smooth, introducing the bottom icons one by one to make it effortless to learn.  You unlock new planets with cash amounts, each a few K more than the one before it.  After the first few, you have to research new levels of Telescope to unlock 3 more planets each time.  As an idea of the costs, the 10th planet costs $75K to add.  Number 11, 12, 13 were $150K, $250K, $400K.

Each planet has a simple mining system with three stats: mining speed, ship speed and ship cargo size.  It's actually a neat little balance trying to optimize these.  If the mine goes too quickly or the ship if stoo slow, the ores pile up there and never get to the mothership.  If the ship is too fast or has too much cargo space, then you wasted upgrade funds and it won't be bringing back full loads.  The costs for each level of boost to each stat goes up by level and each planet is more expensive in every way than the one before it.

You have to smelt ores into bars and craft raw materials into other things, and there is a reasonably big tech tree to research.  None of this makes any real scientific or economic sense, it's just the usual exponential list of stuff found in idle games.  But it is a colorful range of real-world metals and an odd high-tier alloy called inverton.  With 1000 ores per bar, the whole crafting tree is in the stratosphere, but okay, they're just numbers to crunch.

You can hire managers to boost production on specific worlds, but they use "dark matter", the bonus gems of the game.  Within the usual 1-to-5-star rating system, they have enough tiers and options to be interesting.  There are three levels of recruiting: Ark Public school costs 50 DM, Ark Private School costs 300 DM, and Brilliant Academy costs 500 DM. The odds are: Public (75% of 1*, 20% of 2*, 5% of 3*), Private (75% for 3*, 25% for 4*) and Academy (75% for 4*, 25% for 5*).  The two I have managed to get are a 1* that gives a x1.25 boost to mining speed, and a 2* that gives x1.5.  Dark matter is pretty hard to get, and is the main thing they sell in the store.

The developer seems to have a $9.99 option on all their games to hide ads, which I did.  As for the street value of those dark matter blobs, the prices range from $4.99 for 100 DM up to 3000 DM for $99.99.  Other shop options include a daughtership, an eldership, and a few other packs.

Your set of planets is oddly called Your Galaxy, and after it reaches a value of $10M you can sell it and start over.  I'm not sure the mechanics of that, but a lot of these idle games have a similar mechanism where you retain some kind of bonus from resetting you game back to the start, and each time you do that it is way quicker to redo all your progress and over further ahead.

There is also a feature on the far bottom right icon to Add a Room to your spaceship, but it requires some weird icon thing that I have no idea how to find.  Anyway, Engineering gives a x1.25 mine rate and Forge gives smelt speed of x1.2 and they each cost 3 thingamajigs.  Update: you get those "credits" for selling your galaxy; mine is currently worth $30.4M which would get me 14 credits.

Various research projects add new features, like the Beacon that lets you spend blue tokens to add mine speed, ship speed, cargo boosts to each set of 4 planets from one place.  The first boost of costs 4, then 8 then 12 then 16, and the choice each time is =2% mine rate, +4% ship speed or +4% cargo.

Occasionally, an asteroid appears and after you build what's probably your first research project, Asteroid Miner, you can zap those for a few thousand ores.  Another research project (Colonization) puts colony icons above 3 planets, where you can dump tons of resources to get modest boosts.  I have a green colony icon right now on planet 3 asking for 6.03K silicon and 18 lead bars, which will again give bonuses to the 3 mining stats.  There are multiple levels of Colony for each planet, each time you get to choose between x1.3 mine rate, x1.6 ship speed or x1.6 cargo.  I don't know if the boosts change with higher levels, since I haven't gotten that far.

Talk about exponential insanity, the top player on the leader board had $5.04E+283.  Yes, scientific notation is an option.  But isn't that ore than all the particles in the actual universe??

Those are my initial reactions.  Feels like it is worth trying for a while.  I don't have time to really grind away at these essentially pointless activities, but I have started a spreadsheet of tech tree and costs of things, so that's always fun meta activity.

1/6 update: I got to Telescope 5 and unlocked planets 16,17,18, now I need $6M, $12M, $25M to start them.  I can mine up to gold, smelt up to Steel Bar, and craft up to Lasers.  It's still a reasonably fun balancing act, but the craft and smelt times are starting to drag out to 8 or 12 minutes per item.  Every few minutes "the Ark rewards your loyalty" with boosts of either 5 dark matter or an ever-growing cash amount, currently about $2M.  Beyond all that, there's not much to do other than watching ships bounce back and forth, tweaking numbers, or waiting for things to be produced.  Except maybe going to bed and hoping enough stuff happens overnight.







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