Deepstrata

A mining pod, a fuel gauge, and a lot of rock

You drill for REGOLITH Deep Extraction. The pod flies on thrusters and chews through any rock you point it at. Fuel burns the whole time you are below the surface, so every descent ends with the same question: one more vein, or turn back now.

Sell what you bring up. Buy a longer drill, a bigger tank, a thicker hull. Go deeper.

The descent is the game

Every metre of strata is destructible and every metre costs you. Fuel burns the whole time you're below the surface line. Cargo weight fights your thrusters. Undermine a boulder and it drops on you, and the further it falls the more it hurts. Bite into a gas pocket and it goes up - along with every pocket touching it.

Plain dirt is not always plain dirt. Buried caches hide a hidden vein, a fuel gush, a relic - or a lava seep and a very short trip home.

Read the rock

Living Strata formations are seeded into the ordinary geology, each with a rule you can learn. Relieve fractured stress nodes, vent pressurised seams, quench thermal cores, brace brittle shelves. Work one cleanly and it pays a mastery bonus on top of the ore. Rush it and the formation turns on you.

Five contracts and an open one

• Certification - Luna Proving Grounds. Gentle rock, first descent.

• The Mars Contract - Outpost Karga. A classic run, and a lost beacon to recover.

• Ember Harvest - Io. Lava everywhere, thermal cores to extract.

• The Cold Archive - Callisto. Slow ice drilling, gas pockets, forward bases.

• Site Omega - The Rift. Bedrock maze, every hazard, and the STRATA-9 Guardian.

• Open Contract - Mars Deep. No quotas. Just the depth meter. Open from the start.

The story arrives over the radio while you work — dispatch, the other drillers, and an abandoned terraformer AI that has been alone for a very long time.

Wake it, or feed it

Each site's guardian sleeps in its own chamber until the final mission opens. Put a shot into it and fight - volleys, dashes, slam shockwaves, and collapsing ceilings. Or haul down the offering it wants and feed the sleeping machine instead.

Set your own pressure

Every contract deploys at Peaceful, Standard, Hard or Brutal. Harder means worse odds, more seismic storms and meaner caches - and more XP.

Peaceful is a genuine no-combat survey charter: nothing roams, guardians can never be woken, veins run richer and hazards run gentler. If you want the mining and none of the fighting, that mode is built for you.