Star Citizen's Incredibly Deep Mining System Explained

The upcoming space simulator Star Citizen, has explained how its mining occupation will work in the game, and it sounds incredibly involved.

"Mining presents players with a variety of challenges requiring skill and intelligence, whereas mindless repetition of a task and idle drudgery are explicitly avoided," Tony Zurovec, Director of Star Citizen's Persistent Universe said. "There are no aspects of mining that allow a player to simply press a button and wait without concern for a result, or that require players to perform an action repeatedly without some element of thought and/or dexterity coming into play."

The most valuable materials in the game will often reside in dense asteroid fields, so pilots will have to avoid compressed pockets of gas, volatile materials, and seismic vibrations. Combat isn't inherent to mining endeavors, but if you're carrying valuable cargo, you could be an easy target for other players who want to steal your stuff.

You can work as a freelance miner, finding and selling materials as you please to best take advantage of the market, or on contract, agreeing to retrieve certain materials for a set fee.

The mining operations itself is also divided into multiple roles, which either other players or hired NPCs can fill. There's the self explanatory position of the pilot, the scan operator in charge of launching probes that find materials, a beam operator in charge of extracting the materials, and a cargo operator who crushes the materials and stores them. Ships that have their own refineries will also need a refinery operator.

You can read more about Star Citizen's mining occupation in much greater details on the game's website.

Star Citizen and Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts already raised close to $73 million in crowdfunding, making it the most-crowdfunded project of any kind in history. Roberts recently said that the game still has a lot of room left to grow.

For more on Star Citizen and Roberts himself, check out part one and part two of GameSpot's interview with the legendary designer.