Just a little update on how Minerbot 2 is going. I’ve been working on the asteroid generation system, trying to add a little variety. In an earlier post, I linked an image of the basic asteroid… basically just three hardness levels of rock in a circular asteroid shape. Now I’ve put veins of ore in that rock, so there’s actually a point!

There are four types of ore vein so far:

• Radial — A vein oriented along the radius of the asteroid.
• Stratum — Aligned along the circumference of the asteroid, as if it was a layer as the asteroid formed.
• Crystalline — I’ll probably be going back to fix this one up, but it’s supposed to look like the ores were in a crystal sort of formation.
• Deposits — Sort of fill in the gap between rock strength layers, as if when a certain layer of the asteroid was completely formed the ore in question settled into place on the outside.

Examples of all the vein types can be seen here if you look closely.

A few people I’ve shown this to were confused about what this image represents. This is a debug map of a 2d asteroid, which represents ores and rocks as different colors. Note that in-game, the asteroid will NOT look like this, rather, a tilemap is assembled using these colors as a sort of key.

Looking forward to starting gameplay!