In 2086, a young pilot is driven by the desperate need to help their struggling community on Mars from the brink of destitution. As that pilot, you sign up to work for an astro-mining corporation and embark on high-stakes mining missions, earning commission to fund the survival of your family and friends in a merciless profit-driven world. As your career continues, you'll delve deeper into the corporate underbelly and uncover the harsh realities and ruthless capitalist secrets of the company you work for and their competitors.
Fly free to explore over 20 missions
Find, mine, break down, and haul precious resources from asteroids into your cargo
Converse with your bosses, colleagues, and rival factions to discover more about the world
Spend your commission wisely: will you use your pay to help your community, yourself, or something more?
Actions have consequences: what you do, or fail to do, in a mission will dictate future missions and the direction of the story
Progress however you like and watch the game unfold whatever the results of you missions: get rich, get destructive, or just get fired: the game will go on.
You'll fly out to missions given by your coropoate overlords in your surveyor ship. Missions take place in local asteroid fields where you will pilot mining drones to navigate through the rocks, scan materials, and gather resources, using tools such as kinetic impactors to break down larger asteroids, and grappling magnets to haul them into cargo containers. While many missions are about pure profit, some missions will see you spying on rival corporations, clearing debris, rescuing stranded pilots, or testing out new controversial technologies.
As you explore each field, you'll earn bonus pay and commission for the resources you've collected, and slowly begin to uncover what's really going on out in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt. If you damage equipment or fail your missions, you might be fined and have less money to send back to your community on Mars, or be sent on lower-risk missions in the future.
Your actions and the decisions you make along the way will change the course of the story, the missions you take, and the relationships with the people around you. Eveyone has their own agenda, and everyone wants to find a way to use you for their own ends.
Hot on the heals of the Windows release yesterday, Aracore Astromining Ventures is now available on MacOS and Linux!
Any issues, please report in the Steam community or Discord (via the in-game links)
Aracore Astromining Ventures is live today. Strap-in as a rookie pilot and dive into the corporate-controlled mining zones of the outer asteroid belt. Fly dangerous jobs, uncover buried secrets, and decide who, if anyone, you stay loyal to.
Features
20+ story stages to explore across the belt
[/*]Fly a variety of ships, and choose the right one for the job
[/*]Mining tech, ranging from grappling hooks to gravity-mines
[/*]A world rich in story, with many memorable characters to meet, help, ignore, or betray
[/*]Branching narrative with meaningful choices and muliple endings
[/*]18 challenge and training missions to push your piloting skills
[/*]A free-fly mode that let's you relax and enjoy the ride
[/*]
Changed the default 'grab' component on the drone ship:
Drones how have 'nuclear magnets' at their front
[/*]
Hold the grab key white touching an object to attach it to the drone
Release the key to release the magnet
As always, the mass and velocity of objects attached to you will affect your movement
The grappling tail grabber is still installed, enabled in ship systems
[/*]
Only one 'grab' component can be activated at one time
[/*]
Replaced 'slow movement' input with 'stop'
this will attempt to stop a ship in place, without rotating it
[/*]pressing any movment input while stopping will cancel the stop
[/*]attempting to stop while grappling/holding objects may not be reliable!
[/*]ships with damaged engines will not be able to perform this action
[/*]
Added scan-time indicator for scanner
'detailed' scans of objects need around 2 seconds of scan contact time
[/*]contact time indicator is shown underneath scanner
[/*]audio tone indicated detailed scan completion
[/*]
Reworked music and sound implementation to fix issues from some users
Music looping is now imperfect: tracks have a short pause before the loop, fix incoming
[/*]
Rebalanced collision damage
collisions at slow relative speeds will not cause any damage
[/*]overall, this makes drones more durable, but doesn't affect damage to asteroids
[/*]
Fixed volume control sliders
now they work properly!
[/*]
Added parallax backgrounds to make stages prettier
lovely!
[/*]
Additional mission added!
After analysing ongoing pilot feedback, Haaris has decided to take new pilots under his wing. After his scans revealed a potential asteroid strike on Ara base, Haaris now offers to take new pilots on a mining mission with the hopes of avoiding chaos!
Added a new mining mission!
[list]After the tutorial stage, players may now opt to go on a new mission with Haaris
[/*]This mission allows players to skip the asteroid strike and clean-up missions
[/*]Players may choose the (more clearly labelled) more difficult mission if they're sadists
[/*]
Added an 'engine power' key: hold for finer movement control
[/*]Added an in-game link to the DIscord channel: join if you want to get involved in the game!
[/*]Updated dialogue
[/*]Join the Discord!
If you want to be involved in development, get access to the beta-version of the full game (now around 80% complete), and give your own suggestions, join the El Crabo Grande Game Discord
Next Update
Some players are having issues with sound. If you have no sound or no music (which is a terrible shame, as the music is awesome), please post in the discussion board or Discord and I'll find a fix, which may involve ripping out the current sound engine and replacing it.
Any feedback on the changes is always welcome!
Updated controls and interface
After listening to pilot feedback, Aracore Chief Operations Officer and engineering mastermind Tully has completed drone upgrades! Details below:
Added lateral thrusters to drones (to move sideways)
[/*]Increased power of reverse thrusters
[/*]Added targeting overlay (enabled/disabled in ship systems menu)
[/*]Added ammo count interface
[/*]
Slightly bigger is the control scheme update:
Added keyboard-and-mouse controls, using a visible cursor that the ship rotates towards
[/*]Added two different gamepad mappings (dual-stick and dpad)
[/*]
Any feedback on the changes is always welcome! Do we need a 'reduced engine power' mode where speed and rotation is slower?
Future difficulty adjustments
The second biggest issue for many in the demo was the difficulty of the asteroid-strike intro stage (now appropriately renamed "Impossible Odds". I'm planning on adding an alternate stage with some peaceful mining (the asteroid strike will still happen in the story, you'll just not have to deal with it!) and making it clear that there's an "action" route and a "peaceful" through the game that the player can choose.
As it is, for most of the rest of the game, the player will be choosing (sometimes indirectly, sometimes directly) to opt for mining missions, where time is not an issue, and chaos is minimal, or play the more action-oriented corporate espionage missions, so it makes sense to start the game as it goes on!
Special Thanks
A huge thank you to the various players who've posted suggestions and issues that allowed some bug fixes and improvements!
I'm tired now, so I'm going to bed.
Hi all!
Tonight I'll be playing through the demo and challenge stages, giving details on gameplay, sharing a few secrets, providing some information on the world and backstory
Updated the demo to include some features of the full game:
New game mode: 'Challenge mode' with 18 micro-missions to test your mining skills
[/*]New Game mode: 'Free Mode' with two large stages to explore
[/*]Both new game modes contain new ships and technologies for the player to experiment with
[/*]Input will default to gamepad or keyboard depending on what you press on the main menu
[/*]Direct link to steam community to feedback added to menu menu and pause menu
[/*]
New achievements have been added for completing all challenges!
Updated the demo:
- Added a short tutorial stage for players to familiarise themselves with the drone controls before chaos kicks in
- Allowed player to skip tutorial, or just fail it and move on anyway
- Altered Stage 3 (Ice Breaker) end condition to include docking with surveyor ship
- Added new dialogue for several rare situations when the player does strange combitations of things
Fixed bugs relating to starting Stage 4 (Noble Pursuits) with only one drone
Fixed collision issues with grapple on some objects
The AraCore Astromining Ventures Demo is now available on Steam!
The demo includes the first four stages of the game, where you'll be introduced to AraCore and its employees, complete (or mess up) several missions on each stage, and earn your first paycheck. Plenty of secrets await as your adventure begins, immersing you in the dystopian world of the corporate-driven astromining future.
If you like it, please let me know!
After quite a lot of work, the AraCore Astromining Ventures Demo is nearly ready for public release on Steam! If you'd like to participate in the beta test and gain early access to the demo, reach out via the community hub on Steam, join us on Discord, or leave a comment on our YouTube channel.
The demo includes the first four stages of the game, where you'll be introduced to AraCore and its employees, complete (or mess up) several missions on each stage, and earn your first paycheck. Plenty of secrets await as your adventure begins, immersing you in the dystopian world of the corporate-driven astromining future.
Minimum Setup
- OS: Probably anything
- Processor: 2 GHzMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL 3.3-compatible GPU (anything post 2015)
- Storage: 1 GB available space
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