A shattered sky, three crystal mines, and two machine powers that want the crystals back. Fly, dig, fight, and carry them home.
The world is shared: it keeps going while you're in here.
New: the operation. Each day the planet pushes up violet crystals into three mines: the Deep (down the mine lift), the Shale Field, and the Deep Field (guarded by an outpost). Cut them with the hand drill (3) or drive the Mole into a cluster and hold W. Your pack holds 40, the Mole's bin 300, the gunship's hold 400. Land the gunship beside the Mole to take its crystals aboard, then land on the home pad under the Portal to send them home: that's what pays. On foot, E on the pad sends your pack's. Ordinary digging draws nobody, but the first crystal cut at a mine tells the machines: they send waves at that mine (the faster it's being emptied, the bigger), hunt anything carrying crystals through the air, and raid the Portal while any mine is being dug. A mine nobody has cut at for a minute and a half goes quiet. Die or lose a ship and its crystals spill: pick them up within a minute or the machines take them. At nightfall what's still in the ground stays there, and anything still being carried is lost. The panel top left keeps the day's count.
New: the Workshop. The long shed east of the home pad is where the island's ore becomes kits for the mines. E at its bench, then 1 a wall kit, 2 an AA gun kit, 3 a missile battery kit: the ore comes out of the island stock there and then, and the kit is made on the bench in its own time (12, 40 and 60 s), one after another; X takes the last order back, ore and all. Made kits wait on the rack along the north wall until the gunship sits on the home pad; then they go aboard (she carries 8). Land her at a mine and E at her ramp unloads them into a field crate (the one with the amber lamp); B at that mine builds with them, one kit a wall or a gun, even down in the Deep's cavern. The machines go for your guns now as much as for you, and a field crate can be blown up with its kits in it.
New: the lifter, and nothing of yours on the ground. Your machines live on the Station, on the lifter's dock off the east rim: the Mole under the lifter (a big flying plate on four fans), the landship on its bay beside it. The lowlands are only the mines now. To go down: walk up to the lifter and press E, or press L anywhere (on foot, in the Mole, in the landship), then 1 the Deep (it sets the Mole beside the mine lift, facing it: drive on, SPACE takes her down), 2 the Shale Field, 3 the Deep Field, 4 back to the Station. It takes the machine you're sitting in; on foot, Q switches between the Mole and the landship. The Mole rides in its clamps, the landship (too big for that) hangs under it on cables. It flies to the machine wherever it is in the open, carries it there, sets it down facing the crystals, drops the kits on its deck (it loads the Workshop's rack while docked, 12 at most) in a field crate, and flies home. Ride in the cab or on its deck (it waits till you step off). Where the machines' guns cover a mine, it sets down just out of their reach on your side and you drive in. Sent home with the Mole, her bin comes out at the Station: crystals through the Portal, ore into the island's stock. It's hunted when it carries crystals, loses a fan at a time and slows, comes down where it is with too few, and falls with its load when it's shot to pieces; a new one comes to the dock, and E beside it there repairs it. A lost landship is re-ordered at the dock console.
Knock out guns · shoot the glowing core under an island to drop it · hold off the Rust raids on your island.
Your carrier. A 52 m flying warship moored bow-first at the pier behind the storehouse: a flight deck (your gunship can land on it and ride along), a one-storey bridge (E at the helm), and four big ducted lift fans powered by the aether crystal in her belly. Kill the crystal and every fan dies; kill fans and she tips toward the dead corner and sinks. At the helm: W/S the engine telegraph, A/D the rudder (she turns even stopped, faster with way on), Z/X crab her sideways, SPACE/SHIFT her height; she holds course and height when you leave.
New: go below. Stairs lead down from the bridge, from amidships and forward to her gallery deck: a corridor bow to stern with the crew's quarters, the mess, stores, the armory, the rocket magazine and the engine room, where the crystal's power comes up through two glowing conduits. The deck above cuts away round you while you're down there. Her crew live and work aboard: engineers, deckhands, and spare gunners who run up the stairs (or down a trunk) to any gun that loses its man. Six crewed weapons: two big twin guns on deck, two ball turrets underneath (reached down a ladder from the gallery deck), and two rocket launchers whose missiles chase aircraft. The gunners pick their own targets, or fire on your mark (LMB at the helm; mark an aircraft and the launchers go for it too). E at a gun takes it (its gunner goes below); in a launcher, hold the crosshair on an aircraft to lock it, and with no lock the missile rides your crosshair. Her flak guns are automatic. Q flares, T to moor (bring her bow up to the pier), E beside her there for repairs; moored, new hands come aboard to replace her dead. The dock console builds another if she's lost. A rope ladder over the side gets you on and off anywhere.
Units: the machines garrison their islands with robots (about fifty at each capital): red Rust units, steel-blue Cobalt ones. Every heavy gun and missile site has a gun unit in its seat (knock it out and the nearest unit runs to take over), and their aircraft are flown by flight units that go down with them; nobody on their side bails out. Your base has its own guard of seventeen, people like you. The machines shoot only while they're at war with you. Friendly fire is on: rounds and blasts hurt whoever they hit, your own men included. Red markers show who's shooting at you.
What's bolted on comes off: shoot away what holds a gun's barrels, a launcher's pod, a lift fan, the mast, the rope ladder, the fighter's rockets and legs, an enemy's turret or the gunship's ramp, and it falls as wreckage (anything that lands on the carrier's decks lies there and rides along with her). A knocked-out gun's gunner gets out, or lies where he fell. Set the carrier down and her ball turrets are crushed flat, gunners and all. Blow the deck out from under her crew and they drop through her. The ground crew fit new parts.
New: vault raids. The other half of every day's crystals is locked in the machines' vaults: a squat armoured strongroom in front of the keep in each capital (the Rust Citadel far to the north-east, the Cobalt Bastion far to the north-west), 300 in each, sealed. The top panel shows both. Blow the door (it faces the keep) or hole its armour and it's broken open: E inside fills your pack, or land the gunship beside it and it loads the hold. Taking from a vault draws aircraft from both of them, soon and often, on top of the capital's own guns and garrison, and whatever you carry out is hunted all the way home. Spilled crystals the machines collect go back into their nearest vault, so you can raid them back. Whatever is still in the vaults at nightfall is burned, and at dawn the vaults are mended and full again. Fighting the machines counts as work (every kill is a minute's worth).
New: the machines hunt the crystals. Whatever carries crystals is what they go for, first and from far off. The first cut at a mine brings a ground wave within about 10 s; lift crystals in the gunship and aircraft come up out of the nearest burrow or machine island after it within seconds, again every 22 s; and while any crystals are out, a ring of their aircraft circles the Station, so the last kilometre home is the hardest. Their island guns shoot you first when you're on foot in reach, and a shell bursting beside you hurts. Crystals stow themselves: walk up to the Mole and your pack empties into her bin, board the gunship and it goes into the hold, step onto the lifter and it goes on its deck. Stranded on foot? L then 5 (COME FOR ME): the lifter sets down beside you anywhere in the open, E beside it climbs its leg, and it flies you home.
New: one shared world. The day, the mines and their crystals are the same for everyone connected to the game server: when anyone cuts a cluster it shrinks for all, and dawn and nightfall come at the same moment for everybody. The server counts what you cut, carry and deliver (points for now), and a delivery through the Portal is split between everyone who worked in the half hour before it, by minutes worked. Sign in with Phantom to have your points kept. The daily board (a link under the server line) shows every day's split: delivered, burned, left.
New: the machines hold the ground. Five of their bases stand on the lowlands, well off the mines: the Rust in the east (Pumpworks, Depot, Gate), the Cobalt in the west (Yard, Relay). Each is a walled compound with a blockhouse, a watchtower, the hatch house their ground bots come out of, guns on towers over the wall (MG nests among them: long bursts that cut down anyone on foot) and a dozen units. Patrols of ground machines drive between the bases, past the mines. At peace they leave you be; once crystals are out, everything on the ground is after them, and walking up to a base in the open is how you die. M shows them all.
The machines. Beyond your island, two AIs hold the planet's islands: the Rust (red aircraft) in the north-east and the Cobalt (blue) in the north-west. They're allies, and their one rule is that nothing leaves the planet. While crystals are out of the ground (a mine being dug, crystals carried or spilled), both of them are at war with you, and they stay at war until the crystals are delivered or taken back. Otherwise they leave you be: fly past their islands, land at their mines. Fire on anything of theirs, blow holes in their islands, dig into them or loot their stores, and both are at war with you for 4 minutes; the one you hit sends raids at your island. The panel shows where you stand (THE MACHINES: QUIET or AT WAR). Each holds a big fortified capital (a keep, a hangar, barracks, fuel, and a stores yard full of ore), a long airfield island, two outposts, a ridge fort and a lone gun rock; their planes sit parked on the aprons. M shows the whole world and every aircraft in it.
Getting ore home: in the Mole's bin, on the lifter; in the gunship's hold (land within 18 m of the Mole and her bin comes aboard, then land on the home pad); your pack banks itself on the home pad. B builds on your island from its stock, and at a mine from kits.
The fighter waits at the west end of the runway: walk up to its left side and press E. W opens the throttle; it flies where the mouse points (it banks and pulls to get there), so keep the centre of the screen where you want to go. Past 130 km/h on the runway, move the mouse up to lift off. LMB cannons, RMB rockets, Q flares, A/D roll, J eject. Too slow and it stalls. It has wheels: the gear folds up by itself once you're flying fast and comes down again whenever you slow below 180 km/h. To land, line up with the runway (the green RUNWAY marker), slow down, keep the wings level and sink gently onto it (the panel ticks off gear, speed, sink rate and wings), then hold S to brake. Planes that touch in the air both go down, so don't ram anything. The machines' aircraft are flown by robot flight units; they go down with them. Back on the runway, E beside it repairs it (iron) and reloads rockets (brimstone); if you lose it, the hangar builds another.
Your island is a base. A 100 m runway along the south side with the fighter's hangar at its west end, the gunship's pad in the middle, the control tower, and the storehouse north of the pad, where everything you fly home piles up by kind.
Four resources. Iron in the lowland fields and in salvage from what you shoot down (walls, hulls), copper in the upper deep (guns), aether further down (engines, machines), brimstone by the lava at the bottom (bombs, missiles). Every build and repair shows its recipe; the pack, the Mole's bin (1600 now) and the gunship's hold (800) carry any mix.
The mine: at the mine head a lift shaft drops into the deep: dark caverns, ore veins, a lava canyon at the bottom. Drive the Mole (the drill tank) onto the lift (SPACE rides it), then drive it into rock: it bores its way through and follows its drill. Steer the drill with A/D and R/F (up/down) and the tunnel curves after it; X levels out. It can't back round bends: to turn round, bore a loop. The Mole is for getting through rock and carrying the load; its drill grinds most of the ore to dust. Gather with the hand drill (3): it fills the pack on your back, and E beside the Mole's bin empties it. F on foot throws a flare, M opens the map. Mind the gas pockets, the cracked ceilings, and the burrowers your noise wakes up.