Astronomics Review – I’m Addicted to Space Mining Now

Astronomics is a game that I should, by all rights, not enjoy whatsoever. It’s a mining and crafting game set in space, which sounds a lot like other games in this genre if you were only paying attention to the basic premise. But I ended up not just enjoying but loving my playthrough of the game. It has an interesting premise, fun moment-to-moment gameplay, and developing interesting mining strategies is nothing short of addicting. Astronomics is one of those games that will keep you up until the early hours of the morning, telling yourself “just one more quick mining trip” – but who are you kidding? You’re falling asleep at the keyboard tonight. 

But let’s lay out the basics of Astronomics first, before we get things too confused. The premise of the game is that you’re an astronaut trying to return home. The home in question happens to be Earth, because in the far-flung future, real-estate on earth is expensive and only the richest can afford to live there – or so they say. Since you will need a big bank account to fund not only your journey back to the mother planet but also your residence permit, you need to mine asteroids to save up money. 

At the start of the game, you have a basic freighter, which serves as your home, and a cargo ship that shuttles you down to the asteroid you need to mine. Simply visit the map screen and set your course for whatever asteroid that takes your fancy. The navigation menu tells you how much fuel you have, what resources are on certain types of asteroids, and all of that great stuff you need to plan your expeditions. Once you’ve hyper jumped your freighter, you’ll play a short mini game where you dodge other asteroids and space junk as you fly your cargo ship down to the surface. Once there, you can’t leave your ship, so instead you control a command bot remotely. This human-like android has a gravity gun to lift objects like all the clumps of minerals you need to bring back to the ship. Simply fill your ship with all of the various resources you find on an asteroid, head back to your freighter, and jump back to a nearby space station run by the corporations who will pay you for all of your hard work. 

Once back at the space station, you can sell the resources you just mined, refuel your ship, upgrade your ship, freighter, bots, and unlock more helpful mining equipment and abilities. You can also grab contracts, which are basically side quests that will reward you with money if you complete them. These are generally basic in nature and ask you to do things like buy 3 worker bots or visit a certain type of planet. The basic gameplay loop, then, is mine a planet, return to a station, sell your resources, upgrade your ship – rinse and repeat. But to leave it at that would be to do Astronomics a huge disservice, so we need to go a bit deeper.

See, the randomly generated asteroids you visit all have different resources and layouts. You’ll find chasms and mountains that are hard to traverse, or maybe just a bunch of rocks between your ship and the clumps of resource nodes on the planet. While your command bot does have a nifty jump pack that will help you get over these obstacles, your worker bots won’t be able to follow. Ah, yes, the worker bots. Purchasable at space stations, they look like robot vacuums and will hoover up all of the resources you pull out of the ground and take them back to the ship for you. You can obtain other similar automated robots like mining lasers to help you out too, and this is where Astronomics gets satisfying. 

While at the start of the game you’ll be painstakingly hauling lumps of nickel back to your ship time after time, once you have enough to buy the workers and mining lasers, you’ll find your efficiency improves. Slap down a mining laser, and it’ll start blasting through rocks to open up paths for your worker bots to reach new places. Now imagine placing down 2 mining lasers and quickly reshaping the asteroid while the worker bots collect everything as fast as possible. But what about mountains? That’s where the crane comes in. Once you’ve unlocked the crane, you can choose pick up and drop off locations. That means the worker bots will drive up to the crane, get picked up, then dropped off somewhere else, allowing them to clear gaps or reach places they wouldn’t be able to. Then they can pick up all of the minerals you’ve mined, get moved by the crane, then head back to the ship, saving you all of the hassle you started out with at the beginning of the game. The crane, worker bots, and mining lasers are all upgradable and are only a small fraction of the number of other equipment available, but I’ll leave it there for fear of spoilers. 

Astronomics takes a lot of cues from games like Factorio and Satisfactory, especially when it comes to automation. Except where those other games are more of a hardcore experience that turns a lot of players off, Astronomics is very approachable to those looking for fun, strategic space mining but don’t want all of the mathematical headaches that come with something more serious. For example, since you’re visiting asteroids, they’re only available for a limited time before they leave your corporately designated area of work in the universe. This adds both tension, because you really need to get the most resources mined in time, but it also makes the game playable in short 15 to 45 minute chunks. This is a big departure from a lot of other games in the genre, which make you feel like you really need to clear your evening schedule just to work out how to build a conveyor belt. I’m joking, don’t come after me, I know what you factorio players are like. 

One thing we need to talk about is the fact that Astronomics is in Early Access, which would normally mean I’d be more cautious about scoring a game like this, but Astronomics is actually a fully complete game. That’s right, Astronomics is fully playable from start to finish, which means players can complete the campaign and make their way home to earth for the very first time. Why IS the game in early access then, I hear you ask? According to the developers on the Steam store page, they’ve released Astronomics in early access so that they can adjust and balance certain features, as well as add more mining tools, contracts, and more based on community feedback. 

Astronomics is clearly an early access game done right, and the game’s developers, Numizmatic, should be praised for releasing a fully complete game that doesn’t have placeholders everywhere, but it’s also the area where the only niggle I have with the game comes in. Because the game is randomly generated, the resources you will get from a planet can vary, and the start of the game in particular is slow. It feels like the space stations do indeed want too much money for certain basic upgrades, and it can feel like a bit of a grind. But, in saying that, this is clearly why Numizmatic have released the game into early access.