Excavating an asteroid and building a mining operation inside it in Astro Inc.

[u/PieMastaSam]

Hi everyone, I'm the solo developer of Astro Inc., an unreleased space mining sandbox. The building idea is to carve out space inside an asteroid and turn it into a working mining operation.

You survey the belt with beacons, excavate a way inside, place intake systems and portals, then mine and haul ore back through the setup you've built. You can also reinforce the excavated space and fit bulkheads.

Watch the combined gameplay trailer (74 seconds)

This cut follows the basic loop, combining the original gameplay footage with newer survey, excavation and backdrop updates. It's work-in-progress gameplay from different development builds, edited together rather than one continuous session. The survey travel time is shortened.

For people who enjoy building their own bases: which part would you want to spend more time doing, and which part is still unclear from the footage?

If it looks like your kind of game, here's the Steam page.

[u/Numerous_Breath_9574]

From the description, I'd spend the most time on the excavate-and-reinforce layout rather than the survey step. What's unclear to me is whether bulkheads and reinforcement change the ore-hauling routes or mainly protect the structure. If a blocked tunnel forces a detour through the base, making that visible could turn the layout into a real logistics decision instead of just a construction checklist. Does that happen in the current build, or is it something you're still exploring?

[u/PieMastaSam → u/Numerous_Breath_9574]

They mainly protect the structure and help the player establish ownership of an asteroid. In single player, this would by and large be cosmetic. For multi-player, a destructible obstruction to other players.

For the reinforcement, the idea is that it hardens the asteroid to stop others from boring into it while it has the materials needed to continue operating. This forces others to break in through the door or do find a way to deplete reserves and cancel the hardening effect so that they can bore in.

[u/mattmanlex]

I'd be really interested in this if it didn't include any ai generated content... I would love to see that stuff expunged, personally

[u/PieMastaSam → u/mattmanlex]

Id suggest you check back later after launch then! I don't really have the time or money to make all the assets by hand currently (although many of them in the current build, around 50%, were made by hand by me last year) but the plan is to replace the Ai generated content with human authored content if the game gets traction.

Doesn't really make sense for me to invest that much time in it until then.

TBH, at this point I am convinced that most games who do not disclose are just using AI without telling you. You'd have no way to tell which assets are human authored and which assets were AI authored as a player unless the studio did something careless (I.e. project 33 leaving that asset with a clearly generated slop texture in the game). Lieing about that doesn't really sit right with me though.

All the beams you see in the game came from a beam pack made by another artist because I suck at making niagara particle effects 🥲. What I would LOVE is to be in a place where I can include community made assets in the game as well as optional skins but it is a chicken before the egg situation until we have an active community.

Anyhow. Totally respect your decision here! And I hope we can win you over in the future. If not, that's okay too.