Back in "How Your Base Grows" I said Breach Shard, the refinery loop, and what the stuff is actually for deserved their own dispatch. This is that dispatch. Mining shipped with v0.0.10, it's had a couple of days of live hands on it, and it's the first system in the game you play with your hands instead of a build queue. Here's the whole thing, honestly.
What Breach Shard is
Your first two resources, Salvage and Ore, tick over on their own - build the right structures and they fill while you're offline. Breach Shard is the opposite. Nothing produces it passively. There's no rate, no generator, no meter creeping up while you sleep. The only way the number moves is by going out into the world and pulling it out of the ground, and each base banks it up to a cap.
That's deliberate. I wanted one resource at the top of the economy that you earn by showing up and doing something, not by waiting. It's rarer than Salvage and Ore, it's harder-won, and it's the gate on the best things you can build. We'll get to what those are at the end.
Where it lives
Breach Shard sits in the ground on specific tiles - the breach scars, where the world's been torn open. Mechanically those are two terrain biomes: rift and crystal. You'll see them on the map once you're looking. There are two ways to get the Shard out of them, and they're a difficulty ladder: prospect it by hand first, then build the machine that does it for you.
Tier one: the Prospector and the overheat rig
The way in is the Prospector, a mining unit you train and send out to a rift tile. When it arrives it deploys and stays - it doesn't do one trip and come home. Each cycle, every surviving Prospector on the tile digs up a little Shard into its own cargo. So far, so calm.
Here's the hook: the rig overheats. The first cycle is always safe - a fresh deployment never breaks on its first tick. From the second cycle on, the game rolls a seeded d20 each cycle. A high roll is clean; a low roll dumps heat into the rig; a natural 20 adds no heat at all and a natural 1 breaks a miner outright. As heat piles up, the chance that a Prospector overheats and is destroyed climbs - and a miner that breaks takes the Shard it was carrying with it.
So mining is push-your-luck. Every cycle you're carrying more banked-but-not-yet-safe Shard, and every cycle the rig is a little more likely to eat one of your miners. You watch the heat and the break chance climb on the live panel and you decide: Recall now - pull the survivors home and bank everything they're carrying - or push one more cycle for more. Bank, or lose it. If you'd rather pre-commit, you can set an auto-return after X cycles cap so the deployment pulls itself out at a risk level you chose in advance.
The only lever you've got in this version is tactical: deploy fewer miners and the heat builds slower, or rest the tile and come back. There's a cooldown on each tile after you've worked it (roughly four game-hours) to stop anyone parking on one spot forever.
Interim numbers, all tunable: a cycle is about a game-hour, a safe cycle is one Shard per miner, heat starts mattering past a floor and the break chance tops out around fifty-fifty at the hot end. Those will move.
Tier two: the Forward Mining Outpost
Hand-prospecting is the tutorial for the real system. Research Forward Operations (it opens up at HQ level 5) and you can go plant a base on a breach tile and let it mine for you.
You do it by training a Pioneer - a mobile-base unit, the mining cousin of the Steward that founds your colonies. Send the Pioneer out with a garrison and it stands up a Forward Mining Outpost on a rift or crystal tile. On that outpost you build a Static Miner - a structure that only exists on outposts - and it pulls Shard automatically, no mini-game, no babysitting.
The clever bit is the refinery, and it's the overheat rig turned inside out. Where a Prospector's heat is a risk, the refinery's "heat" is good: the longer it runs uninterrupted, the faster its raw Shard rate ramps - roughly fifteen percent a cycle, up to about four times the base rate once it's fully warmed up. Left alone, an outpost gets better and better at its job.
That raw Shard isn't yours yet, though. It piles up as a raw pool on the outpost. To turn it into real, banked Shard you run Extract, which shuts the refinery down for about a game-hour while it drains the raw pool into the secured pool and resets the ramp. Then your Haulers carry the secured Shard back to your home base, exactly like moving Salvage and Ore between bases. Mine, ramp, extract, haul - that's the loop.
The catch: outposts are exposed, and they don't last
An outpost is not a safe little Shard printer you set and forget. Two things will take it off you.
First, it's temporary by design. Every outpost carries a destabilise clock - it tears itself down automatically after seven game-days. You get a big head start and a productive week, then the tile lets go and you go plant another one somewhere fresh. The outpost list shows you how long each one has left.
Second, it's out in the open and it's raidable. An outpost sits on the map with a garrison, and a decisive attacker win against it doesn't just loot it - it destroys it, and carries off the Shard it had banked, up to their carrying capacity. Retreats and defender wins leave it standing. So the garrison you send with the Pioneer isn't decoration. Going wide for Shard means having something worth raiding sat where everyone can see it, and deciding how much you're willing to defend.
What it's all for
Breach Shard is the currency of the new top tier. At HQ level 10 you can build Aegis Command, the Concord's high-end production hub, and it fields the first units in the game that don't come from the Barracks: the Enforcer, a heavy assault walker built to plant itself and not move, and the Censor, a fast skirmisher for catching what the Enforcer can't. Both cost Shard to train. Everything above - prospect, outpost, refinery, haul, defend - exists so you can field those.
The honest bit
Mining is the newest system in the game and it's the one I'm least settled on, so here's where it stands.
The Prospector's Shard yield started life about a hundred times too high - the first playtests turned it into a firehose and I cut it hard in a patch. It's a tap now, and it might be too tight; that's the single number I'm watching closest. The refinery ramp, the four-times ceiling, the Extract downtime, how long an outpost should live, what a Pioneer costs, the elite units' own stats - all provisional, all knobs I'll keep turning as I watch people actually mine. If the outpost week feels too short or too safe, if pushing your luck never feels worth it, that's the feedback I need.
How to play it well
Prospect before you commit. Hand-mining costs you nothing but time and teaches you the rhythm. Get a feel for how fast heat climbs before you sink a Pioneer into an outpost.
Recall on a good roll, not a bad one. The temptation is to push after a clean cycle. That's exactly when your banked cargo is biggest and worth the least risk to lose - take the win.
Fewer miners, longer runs. More Prospectors mean more Shard per cycle but faster heat. If you want a deployment to survive, run it lean.
Set an auto-return if you're stepping away. The rig doesn't care that you closed the tab.
Treat an outpost like a raid target, because it is one. Send a real garrison, watch its destabilise clock, and Extract + haul often - Shard sat on the outpost is Shard someone can take.
Alpha caveat
This is the least-baked system in an alpha game, landed two days ago, on top of a world map that's barely a week old. Expect the numbers to move under you - that's the tuning landing, not a bug. Go work a rift tile, plant an outpost somewhere you'll have to defend, and tell me where it breaks.
- The Dev
Play: play.breachlands.com