"What are you playing?"
"Oh, just SOME Space Overlay Mining Empire."
SOME plays right on your desktop, over your other windows. A space station sits in one corner of your screen. Your mining ship flies out to the asteroids around it, cuts them apart block by block with its laser and hauls the ore home. Clicks on empty space go through to the windows underneath, so you keep working while it mines.
From the first click to a fleet that runs itself
At first every trip is yours: click an asteroid to send the ship out, click the full ship to call it home, then unload its cargo and sell the ore. Credits buy lasers, cargo and thrusters, and then the upgrades that take the clicks away: autopilot flies the trips, auto-target picks the next asteroid and auto-unload empties a docked ship. Buy more ships and they work the belts side by side, while you look over now and then to see what they have brought in.
A station built from blocks
The station, the ships and the asteroids are all made of blocks. Every part you buy shows on its ship, and every block you research for the station takes its place there. The tech tree opens over the desktop as a circuit board, rooted in the station's corner, with:
scanners that open the next belt of asteroids and zoom the field out
cranes and a second dock, so the fleet unloads faster
a Refinery that turns ore into material, and an Alloy furnace that makes alloy from crystal and material
a Shipyard, where you lay out each ship's parts on its hull and fit out haulers that fetch the ore your miners drop, so the miners keep cutting
Rearrange the station's blocks at any time, for free: a fitting works only beside its machine.
Past the last belt
Four belts of asteroids ring the station, each further out and richer in crystal than the one before. Open them all and build the jump gate. It joins your station to the galaxy, and a jump takes the station, the fleet and everything you have researched to another system, with rocks of its own and a twist of its own. The game goes on after the gate for as long as you like.
Made to sit beside your work
Pick the corner the station sits in, and the screen, when you have more than one.
Set the game's size from 75 to 200 %, and fade it down to 20 % to let the desktop show through.
It draws at most 30 frames a second, and stops drawing while nothing moves.
Once the fleet runs itself, it keeps mining while the game is closed, for up to eight hours.
Everyone needs SOME Space Overlay Mining Empire.
