The Exploration Continues: The Search for Platinum, Unexpected Damage

In the early game, a lot of time ends up being spent waiting for different ores to refine down into ingots for use in construction. During this time, I've been trying to upgrade my Yellow Rescue Ship with some of the ideas mentioned in the previous post.

My ship's donk just keeps getting bigger...

I had previously removed the collector from the top of the ship for use with the spherical gravity-fed ore scoop design underneath the ship. This gave me more room to move the ship's only gyroscope onto the top, which in turn allowed me to peel back some of the armor covering the slots for upgrade modules that run down the underside of the refinery. Given the amount of ore I have to chew through, and that the world has an almost limitless amount of asteroids to mine, I decided to go with a pair of productivity modules, and one power efficiency module. The latter makes it take slightly less energy to power the refinery, while the former allows it to work through my collected ore faster than normal. This is my first time using upgrade modules, so I'm not sure if any of it will make much of a difference in the long run.

There were still further upgrades to make to the ship, though. I tore away a good deal of the armor at the front of the ship, replacing them with glass panels so I could see things better while sitting in the pilot's seat. The only door - which I had temporarily cannibalized for its displays and motors - was rebuilt. And, all of the other dents and half-finished pieces of armor were smoothed out, so the ship looked less like I had recently bought it from a scrap yard. But there was one thing I had built in the past that I knew I wanted to again.

I call it a safety beacon. Large ship beacons normally have a maximum range of 50km. While active, the title of the beacon is shown as a point on your heads-up display, so you know where it is at all times. While this can be very helpful, it can eventually come to severely clutter your screen. To combat this, I tend to place a sensor somewhere inside the ship that detects players. Whenever I'm within its 50m radius, it turns the beacon off, both to save energy and keep the beacon off of my HUD. The only problem is that sensors require detector components, which themselves require platinum ingots to create.

I took this screenshot after having started some repairs.

The first asteroid I had visited had plenty of iron and silicon, and the smaller rocks nearby had a handful of the other types of ore, except for platinum. After traveling to another asteroid, I found it much the same, save for the inclusion of magnesium. The third I traveled to seemed composed only of stone and iron.. but it looked strange. Randomly, on its outer surface, were patches that seemed to be missing their textures. When I went out to investigate, I found something even more strange - one of the front thrusters of my ship was missing, and the armor and glass around it were twisted and broken.

I'm not sure what caused it. It's possible that using my inertial dampeners to bring my ship to a stop during my travels had caused damage due to pushing the reactor past its maximum output, but I don't think I've ever seen that happen before. For now, my next task seems pretty evident - try to fix my ship so I can continue my hunt for platinum.