Asteroid

Asteroids play a crucial role in Career as cover during combat, and one of the primary means to obtain Resources throughout play.

Asteroids are located in many areas throughout each Star System. They can be found:

• in the common Asteroid Belt surrounding all systems, noted by the white dashed circular line; via two types of Points of Interest (PoI) -- the Asteroid Field and Valuable Asteroids;
• within the Sun Zone, the damage perimeter surrounding every star;
• and, rarely, as small loose asteroids that spawn randomly in the system.

In addition to Small through XXL sizes of asteroids containing various amounts of resources, there also exist both regular rock-only asteroids and very large rock-only Megaroids. Beyond their value as resource deposits, asteroids can also be used tactically in combat, as a way of blocking incoming weapons fired at the player's ships, or separating a pack of enemies.

Resource Acquisition

Both the Asteroid Belt and Asteroid Fields contain numerous asteroids of Rock-Only, Copper, Hyperium, Iron, and Sulfur; and significantly fewer rare Carbon, Gold, Tritanium, and Uranium asteroids. The Valuable Asteroid PoI is always one of the four rare resources, most commonly of an XL size and sometimes of an XXL size. Additionally, the asteroids in the Sun Zone are also always of the rare resources. While some resources in a given asteroid will spawn in soft rock, and therefore are harvestable by Crew performing an E.V.A. maneuver, others in that asteroid could be buried in hard rock, requiring use of a Mining Laser to extract. In both cases, a well-supplied Resource Collector will pull the resources back to the ship's storage faster than Crew can haul them.

See also : Making Money With Hyper-coils

Technical Generation Details

During procedural system generation, under standard rules, the following numerical values are used for selecting what asteroid is spawned:

• The Asteroid Belt contains between 750 and 900 asteroids.
• Each Asteroid Field contains between 75 and 100 asteroids.
• The Sun Zone contains between 25 and 50 asteroids.
• An additional 125 to 150 asteroids are scattered throughout the system randomly.

The spawn for each asteroid is calculated from a ChanceWeight table. Each value is based on whether it's a common (ChanceWeight = 1) or rare (ChanceWeight = 1/16), multiplied by the size weights (with Small = 1 and halving with each size increase up to XXL = 1/16). This weight is then used with a random generation to determine which asteroid is spawned. For a given random asteroid, this means that a Small Iron asteroid has a weight of 1, while a Large Gold asteroid has a weight of 1/16 * 1/4, or 1/64.

Weights for Asteroid Belt and Fields

Resource	Small	Medium	Large	XL	XXL
Rock-Only	1	1/2	1/4	1/8	1/16
Copper	1	1/2	1/4	1/8	1/16
Hyperium	1	1/2	1/4	1/8	1/16
Iron	1	1/2	1/4	1/8	1/16
Sulfur	1	1/2	1/4	1/8	1/16
Carbon	1/16	1/32	1/64	-	-
Gold	1/16	1/32	1/64	-	-
Tritanium	1/16	1/32	1/64	-	-
Uranium	1/16	1/32	1/64	-	-

Weights for Rare Point of Interest

Resource	XL	XXL
Carbon	1	1/2
Gold	1	1/2
Tritanium	1	1/2
Uranium	1	1/2

Weights for Sun Zone

Resource	L	XL	XXL
Carbon	1	1/2	1/4
Gold	1	1/2	1/4
Tritanium	1	1/2	1/4
Uranium	1	1/2	1/4

This does not mean that a Large Gold asteroid has a 1/64th chance of spawning in an Asteroid Field, but rather the weight of choosing that particular type of asteroid is 1/64th, compared against all other possible asteroids in that table. These ChanceWeight values can then be re-calculated to show percentage chance for each individual type of asteroid, per each asteroid spawn:

Percentage Chance for Asteroid Belt and Fields

Resource	Small	Medium	Large	XL	XXL
Rock-Only	9.88%	4.94%	2.47%	1.23%	0.62%
Copper	9.88%	4.94%	2.47%	1.23%	0.62%
Hyperium	9.88%	4.94%	2.47%	1.23%	0.62%
Iron	9.88%	4.94%	2.47%	1.23%	0.62%
Sulfur	9.88%	4.94%	2.47%	1.23%	0.62%
Carbon	0.62%	0.31%	0.15%	-	-
Gold	0.62%	0.31%	0.15%	-	-
Tritanium	0.62%	0.31%	0.15%	-	-
Uranium	0.62%	0.31%	0.15%	-	-

Effectively, this means that approximately 9.88% of all asteroids in an Asteroid Field will be Small Rock-Only asteroids, 2.47% will be Large Hyperium, and so on. Given that there are 75 to 100 asteroids in an Asteroid Field, you can therefore expect about 7 to 10 each of Small (Rock, Copper, Hyperium, Iron, Sulfur), 3 to 5 each of Medium (Rock, Copper, Hyperium, Iron, Sulfur), and so on. Similar maths can be performed to calculate chances for the Asteroid Belt and other generation areas.

History

Cosmoteer Modern
0.26.0	Sun Zone asteroid generation now uses correct table