Astefactor
Mine asteroids, process resources, upgrade your equipment, repeat. Ah, and also defend your factory, because it seems like quite a few folks are interested in that strange device you just found. Who knows why? There's no way it's of some universal importance, right?..
Travel through the cosmos and collect resources
You are a proud owner of a mobile asteroid mining facility - better put it to work! Jump from sector to sector, find good resource-containing rocks, and crush them into useful ores using your equipment. More then 10 shiny base materials are waiting for you to gather and process them!
Automate production
Use a space inside your main ship to build processing facilities, oprimize production chains, and use the resulting components to upgrade your factory and equipment. Balance between scale and complexity to maximize your efficiency. Handcrafting is used to kickstart things off, but is very inefficient and not meant as the main way of resource processing.
Stand for yourself!
Fight off various enemies to defend your possessions. Use produced items to build and upgrade powerful weapons and combat devices, that will help you to destroy all attackers. Free energy is yours, finders-keepers! Wait, why is this enemy ship almost the size of your factory?..
Variability
You can acquire numerous unique devices during the run, serving all purposes imaginable - giving you more power in combat, allowing you to explore and gather resources with more ease, or increasing your production efficiency - all these are valid ways to...
Get to the end, and find out what is going on
A genius scientist. A powerful and resolute cult leader. A crazy yet firm and determined pirate troup boss.
Relax, you are none of those people, no-no, hah.
You are a simple asteroid miner. You look for space rocks to tow with your shuttle, then bring them back to your mobile base. You blast them with lasers (cool!) to extract valuable resources, then you sell them. Then you go to the next space sector via your warp drive, and repeat the process. Simple.
Occasionally you try to utilize that empty space you have inside your base and build a small production line in it - processed resources do sell better.
The thing is - now that's not that simple! Ore processing machinery is complicated, and needs waaay more energy than your simple reactor has to spare after all those warp jumps.
The good thing is - you just found... this thing. It was just drifting there, in a random remote sector of inhabited space, emitting a strange signal your communication equipment picked up.
And the important thing is - it gives free energy! You don't know why or how, but when you warped for the next time after finding it, this device, left lying among your crappy contraptions, nearly melted them with a powerfull power surge! Fortunately that space you tinker in is properly insulated. Keeps things simple.
You just figured out the way to harvest this energy, althrough only small part of it for now, and even with this amount, you might finally succeed with your resource processing ideas. You called the device "Spark core".
That's just wonderful!.. if not only for one little thing: it looks like you aren't the only one who needs free electricity. Who would've known!
Those rusty-orange folks, they seem to follow wherever you go, and they don't seem too friendly. And you really need free electricity more then they do, for sure, so they better be ready to meet with those industrial-grade mining plasma cannons your shuttle conviniently has!
At least those peculiar alive-looking blobs of light you started to notice in different places of cosmos recently don't seem to be agressive. Despite being quite misterious, they still do look pretty simple. That's definitely a good thing.
Time to find out about overarching story you unwillingly became a part of, and help to fend off a looming threat, much bigger that anything that you could've imagined as a simple asteroid miner. The Light awaits.
