Volume 0 Issue 005

| TestNet News | February 1st, MY 153 |

Mineral Wealth Sim Hotfix

TestNet Patches Out "Nots"; Acknowledges that Asteroids are Actually Made of Matter.

Anyone that has spent some time on the Council's new TestNet Client will have noticed that the way that Core Samples and Extractors simulated mineral wealth was somewhat frustrating and baffling. But not anymore; the Council today pushed out a patch to update this behaviour.

Until today, the resource maps ranged from 0% up to 100%, but this left large areas of asteroids not covered by any of the multiple overlapping heatmaps. This lead to the existance of "null lots" or "nots" with zero extractable resources of any type. While this lead to some complaining about the unfairness of the heatmaps and the worthlessness of these "nots", it also lead some to question what the Council felt was under the surface in these area where there was apparently no trace of anything to be dug up at all. Not just that they were difficult to retrieve or uneconomical to retrieve, but that nothing at all existed there in the first place.

Going forward, the system will be more even-handed, with half the mineral value coming for the average distribution across the whole asteroid and the other half coming from the resource heatmaps as before. This means that even on the previous "nots" where no heatmap reaches, there will still be at least some mineral wealth to extract. These "nots" will certainly not be high on anyone's list of spots to develop and remain prime candidates for the non-mining infrastructure needed on all rocks, but they will no longer be worthless for mining.

"The Council remains comitted to building the best tools for the job of colonization before we have to do it for real later this year," Chief Technology Officer Petros Vallois stated in a prepared speech from the bridge. "Humans are tool-using primates; this is our greatest strength."