PILOTING DRONE-01

• WASD or arrows — fly
• SPACE (hold) — bore the rock you are facing
• Q — drop an ORE BEACON: miners follow it
• E — drop a RALLY BEACON: guards converge on it
• 1 print miner   2 print guard   3 autofab
• M beacon overlay   P pause   ESC quit
• F — autoplay: hand DRONE-01 to the colony AI
• [ ] — simulation speed, 0.25× to 8×
• N mute   B cycle audio pack   V score on/off

Cargo is picked up and unloaded automatically — bore a seam until it breaks, then fly home through your own tunnels.

Autoplay runs the whole colony for you — it prospects by scent, hauls, drops its own beacons, defends the fabricator and eventually mounts an assault. Touch any movement key and you take the controls straight back.

THE SWARM

• Mining drones wander, smell ore through rock, bore toward it and haul it home — laying a scent trail on the return trip that other miners follow. That trail is how a productive tunnel becomes a highway.
• Guard drones patrol the tunnels and run down any rally beacon or distress scent. They are how you take ground.
• Beacons evaporate. A route only stays busy while it keeps paying.

THE FABRICATOR

• ORE — structure. Printing bodies.
• ICE — volatiles. Coolant and life support.
• POWER — solar. Charges fast in the lunar day, barely at all in the night. Print while the sun is up.

Every tonne delivered builds the surface plant out: solar arrays, a high-gain dish, volatile tanks, radiators, a habitat dome. Once the launch pad is up, surplus ore above the printing reserve is flown to Earth orbit — that tonnage is your score, and the plant keeps growing as it climbs.

AUDIO

• Five sound packs, all synthesised at runtime — no audio files anywhere: Industrial drills and servos, Laser beam mining, Demolition shaped charges, Percussion (the whole operation played on a kit), and Electro chiptune.
• An adaptive score reads the colony: layers enter as the swarm grows, it drops an octave into a minor key through the lunar night, and a raid on your fabricator pushes it to full intensity.
• Everything is switchable mid-run from the status bar, or with N / B / V.

THE OPPOSITION

• Helios drones mine the same seams and raid your plant. Bore into their fabricator to end the contract.
• Tube crawlers live in the deep lava tubes and eat anything with a heat signature. Neither colony owns them.
• If DRONE-01 is destroyed, your link jumps to the nearest surviving unit. You only lose when the colony does.

MOUSE

• Press and hold anywhere on the rock — DRONE-01 flies at your pointer and bores whatever it runs into. Drag the pointer around and it follows. This alone is enough to play the whole game.
• Release to stop. Keyboard thrust overrides the pointer while held.

MINIMAP

• Click or drag the minimap to fly the camera anywhere on the claim — useful for watching the swarm work, or scouting Helios.
• The view stays where you put it until you recentre: press the bound key, hit RECENTRE in the status bar, or just steer the drone.

TOUCH · IPAD

• Drag on the rock to fly and bore, exactly as with a mouse.
• A pad of action buttons appears at the bottom of the view the first time you touch it — BORE is hold-to-drill, the rest are single taps.
• Toggle the pad any time with TOUCH in the status bar.
• The view never scrolls or zooms under your finger while you play.

THE FOUR VERBS

• Bore — break rock. Ore and ice load straight into your hold; fly home and it unloads itself.
• Ore beacon — a scent bloom that pulls mining drones to a seam.
• Rally beacon — pulls guards. Plant one on the Helios fabricator and your guards read it as an assault order.
• Print — spend ore, ice and power on another drone.