We’ve been mining and refining various minerals in video games now for a hell of a long time, because it turns out people just love crafting games. Whether they’re into the creativity a game like Minecraft provides or the exploration something like Astroneer has to offer, there’s a crafting game for everyone out there. Exovia is perhaps the title in the genre that has me most interested right now though, because its particular brand of block gathering gameplay has its hooks in already.
As a little Pioneer spaceman working for the titular Exovia, this preview build dropped me into an asteroid field with the objective of eventually building a warp gate. This sounded a bit overwhelming, but after a few helpful quests to guide me on how to safely float about and start collecting chunks of rock I felt ready to start my mission.
Collecting materials in Exovia is pretty easy, but incredibly satisfying despite this. First you’ll need to equip your mining laser and point it at the square you want to mine. Then once it breaks apart from the wall you can vacuum it up, and spit it back out into the correct one of your refiners. By doing this over and over again you’ll get yourself a nice selection of resources, which you can use to build structures or research new ways to effectively mine your way to success.
In the very early moments of my time with Exovia everything felt a little slow going, but that’s because I was trying to do all these little mining tasks without any assistance. By constructing ridiculously powerful conveyor belts across the space environment you’ll be able to ensure all the floating bits you mine automatically zoom back towards your refining area without you having to boost back and forth with them. Because everything in space floats about a lot you don’t even have to be particularly precise with your placement of conveyor belts either, as this means that eventually most leftover materials will get sucked away anyway. It’s really satisfying when you get this small amount of automation set up, and with extra options like buildable walls and auto drills that do the digging themselves you can really go hard on the construction.
With a conveyor system in place to maximise my mining potential I was drowning in rock, iron and ice, and was ready to start spending it. The research tab had plenty of ways to do that, from unlocking new helpful tools to build to simply upgrading my core abilities. Making the mining laser more powerful immediately sped up my gathering abilities, and the research tree stretches much further than that with all sorts of movement speed and carrying capacity upgrades ready to be unlocked by an eager miner.
Progressing further into the preview build of Exovia, I uncovered more and more interesting elements hidden under the layers of dirt. With a handy scanner you’ll be able to search out deposits of rare minerals that you’ll need for later upgrades, which you’ll want to aim towards pretty quickly. Along the way though you might discover things like explosive pockets that suddenly blow up a massive area of rock, which despite seeming somewhat dangerous are incredibly helpful to clear out big areas. There was never anything more threatening out in space during my time with Exovia though, and instead I had a rather relaxing time just mining away at the world.
After pushing along through objectives I found myself at the end of my time with Exovia after about an hour, and I was itching to keep progressing. This space mining game is seriously compelling, thanks to the satisfying loop of gathering rocks and the clever ways you can automate the process as you go. I’ll be really interested to see how this evolves as you progress further into the asteroid and into the research tree, because I can see this game devouring my free time.
Exovia is coming to PC.