What specifically is in 3.19 right now? Can you give us a rundown of the mining improvements?

Okay, the short version is everything. So I will probably forget some things, because the list is actually quite a bit bigger than I was imagining. I even wrote the summary for our Live Experience team of what actually changed, and that list got bigger than I expected, to be honest. But let's start with the resources. I think that is the biggest change, because it not only affects the mining itself, but it also has an impact on trading. Because right now resources have distinct locations in Stanton. That means we defined now seven standard materials that have seven different locations, or there can be a combination of those in those locations. And those standard materials or those standard resources you only find in those particular locations. For example, the standard is copper and iron. So those you will only find in dedicated locations throughout Stanton. And in addition to that, we introduced rarity to some resources. We have a common one, we have an uncommon one, and we have one rare one, which is Quantanium. So those are now more sparse in their general appearance. So that is the thing that you will notice at first sight. Another thing that is more hidden behind is that each resource now has its distinct density. So that means that even though the rocks look very similar in size in comparison to before, they will have now drastically different masses. So heavier elements will have a huge impact on the mass of the rock. And that actually helped us a bit, because that made certain materials now more viable for bigger ships or bigger lasers, while others are now better suited for smaller ships or single-player ships and smaller lasers. So that was already a big win for us. In addition to that, we also introduced a new mineable that is called Janalite. That is something that we introduced for FPS mining solely, and it's located in the new caves. Basically we wanted to make mining outside of prison more attractive, and now we have this super rare mineable there that will earn you a fortune if you find it. And on the resource side, not only did we update the distribution of the standard materials and the materials in general, we also adjusted all the probabilities of each of the sub-elements. Well, for us, we have a better overview of what resources are where. But for players, I think it's more fun to actually look for certain materials than it was before.

They'll have to discover a completely new distribution, and it might be annoying or exciting depending on everyone's perspective on life. One thing I wanted to add, one thing that we definitely added, and I hope this helps, is a lot of improvements on the mining UI and UX. So there's a lot of small little things that just added together make it more user-friendly. They make it easier for a beginner to understand exactly what's happening, why is it happening, and all.

On the resources there are even things or rule sets that are still uncovered. So I leave it up to the community to uncover those rule sets, because there might be some things that would help you to look for certain materials in a more targeted way. But that's all for the resources. Dan already talked about the UI changes, so actually a shout-out to a person that is ruling all our UI work in our team, that is Bastian. So Bastian did an amazing job with all the UI work that we now have done for the update. So for the UI, as Dan stated, it's now more user-friendly. So we have clear indicators for what you actually have equipped. We now have a dedicated helper that tells you if you should actually try out the rock that you are facing or you should call in a friend, because it says impossible, and impossible means impossible for your current setup. So you definitely will need some help there. One more thing that I forgot, it's actually a huge list. One more thing I forgot is that we now have even different scaling for the resources. So beforehand we had very limited scaling for the size of the rocks you find on those planets. So now, if you're lucky, you even find those little nuggets that you don't even have to break. You can just scoop them up. So even if you were unlucky and didn't have the matching mining heads equipped, you at least got away with something. And that directly leads to the next big update, which was the mining heads. So what we did there is we basically started from scratch. So we mapped out all the resources and defined their own individual parameters, meaning each resource has its own way of affecting the resistance and its own way of affecting the optimal window or the instability and all those parameters that you know from the mining heads. And we mapped that against the mining heads. And then what we did was make some values exclusive for some of the sub-items, and basically did a full cleanup of all the items that we had and then mapped certain types of combinations and the mining heads towards those properties of the resources. So what we did is have one mining head where we calculated on our Excel sheets that it will work better with certain resources, while others won't have such a benefit there. Doesn't mean that they won't work, but it will be more challenging for players with certain laser combinations to crack open certain types of rocks.