Can you elaborate a little more on the lore behind Coaxium and the mining of quantum fuel?

Now, I'm pretty sure Coaxium isn't us. I'm pretty sure that's another sci-fi franchise.

I was frantically researching when I saw this question. I was like, why didn't we mention Coaxium? And it is not us.

That's another sci-fi franchise. But let's talk about the quantum fuel. Can you tell us a little bit more about the lore behind quantum fuel, or the mining of quantum fuel?

So this is an interesting thing, going back to how we work with game mechanics. The design team was starting to look down the road at introducing quantum fuel mining into the game, and so we needed to come up with the lore behind what quantum fuel was and how it's found, to help guide them in how they were going to build it. And we got their design qualifications of, oh, it needs to be found in almost every system. It has to be rare for the price, but also slightly common so that you're not stuck somewhere.

One of the interesting things, sorry to interrupt, about the parameters that was really fun was, because we had quantum fuel before we discovered jump points, the idea was it had to basically exist in our solar system.

Yeah, we needed a way to find it in Sol, which was a nice little peccadillo. So we did a whole write-up, and it recently got approved by CR. And how these things work is our write-ups will change. Once the designer gets their hands on it and starts implementing what we came up with as a backstory, we'll find out, oh, actually, we need it to be more like this. We need it to be less common, more common. We need it to be more difficult. We need it to be highly explosive because it's more fun. And then we'll adjust based on that, or we'll have a discussion with them about, if not that, then this.

Yeah, or adding variations or whatever.

The basic idea, I can give a sneak preview of some of it, is that there are these particles called transients which can bend space and mass around themselves. And they were this really cool discovery, but they were very fleeting and hard to find. And then scientists, slowly after discovering this, were able to detect them in, oh, I'm totally blanking, what's the Hadron Collider kind of thing? The particle colliders were able to pick up on these, and eventually they were able to find that these would be stably existing temporarily in transisotopes, where these transients would temporarily attach themselves onto atomic particles and exist. And that was the main way we started harvesting them: certain elements are more prone to existing as transisotopes that you can then use to harvest the transients, and that gets turned into quantum fuel. So using scanning, you'll find a rock that's iridium, and then through scanning it you'll see that it's 5% of these transisotopes, and you'll have to harvest them quickly, and if you put in too much energy they'll devolve back into normal isotopes. So there's a high risk, and you have to be careful with harvesting and then transporting them to make sure that you preserve the transients until it's refined.

Now this is really new stuff. It hasn't been shared anywhere. You just got this approved by CR. Now it's got to go to design.

And design was involved in the conversation and all that. So this is on our internal Confluence page. This is a full write-up, with scientists' names and a timeline and all that kind of fancy stuff. We haven't discussed this publicly before.