Mineral Vein
What it is
The sustained-DPS tier of the world-prop catalog. A green crystalline destructible that joins the off-screen spawn pool, breaks under sustained bullet fire (or a single ship contact), and drops a fat XP-orb bundle worth roughly a quarter of the current level bar. Sits between Volatile Crystal (risk-reward) and Supply Pod (rare iconic) on the HP curve, but the highest-value common-roll loot piece in the catalog by raw orb count and per-orb XP. Designed to reward weapon-fire builds — the HP figure is too high for a casual ram-through to feel deserved, so players who burst it down with sustained DPS get the visible payoff and the chain-cascade beat. Reads as “valuable mineral seam” rather than “rock.” Sprite is rendered as a baked emoji sticker with a bright green rim halo. No edge-arrow telegraph — Mineral Veins are common enough that hunting one would over-salt the field; the value lives in stumbling on one and bursting it.
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Max HP | 40 |
| Visible silhouette radius | 34 px |
| Density multiplier (vs crate slider) | 0.25 |
| Orb drop count on break | 10 |
| XP per orb (fraction of current level bar) | 0.024 |
| Total drop value (level-bar fraction) | ~24% |
| Sticker emoji | rocky outcrop with embedded gems |
| Rim halo color | bright green (#5fe07a) |
| Edge-arrow telegraph | no |
Spawn behavior
Mineral Veins share the typed prop pool with every other prop kind (pool cap 48, max simultaneous active 10 at slider=100). Type selection uses a weighted roll where each prop’s density multiplier is its weight in the bag. With Mineral Vein at 0.25 it lands as a comparatively rare common-roll — less frequent than Scrap Pile (1.0), Drone Wreck (0.6), Comet Fragment (0.4), or Volatile Crystal (0.35), but more frequent than Magnetar Pulse (0.20) or Supply Pod (0.15). The deliberate scarcity prevents the field from oversaturating with green and keeps each find feeling rewarding. Spawns are gated to be off-screen (never visible-spawn), pushed roughly 500-1400 px from the ship, biased 70% of the time into the player’s heading cone, and reject when too close (under 160 px) to another active prop.
Per-planet active count is driven by the planet’s destructibles.crates slider mapped onto a 0-10 active prop ceiling.
Mineral Veins also appear off the standard spawn path through one chain-cascade source:
| Cascade source | Mineral Veins spawned per proc | Spawn ring radius |
|---|---|---|
| Supply Pod break (100% proc chance) | 1 (in 5-prop ring) | 110 px around break |
Cascade spawns use a forceSpawnAt primitive that bypasses viewport gating, the density cap, and minimum-gap rejection — they always land where the break point dictates.
Break behavior
On ship contact the runtime applies max-hp damage in a single hit — the ship one-shots regardless of the 40 HP figure. Bullets do their listed damage per overlap with piercing idempotency (a single piercing bullet cannot chip the same slot twice in one tick). 40 HP is the third-highest in the catalog (Supply Pod 80, Mineral Vein 40, Magnetar Pulse 35), so sustained DPS or several ram passes are the realistic clear paths.
Non-fatal bullet hits play a chip-flash on the rim and emit a small spark cloud; reaching 0 HP triggers the full break sequence.
Break sequence (in order): fire prop_break signal → play the per-type audio cue → telemetry record → spawn XP orbs → spawn break VFX → roll synergy → deactivate slot.
The XP-orb drop is the standout signature: 10 orbs at 0.024 per orb is the second-largest bundle in the catalog (behind Supply Pod’s 12 × 0.035) and the highest per-orb XP fraction outside Supply Pod. The drop reads as the climactic payoff for the player’s investment in chipping the vein down.
| Break VFX layer | Value |
|---|---|
| Spark cloud particle count | 24 |
| Spark RGB | (120, 230, 130) — emerald |
| Chunky debris count | 5 |
| Chunk RGB | (60, 140, 80) — forest green |
| Rim shockwave color | #7fe89a |
| Outward ring burst count | 10 |
| Audio cue id | per-type mineral-vein recipe (shatter cascade); falls back to generic prop break |
Per-type synergy (shatter cascade)
Mineral Vein is the chain-reaction cross-system synergy of the props lane and the first synergy in the catalog to engage the prop pool’s own spawn pipeline. On break, the runtime rolls against the cascade chance; on success it splinters the green vein into two typed fragments at offset positions around the break point, fanned evenly around the circle with a small angular jitter so the ring doesn’t read as a rigid polygon. The iconic beat reads as “vein shatters → fragments emerge.”
The cascade composition is fixed: one Comet Fragment (keeping the visual green→blue shatter cue and threading the comet’s own 35% speed-boost roll) plus one Magnetar Pulse (delivering a guaranteed gravity-pull opportunity at 100% on its own break). When a player chips the vein, rams the resulting comet, and then bursts the magnetar, they chain three synergies into a single beat — speed boost, gravity pull, plus the original vein drop.
The visual bridge between the vein break and the cascaded fragments is a two-pass particle cloud: half the particles in the vein’s emerald palette and half in the comet’s ice-blue palette, sequenced so the eye reads green-first then blue. The cue is the existing beacon-done sparkle/click/sizzle recipe — already reads as “old marker completes, new markers appear.”
Cascade spawns use the forceSpawnAt primitive, so they bypass viewport gating, the density cap, and minimum-gap rejection. If the pool is at the 48-slot cap when the proc fires, individual cascade slots may silently drop; telemetry records the actual spawn count.
| Synergy field | Value |
|---|---|
| Proc chance per break | 0.30 |
| Cascade composition | 1 Comet Fragment + 1 Magnetar Pulse |
| Spawn ring radius around break | 70 px |
| Spawn angular jitter | up to ~17 degrees per slot |
| Bridge particle count | 18 (split evenly green / blue) |
| Audio cue id | beacon-done (sparkle/click/sizzle) |
| Telemetry recorded | actual spawn count (may be < target if pool at cap) |
VFX palette
| Channel | Value |
|---|---|
| Rim halo | bright green (#5fe07a) |
| Spark cloud | emerald (120, 230, 130) |
| Chunk debris | forest green (60, 140, 80) |
| Rim shockwave ring | #7fe89a |
| Outward burst | reuses spark RGB |
| Hit-flash duration | 0.18 s |
| Chip spark particle count per non-fatal hit | 6 |
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags
- Weighted prop-type roll mechanics — the density-multiplier-as-weight pattern is shared across every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page. Only the resulting Mineral Vein frequency claim belongs here.
- Shared off-screen spawn pipeline rules (pool cap 48, max density 10, spawn distance 500-1400 px, 160 px minimum gap, 70% velocity-cone bias, off-screen gating, planet destructibles slider mapping) — all common to every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page.
forceSpawnAtprimitive (bypasses viewport / density cap / min-gap) — the primitive itself belongs on the props roll-up page. This page documents Mineral Vein both as a consumer (its cascade spawns through it) and as a cascade target (Supply Pod cascade spawns it).- Break sequence ordering (signal → audio → telemetry → orbs → VFX → synergy → deactivate) — applies to every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page.
- Bullet collision rules (piercing idempotency via per-bullet hit set, non-piercing consumed on hit, chip-flash on non-fatal) — same for every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up or combat page.
- XP-orb drop scheme (fraction-of-level-bar scaling via
xpForLevel, fan-out angles, per-orb speed) — same for every prop kind; canonical home is the props roll-up page or the XP-orb page. - Comet Fragment speed-boost synergy (35% proc, 1.5× velocity multiplier, 2.0× max-speed cap) — canonical home is the Comet Fragment page. This page only mentions it as the chain-target reward when a player rams a cascaded comet.
- Magnetar Pulse gravity-pull synergy (100% proc, 220 px radius, 360 px/s inward impulse, 28 px max displacement) — canonical home is the Magnetar Pulse page. This page only mentions it as the chain-target reward when a player breaks a cascaded magnetar.
- Supply Pod cascade composition + chance (100% proc, 5-prop ring at 110 px including 1 Mineral Vein) — canonical home is the Supply Pod page. This page only mentions it as the one source of off-spawn-pipeline Mineral Veins.
- Edge-arrow HUD telegraph system — only relevant to high-value props (Supply Pod, Magnetar Pulse); canonical home is the HUD or props roll-up page. Mineral Vein only needs the “no” flag.