Brace Yourself

Look at your map. Southwest of The Jag, a little further down than anything else out there, is a hex that has been marked CAVE-IN since the day you made your character. You can select it. You cannot walk into it. Nobody has ever said a word about it.

That is Deep Jag, and it is Tansy's. The lower workings came down long before you arrived, and she has never mentioned it because there was nothing to mention: reopening it is two people's work, and until now you were not the second one. Finish 10,000 Hours, get your Mining and your Welding both to level 5, and she will bring it up.

Brace Yourself is the job. She supplies the brace and the jack — that hardware is hers and it stays hers. What she needs is somebody to haul the stock down and weld the support together under a roof that already fell once. That comes to 25 Refined Ferrite and 5 Power Cells, installed in as many trips as you like, and then fifteen welding passes.

The fifteenth pass is the one to watch. The moment it lands the passage is open: the rock is pushed back to the sides, the brace is standing where you welded it, the map reads MINING, and you can start cutting immediately. No walk back to Tansy first, no second thing to unlock. Her 250 Welding XP is waiting at The Jag whenever you next go up, on top of the 750 the work itself paid.

What is down there is Galvanite — dark rock shot through with bright conductive veining, which the crews call live rock and which does not, before you ask, generate any power on its own. It is harder going than shale: about nine seconds an attempt against six, a lower success rate that keeps climbing until Mining 40, and 400 grams a piece against shale's 100. A full container out of Deep Jag is a much shorter trip than a full container out of The Jag.

It also gives the Processing Yard two new things to do. Every recipe is listed at the console now, including the ones you cannot run yet, so you can see what is coming and what it will cost. Two Galvanite becomes one Galvanic Stock at Refining 5. One Refined Ferrite and one Galvanic Stock alloy into Galvaferrite at Refining 8 — and when that one fails, one of the two inputs comes back and the other is gone.

Bix takes Galvanite at 4 Credits and Galvanic Stock at 18. Wade has started buying structural material back out of his own yard as well: Refined Ferrite at 10, Galvanic Stock at 18, and Galvaferrite at 45. Where he and Bix both buy the same thing, they pay the same for it. Galvaferrite has nothing to make out of it yet. Sell it or stack it — it is the best thing you can currently produce, and it is going somewhere.