DeepDriller — Dig deeper. Die richer.

01 — The Surface · 0 ft

The Contract

"Whatever you find down there belongs to AXIOM. Whatever happens to you down there belongs to the planet."

— AXIOM Corp Onboarding Terminal, Surface Level

Kerath-9 was classified geologically stable. The classification was wrong. AXIOM has held exclusive extraction rights for eleven years and has never explained why they keep renewing them. When you land, the installation is nearly empty — four buildings, a landing pad, a comms tower, a sky the color of old copper. There are no other miners. There should be dozens.

The AXIOM extraction rig on the surface of Kerath-9

AXIOM Surface Installation · Kerath-9

Onboarding Record · Contractor Intake

PLANET........KERATH-9 · outer Proxima Cluster

ERA...........2387 · corporate frontier space

EMPLOYER......AXIOM CORP · exclusive rights, 11 yrs

YOUR STATUS...contracted miner · designation #23

PRIOR CREW....22 · none returned from Zone 4

02 — The Dive Loop · one more run

The Loop

A full dive fits in eight minutes.
You will never take just one.

Surface→ Dive→ Surface or Die→ Upgrade→ Go Deeper

The extraction pod poised over the mine shaft

Your extraction pod · shaft mouth, Zone 1

Surfacing early is always safe. Surfacing late is always lucrative. Dying is always costly. That tension — cash out, or push one more vein — is the whole game, and it resets every single dive. Procedural generation isn't window dressing: ore, hazards, events and transmissions are re-seeded every run. No two descents are the same at any depth.

Every dive is new

Six deepening zones, fifteen ores, and a continuous shaft that regenerates every run. Deeper means richer — and deadlier.

Build your rig

Eight upgrade slots — drill, hull, engine, fuel, cargo, sensor, thermal, auto-turret. Every upgrade shows on the rover as you spend.

Survive the planet

Gas pockets, lava veins, aquifers, void resonance, gravity anomalies, ceiling collapses — all hunting your hull.

Fight what's down there

Auto-turrets deploy from the hull and open fire when hostiles close in — kinetic, gauss, or a violet arc lance. Or run silent with a cloak and an EMP.

Get rich or get buried

Sell your haul, chase faction contracts, bank cumulative depth to unlock new zones. Death is permanent; the pressure never stops.

Climb two boards

An Open board for total power, and Raw Talent — depth normalized to a stock rig, so skill beats spending. Then take the shared Daily Dive.

03 — How it works · the first ten minutes

How to play

Dig down. Haul up. Don't die doing it.

Swipe to steer the pod through a grid of tiles — every one you drill is one you can fall through. Four gauges decide how the dive ends.

Drill for ore

Carve through soil, rock and ore. The richest seams hide under harder rock a stock drill can't bite — upgrade the drill to reach them.

Watch — drill tier vs. rock

Mind your fuel

Every move burns fuel, and you need enough left to climb back out. Run dry deep down and the only way up is a Beacon — or an expensive recovery.

Watch — fuel vs. depth

Manage the hold

Ore has weight. A heavy hold drinks fuel and slows your climb. Jettison cheap rock to make room for the good stuff — or haul it all and gamble.

Watch — cargo weight

Protect the hull

Hazards and hostiles chip your hull. At zero, the run ends and the cargo is lost. Every dive is the same bet: one more vein, or surface while you can.

Watch — hull integrity

Strategies

Six ways to come back richer.

Risk / reward

Bank the surface run

The safe play prints money too. A short dive that sells clean beats a deep dive that dies. Cash out, upgrade, repeat — depth compounds across runs.

Loadout

Reach before richness

A bigger drill is useless if you can't climb home. Early credits go furthest in fuel cells and hold capacity — buy range first, flash later.

Routing

Dig switchbacks, not straight down

A vertical shaft is a fast trip and a dead end. Angled tunnels give you escape routes, dodge room, and access to side seams.

Materials

Handle Void Glass gently

The richest Zone-4 ore is brittle — every hull hit shatters a piece. Carry it only when you can dive clean, and surface before you get greedy.

Combat

Turrets buy time, not wins

Auto-turrets thin the drones so you can keep drilling — but the deep doesn't tire. Past a certain depth, the smart fight is the exit.

Economy

Read the market

The same ore isn't worth the same to every buyer, and demand shifts. Don't dump the hold on the first offer — sell where it's wanted.

04 — The Descent · the world changes under you

Depth is pressure

The earth stops being earth.

Near the surface it's packed topsoil and rusted iron — exactly what a dug trench should look like. Then basalt, with a single vein that runs a fraction too straight and glows cold blue. Then engineered near-black stone laced with hexagonal conduits. And at the bottom: iridescent, self-luminous matter that was grown, not formed. The transformation is gradual, and uncanny, and it never announces itself.

Descending the machined shaft toward a glowing structure

The shaft · approach to the Anomaly Layer

05 — Materials · fifteen ways to get paid

The haul

Fifteen ores, surface to core.

The shallow seams pay the bills. The deep ones pay for everything — if you can carry them out. Value climbs with depth; so does the risk of never spending it.

Ferrite

Rusted iron. Common, cheap, everywhere.

Cobaltite

Blue-grey cobalt. Steady, reliable money.

Slag

Worthless waste rock. Vendors shrug.

Titanite

Brushed titanium — the first real payday.

Chromium Shard

Mirror-bright shards. Sharp and pricey.

Deep Quartz

Violet quartz, and the first faint inner light.

Voidite

Indigo ore with a living glow. Realism bends.

Plasm Crystal

Magenta energy crystals. Not of Earth.

Neutronite

So dense it warps the rock around it.

Echonite

Pale-cyan crystals like frozen sound.

Resonant Dust

Glittering caged energy in the cracks.

Void Glass

Jet-black, razor-sharp — and brittle.

Prequelite

Pre-human alloy in circuit-like traces.

Core Lattice

A perfect metamaterial grid, lit from within.

Primesite

The apex. The literal heart of the secret.

06 — Hazards · the planet fights back

Obstacles

Everything down here wants your hull.

Some hazards you see coming. Some you don't — until a sensor upgrade lets you. Each one ends the run a different way.

Hull burn

Lava Vein

Molten seams that cook the hull on contact. No touching.

Ignites

Gas Pocket

Pressurised fissures that catch fire. A visual tell warns silent-mode players.

Flood

Aquifer

Trapped water that floods a dig and drags a heavy pod down.

Control loss

Gravity Anomaly

A well that bends your controls — and your descent — the wrong way.

Collapse

Unstable Ground

Rock that won't hold. Drill it wrong and the ceiling comes down.

Collapse

Pressure Crack

Stressed rock under load. It gives when you least want it to.

Shield burn

Void Resonance

Deep-zone energy that shreds shields — and nerves — alike.

07 — The Deep · what AXIOM buried

An ancient runed vault descending into teal light

Veth vault · designation unknown

The Veth

Something pre-human is buried in the dark.

Structures. Terminals. A material catalogued as Primesite — properties that make conventional weapons obsolete. AXIOM has known since year two of the contract. They aren't mining for the resource war three jumps away. They're mining for leverage. And the miners who reached Zone 4 didn't return, because no one was sent to bring them back.

The story is not told. It is excavated.

— across transmissions, artifacts & sealed chambers, one run at a time

A colossal Veth guardian awakening in a molten chamber

Something in the core is waking up

08 — The Bestiary · you are not alone down here

What lives in the dark

The deep doesn't defend itself. It answers.

Boss · Zone 6

The Arbiter

Stone, metal and a single slit of teal light. It was here before you had a word for "here."

Veth construct

Sentinel

Crystalline, dormant — until you take too much. Then it wakes, and the tunnel lights up.

Drone · patient

Collector

It harvests what you drop and what you leave behind. Teal-lit, unhurried, always closer than it was.

Rival · AI

Rival Drone

Named after a real player on the boards. It races you for the seam — and taunts you if it surfaces first.

09 — Artifacts · pre-human relics (mostly sealed)

The collection

Some things down there shouldn't exist.

AXIOM catalogues every artifact in clean, professional language — right up to the last line, which never quite matches. A few are documented below. The rest stay sealed until you dig them up yourself.

Veth Data Core

Anomaly — origin unknown

Artifact 1F · “buoyant, yellow, inexplicable”

Unidentified

[ Redacted ]

Recover them, and the contradictions start to line up.

10 — Transmissions · voices on the channel

The Cast

Everyone down here wants something.

AXIOM Operator · your handler

"Keep to the survey grid."

Professional. Slightly too cheerful. She remembers exactly what you hauled last run — and the deeper you push, the quieter she gets.

An unknown, corrupted transmission source

Unknown Origin · Ghost Signal

"—"

Corrupted transmissions on frequencies AXIOM says are unused. Sometimes it recovers your cargo after you die. For free. It has never asked for anything. Reach Zone 6 and you begin to understand what it is.

[Z2 · −1,800 ft] AXIOM "Good haul. Stay on the grid. Recovery's on us this time."

[Z3 · −2,800 ft] ?????? "you're the 23rd"

[Z4 · −5,000 ft] IDRIS "I've been down here two years. Don't let them tell you it's clear."

[Z5 · −7,500 ft] IDRIS "I think it knows I'm here."

[Z5 · −9,000 ft] IDRIS "—"

One miner went deep two years ago and never surfaced. Her logs wait in sealed chambers — calm at first, then fragmentary, then voiced, then cut off mid-sentence. Her name is Idris, if you dig far enough to earn it.

11 — Factions · choose who you answer to

Factions

Four buyers. Four agendas.

Coming soon

The politics of the deep are still being written.

AXIOM signs your contracts. Others are listening on channels AXIOM swears are dead. Reputation, rival buyers, and the choice of who gets what you find — revealed closer to launch.

AXIOM Corp · your employer The Syndicate · off-books buyers The Collective · the ones who stayed Ghost Signal · unknown origin