Starminer Campaign: We Finally Reach the Gate

We finally reach the Jupiter Gate in Starminer — but the gate's keeper has other ideas, and getting there means first cracking open Loki Station and the research its crew went to great lengths to bury. This is a story-forward leg of the Starminer Campaign. We progress the campaign properly: salvaging the abandoned Loki Station and reading the logs its team tried to wipe, building a colonist-free drilling drone, hauling everything back to Strike Command to load Pannonia II for the long haul, and finally making for the Jupiter Gate — where Commander Heifetz refuses us passage and hands us a new objective out at the Kerrel research facility. As ever, an honest look at an Early Access game: the drill mounts don't quite live up to their billing, the autopilot still fights me, a ship runs itself dry, and the game throws a crash and a genuinely game-breaking bug my way. Lots of promise, a few rough edges, and a campaign quietly getting bigger than I expected. ───────────────────────── ⭐ JOIN THE STRIKE CORPS (Discord):   / discord   Share your builds, name the fleet, suggest what we tackle next — the community names actually make it into the campaign. ▶ Watch the full Starminer Campaign (playlist):    • Starminer Campaign   ◀ Previous episode — The First Jump:    • Starminer Campaign: The First Jump   ───────────────────────── CHAPTERS: 0:00 Intro & Argus Mk I 0:58 Deploying the Fleet 2:45 Loki Station: Abandoned 5:11 Building the Drilling Drone 7:14 Automation: Moving Resources 13:44 Strike Command: Base Tour 15:10 The Build & Sell Money Method 23:39 Shipyard: Frigates & Trade Ships 32:20 Local Jumps & The Galaxy Map 34:29 Finishing the Colonist-Free Drone 38:14 Jumpstarting Loki's Reactor 40:30 Moving Asteroids with the Drill 43:41 Loki Station's Research Logs 46:05 Objective: The Jupiter Gate 47:21 Stripping Loki Station 51:29 Energy Crisis: Running on Empty 54:28 The Accidental Ship Merge 1:04:53 The Duplicate Commander 1:07:56 Building Out the Vulcan 1:10:12 Testing the Money Method 1:17:08 A Game-Breaking Bug (Reported to Devs) 1:18:57 Finishing the Research Tree 1:21:18 Reprovisioning & The Drone Fleet 1:23:24 Commander Heifetz & The Refusal 1:27:32 Kerrel Objective & The Halifax Outpost 1:30:14 Crash & Closing Remarks ───────────────────────── QUESTIONS YOU MIGHT BE SEARCHING: How do you reach the Jupiter Gate in Starminer? Travel to Ganymede in the Jupiter system. But the keeper, Commander Hi-Fetz, won't grant passage to La Land until you complete his task at the Kerrel research facility. What's inside Loki Station in Starminer? It's an abandoned research station. Power it with hydrogen from a nearby ice asteroid and you can read partially-intact research logs that fill in the campaign's backstory, then dismantle it for materials. Are tier 2 drill mounts better than mining lasers in Starminer? They're billed as faster and latch onto an asteroid with no haulers needed — but in this run the drill wasn't noticeably quicker, so it may need a buff. Lasers still hold up. Do drilling drones need colonists in Starminer? No. A basic drill drone runs crew-free — it only needs power (one solar panel covers ~35MW) and a radiator or two for heat, which makes a self-sufficient, fully automatable miner. Can you move asteroids in Starminer? Yes. With a drill attached and thrusters on the drone, you can nudge and fly an asteroid around. ───────────────────────── Music by Helmut Schenker from Epidemic Sound - https://www.epidemicsound.com/music/t... #Starminer #SpaceSim #BaseBuilding #Interplanetary