Unlikely things to happen

Here are some unusual happenings in the game.

1. Surveying a destroyed asteroid
2. How high can the date go?
3. Rare asteroids

Surveying a destroyed asteroid

Ore surveys aren’t reported in until the Scoutship returns to the asteroid it set out from. (You can save time by sending the Scoutship to the asteroid, then conducting the survey, so that it “returns” to the asteroid it just surveyed and reports instantly.)

But what happens if a surveyed asteroid is destroyed before the Scoutship can get back with its report?

There’s actually a special dialog box for this eventuality, saying “Target asteroid has been destroyed! Survey report invalid.”

This doesn’t occur with sector exploration, since those reports are called in immediately.

How high can the date go?

The game begins at date E2.380.01. The last section of the date is the day, which increments about once every 2 seconds real-time. The day goes up to 99, at which point the day loops back to 01 and the year increments. Notably, there is no day 00.

But how high can the year go, and how long will it take to get there?

After 619 metric years and 98 days game time, you will reach the date E2.999.99. It will take 32 hours, 5 minutes, and 58 seconds of uninterrupted play to reach that time, not counting additional time spent in dialog boxes. You can’t leave the game unattended for this time, because you’re constantly interrupted by dialog boxes for things like random events and the Imperial Transporter notification.

However, that’s as high as the date goes. After one more day, E2.999.99 loops around to E2.000.01. They never coded E2 to increment, presumably because it was considered that nobody would actually play a single round for that long. You would also probably accumulate enough background radiation increases from Solar Flare random events to cause a real problem.

Rare asteroids

There are 24 asteroid layouts, but they appear to always be chosen in order, and the game never begins with more than 16 or so asteroids. This means there are some asteroid layouts that you will rarely see because they require a large number of asteroids to appear before the game will generate them.

Asteroid #17, with a hole.

Asteroid #19. An asteroid with two sections.

The asteroid used in the CU Amiga K240 demo.

Asteroid 20. Asteroid that looks like a ship.

Square shaped.

Asteroid 22. Large asteroid.

Asteroid 23. Huge asteroid. This is the last in the list and will almost never be seen, since you need all 24 asteroids to appear at once.

The largest asteroids have a rare large asteroid sprite on the space view.