Overview
"Space Miner Trader" is a homage that fuses three games I grew up with. You fly across an 8×8 grid of sectors, land on planets to dig minerals out of a depth-tiered mine, then haul them to markets where supply and demand actually move the prices. Underneath it all you're juggling fuel, hull, oxygen and cargo space -; the kind of resource anxiety those originals lived on.
It ships in two forms that share one data model: a text/console version and a full graphical pygame build, kept at "gameplay parity" so balance tweaks land in both.
Background
The three ancestors are named outright in the credits: Drug Wars donates the buy-low/sell-high market loop, Miner VGA donates the depth-based digging, and EGA Trek donates the grid-navigation feel. Reference material for all three -; original text dumps, screenshots, even a phone video of them running -; got archived alongside the project so the homage stayed honest.
It started life as a text engine in July 2025, then came back almost a year later for a graphics-and-packaging pass: the pygame frontend, runtime animation, a theming layer, and a distributable build.
How It Works
The whole thing runs on a state machine -; main menu, navigation, planet menu, mining, trading, game over -; over dataclass entities and JSON saves. The three halves interlock through a single number: depth.
- Navigation. 64 sectors, 1-;2 planets each. Move costs fuel; jumps cost more by distance. Every trip rolls a 10% chance of a random event -; asteroid field, solar flare, distress signal, debris, pirates.
- Mining. A grid you descend into, with shallow Iron and Copper up top and Platinum, Uranium, Crystal and Rare Earth deep down. Going deeper means oxygen management, cave-ins and water hazards. Tools: drill, explosives, pump, scanner, torch, reinforcement.
- Trading. A market with live price/demand/supply on 8 minerals, base values spanning Iron at $10 to Rare Earth at $2000 -; a 200× spread. Prices crash and spike; a news feed hints at it.
That 200× price spread is exactly why the depth risk curve matters: the deep, dangerous minerals are the ones worth hauling. There's also a ~29-entry achievement system across Wealth, Mining, Trading, Exploration, Survival and Special, including a hidden completionist.
Current Status
Archived as a finished, playable game. The summary calls it "fully playable with
complete feature set," and a populated achievements.json from May 2026
proves it was actually played through several milestones rather than just compiled.
- Both text and graphical versions are feature-complete and share the same logic.
- Every sprite is generated procedurally at startup -; no art asset files at all.
- A PyInstaller build was packaged into a 13 MB distributable; a parallel Nuitka build was attempted and hit a crash (the crash report is still in the tree).