Player's manual

How to Play
Space Rush: Miners

You fly one ship and you own one mining station. Your mining gun is also your weapon, so every second you spend chipping ore out of the field is a second you are not defending your station or attacking somebody else's. One ship, three jobs, never enough time. The last reactor standing wins.

▶ Play the game

1. The loop

A match is 10–15 minutes long and it is the same four moves, over and over, under a clock that never stops.

Mine. Fly to the asteroid field and hold fire on a rock. The same shot that bites a hull chips a rock into ore — one weapon, one trigger. Chunks drift to you on their own if you are close enough.
Bank. Your hold is small — 2 ore to start. Fly home and simply enter your station's collection field: the hold drains steadily into your safe banked total while you are inside it, and stops the instant you leave. No docking, no parking. Banked ore is safe. Held ore is not.
Spend. Close in on your own station to open the Build & Upgrade wheel and turn ore into turrets, shields, reactor repairs, or a better ship.
Fight. Besiege a rival station, or hunt loaded miners out in the open field where the ore is.

The whole game is the triangle: mine, defend, attack. You cannot do all three at once, and the ore field runs dry. Every death, every purchase, and every alarm moves you around that triangle — and deciding where to be, every few seconds, is the game.

2. Controls

Everything is playable on all three: keyboard and mouse, a gamepad, or a touchscreen. No verb is missing from any of them.

Every action, on every device
Action	Keyboard & mouse	Gamepad	Touch
Thrust / steer	WASD	Left stick	Left virtual stick — put your thumb anywhere on the left half
Aim	Mouse cursor	Right stick	Right virtual stick (Manual aiming only)
Fire / mine	Left mouse button	Right trigger	Right stick while engaged, or the hold-to-FIRE button under Auto-aim
Build & Upgrade	E, near your own station	Y / Triangle	The BUILD button, which appears near your own station
Minimap: corner ⇄ full	M	M	Tap the minimap
Pause / menus	Escape	Start	Tap

On a phone the two sticks are dynamic: they appear under your thumb wherever it lands, rather than sitting in a fixed spot you have to find. The left half is always thrust. The right half changes shape with your aiming setting — see below.

On desktop a controls strip runs along the bottom edge listing the live bindings, and it swaps automatically the moment you pick up a pad. On touch there is no strip: the visible sticks and buttons are the legend.

3. Aiming & steering styles

Two settings decide how the ship handles. Both are changeable at any time, from Settings or from the pause menu, on every device.

Aiming — Auto-aim or Manual

Auto-aim (the default) — the weapon picks the nearest valid target within range, all the way around you, and leads it, because shots have travel time. You choose when to fire; your positioning chooses what gets hit.
Manual — you aim with the mouse, the right stick, or the right thumb. Slower to learn, and the only way to pick a specific target out of a crowd.

Steering — Tap Commander or Sticks

Tap Commander (the default) — tap a spot to fly there; tap a thing to attack it. That includes rocks, so tapping an asteroid mines it. Tap your own station to fly to its collection field, or, if you are already close, to open the Build wheel.
Sticks — you fly it yourself: WASD, the left stick, or the left thumb. More precise, and the only way to dodge properly.

Neither pair is a beginner mode and an expert mode. Auto-aim leads better than most people do; the sticks dodge better than any standing order can.

4. Reading the screen

The HUD only shows things you act on. From the corners inward:

Top left — ORE. A row of filled squares is what is in your hold, one square per cargo slot, flashing when it is full. The number underneath is your banked total — the safe one.
Top centre — the ASTEROID WAVE clock. Which wave you are in, the countdown to the next one, and the match time.
Top right — your station's HP, in your colour, mirrored as a ring on the station itself.
Bottom right — the minimap. Fogged until you build a radar satellite. On a team, the fog lifts wherever a teammate is, exactly as if you were there yourself.
Over every ship — a narrow hull bar in the owner's colour, yours included. On a team, every name also carries FRIENDLY or ENEMY and its letter, in words.

The one rule that reads every health ring

A whole ring in the owner's colour is the health that remains, and threat red fills it clockwise from twelve o'clock in proportion to the health lost. A completely red ring is death, exactly. Reactor and shields share the rule, so a station under siege reads outermost-first: the shields redden and die before the reactor even starts to fill.

Every station's ring reads true at every range, whoever owns it. Red is only ever damage — never the station — so an enemy home still reads in its owner's colour while it burns.

The alarm

When your reactor, shield or turrets take sustained damage you get one unmistakable klaxon and a screen-edge arrow pointing home. The klaxon sounds once per attack — it does not nag — but the arrow stays for as long as the attack does. It rings for your side's station only, never for anyone else's.

That moment — deep in the field, hold half full, alarm going — is the game asking you the only question it ever asks.

5. What you can build

Everything is bought in one place: the Build & Upgrade wheel, opened at your own station. Five segments, each named in words — four of them spend on your station and one on your ship. Your live ore total sits in the hub. A segment's only number is its cost — yellow if you can pay it, red if you cannot.

The five segments
Segment	What it does	Limits
TURRET	Auto-fires at enemies in range. Once the ring is full, the same segment upgrades your weakest turret one mark — Mk I → Mk II → Mk III. Each mark is tougher, hits harder, fires faster and, crucially, aims better.	4 per station. Takes about 10 seconds to assemble.
SHIELD	A regenerating bubble over your reactor. It only starts regenerating after about 8 seconds without being hit.	2 per station. Takes about 15 seconds.
REPAIR REACTOR	1 ore restores 15 reactor HP, instantly and in full — there is nothing to interrupt. It repairs your station, never your ship. This is the one segment that also prints the HP it will give you.	15-second cooldown per station, counted down live on the wedge. It is per station, not per player — a teammate patching the same reactor waits on the same clock.
RADAR	A satellite that orbits your station and lifts the minimap's fog of war around it.	1 per station. Takes about 12 seconds.
UPGRADE SHIP ▸	The one segment that spends on your ship rather than your station. It opens a second wheel — your upgrade ladders. See the next section.	Carries an arrow instead of a price; costs escalate with each rung.

Construction takes time, and queued construction counts against the cap. Defenses are something you buy before the attack, not during it. A ship hull, by contrast, is never repairable at all — ships are cheap and respawn free.

How a station actually dies

Turrets deter; the ship defends. No turret mark ever out-ranges a ship's weapon, so a patient attacker can always pick turrets off from the edge — slowly, and while ringing the owner's alarm the whole time. But turrets firing alongside the defender's ship kill attackers fast.
Pressure beats regeneration. Shields need 8 quiet seconds. Keep hitting and they never come back, and every repair the defender taps is an ore not spent on winning.
Two beats one. An occupied station is nearly uncrackable alone. This is why being in the lead is dangerous.

So: attacking a station whose owner is home is usually a mistake. Pulling them away from it — or noticing that their alarm has gone unanswered — is the skill.

6. Ship upgrades

Behind UPGRADE SHIP is the same radial control, speaking the same language. Each track shows how far up its ladder you are, as pips, and one number: the cost. A finished ladder reads MAX. Upgrades multiply your hull's base stats, and they survive respawning.

WEAPON ▸ DAMAGE — per-shot bite. This is also your mining speed: one weapon, one stat.
WEAPON ▸ FIRE RATE — 0.05 s off the gap between shots per rung. More damage per second; it does not mine faster, because each shot's ore chip is sized to your reload.
ENGINE — top speed.
CARGO — +2 hold per tier, from a base of 2. The upgrade that changes how you play more than any other.
HULL — HP, so you survive the trip home.

Every ore in your hold has five competing uses: a turret, a shield, a repair, a ship upgrade, or the bank. The ore field is finite. That standing argument with yourself, repeated all match under a clock, is the strategy layer.

7. The four hulls

You pick a hull before the match, on the SHIP SELECT screen, and it is locked once the match starts. It sets your speed, acceleration, turn rate, hull HP, weapon power and cargo. Every tile shows its stats as pips and as numbers.

Relative to the Vanguard
Hull	Speed	Accel	Turn	Hull HP	Power	Cargo	Plays like
Interceptor	130%	120%	140%	35	8	2	Scout and miner-hunter. Catches loaded ships in the open; melts on turrets.
Vanguard	100%	100%	100%	50	10	2	All-rounder, and the pre-selected default. Second-best at everything.
Excavator	90%	100%	80%	55	13	2	Mining engine and close-range bruiser. Out-earns everyone; cannot run away.
Hauler	85%	80%	85%	70	9	3	Logistics and siege tank. Hauls three ore and soaks a siege; arrives late.

8. Waves, the Crush, and the end

The claim sits in a decaying asteroid belt that is eating itself. Ore arrives in five timed waves, and each one spawns closer to the centre than the last — so as the match runs on, everybody left alive is squeezed into a smaller and smaller contested space with everybody else.

When the last wave is spent, the claim closes in. This is the collapse phase — the Crush — and it is not an enemy, it is a vice:

Shields stop regenerating.
Repair shuts off, for good.
No new ore arrives, ever.
The boundary contracts and finishes whoever the players don't.

The match cannot stalemate. That is a rule, not a hope. A stockpile spent on staying alive is a stockpile that is simply gone when the Crush starts, and nothing regenerates any more.

You win by owning the last surviving reactor — on a team, by being the last side with one standing. If the last two die on the same tick, whoever died last wins.

9. Dying, respawning, wrecks

Losing your ship is cheap. You respawn free at your home station after 5 seconds, with every upgrade intact. What it actually costs you is time and position — you come back a long way from wherever you were needed.
You drop your entire hold where you exploded. All of it, for anyone to scavenge. Your banked ore is never touched.
A full hold picks up nothing. It exerts no pull and refuses the chunk. With a base hold of 2 that is ordinary play, not an edge case — the game tells you when it happens.
Losing your reactor ends your match. You are out from that moment — no ship, no respawn — with a Rematch button and the option to spectate. On a team, your side plays on until its last reactor dies, but you are watching.
A dead station leaves a wreck for the rest of the match, ringed with ore-laden debris that anyone can take — funded by the dead player's own banked fortune. Nobody's hold is big enough to carry it away in one trip, so wreck sites stay contested. Fights over a fresh wreck are the point.
On the larger maps with fewer than eight players, the unused home slots are placed as derelicts — abandoned rigs nobody owns, carrying an ore field you can scavenge from the opening whistle. They are not opponents and they never shoot back.

Ore is conserved exactly. Nothing you mine, drop or loot ever quietly disappears.

10. Matches, teams and bots

2 to 8 stations, in Free-for-All (everyone for themselves) or Teams (sides made explicit, uneven splits allowed).
Friendly fire is off. Allied shots pass straight through each other, and turrets and auto-aim ignore allies entirely.
On a team you share vision. The minimap's fog lifts under a teammate's coverage as if it were your own — the live dots and the ground they have already uncovered.
Bots fill any seat you want filled, at Easy, Medium or Hard, and they each have a personality with a hull to match — so a silhouette on the minimap is information. The whole game is playable solo, and offline.
Online, the match cannot be paused. Offline against bots, it can.

11. Ten things worth knowing

Bank early and often. A base hold is 2 ore. Dying with it full gives it all to whoever killed you.
Buy cargo first. +2 hold per tier changes the length of every trip you make for the rest of the match.
You do not have to stop to bank. Flying through your own collection field drains the hold. Fly the long way home through it.
One turret is not a wall. It buys you the seconds it takes to fly back. Answer the alarm.
Repair is rationed. 15 seconds between taps, per station. Do not plan to out-heal anybody.
Break contact to get your shields back. Eight quiet seconds. Drive them off, then repair.
Upgrade a turret when the ring is full. A Mk III tracks a strafing attacker far better than a Mk I does — you are buying accuracy, not just damage.
Shots have travel time. Yours, theirs, and the turrets'. Keep moving sideways and a low-mark ring will miss you.
Camp the wreck, not the field. A dead player's fortune is on the ground and too big to carry in one trip.
Watch the wave clock. Each wave lands nearer the centre than the last, and after the fifth there is no more ore, no repair and no shield regen — ever. Spend what you were saving before the Crush spends it for you.