Is there any point in mining underground?

The only thing that bothers me about this game is that ores are everywhere on the surface.

I expected to be mining underground a lot in the X sector, or at least thought that this would be the case. It seems a little silly how easy it is to skim the surface and get all that you need.

I'm curious, are there any advantages to digging underground? Are there any unique dungeons down there?

 

There are more ores in larger quantities under the surface, plus sometimes better items in general.

Also, sector X isn't even REMOTELY balanced right now, so no wonder?

 

There are tombs with bomb selling merchants, small sewers, small Apex labs (abandoned less than screen size is what I've found), a great place to find potato seeds, carrots neon melons etc. Some worlds have layers of bones and flesh or slime or other special sub-biomes. So yeah, for me, there's good reason to gamble on digging down to the molten level.

If your only play goal is to reach max tier fastest, no though. If you like alternate blocks, exploring, farming and discovery, though, there's stuff down there that varies with each planet.

 

Not a whole lot of point. There's a few mini-biomes, micro-dungeons, and a bit more ore as you get further down, but you can find everything you actually need on the surface. It's kind of a hassle to do any serious underground exploration anyway, the cave systems aren't great.

 

To escape acid rain and base-destroying meteors.

 

I was under the impression ore generation was currently setup this way so we could easily progress between sectors without much trouble, mainly for more people bug testing in the later sectors. If ore generation was setup like you'd expect it to be there would be tens of thousands in alpha and beta sector and much less in Delta and X sector, which would roadblock beta testing. The more people progressing through what's available now the better as it will help fixing and tweaking late game development.

On top of that there's lots of work they have to do in the underground as far as instances and fossils etc. It won't always be so empty.

Cliff Notes:

As of now it's easy. it'll get balanced out later.

 

I used to spend lots of time on the surface, but I found its not he most lucrative in terms of ores. The upside is thats where most of civilizations tend to be. The downside is that interacting with them isn't always the most productive. I consider it mostly for looks. I also stopped going on mad killing rampages because it doesn't really yield anything useful.

 

There's as much reason to go underground as there is to do anything else in this game. Playing with a friend last night who started digging near the beam-in point on a planet where I was clearing the dungeon. Dude found 3 techs and all I got was a handful of credits and some trash items.

There's several unique sub-biomes with their own chests/blueprints/resources, always nice to find those. A handful of dungeon-ish possibilities. Ran into a planet with occasional mini-sewer spawns last night, each one had a decent chest in the center. Hadn't seen those before. Prolly plenty of underground encounters to find.