Gems

**Gems** (also known as **crystals**) are resources gathered by mining asteroids or stolen from other bases, aliens or ships. Gems are essentially the currency in Starblast. Once a gem has been dropped, by either an asteroid, a player, or a base, it will remain floating in the same location for a few seconds, after which the gem will quickly shrink and disappear. Upon picking up any gems that were not dropped by pressing V, the player will receive an equal quantity of points.

Gems have many uses. They can be spent on upgrading ship stats, upgrading to a ship of a higher tier, purchasing extra lives, or contributed to a base for credits. In Survival Mode, this donation screen can be accessed by pressing the **W** key. In Team Mode, this menu can be accessed by entering the base's depot. These credits can later be exchanged for secondaries. You also get a bonus gem reward for killing ships levels 3-7.

Larger chunks of gems are worth more and are typically found in larger asteroids. It is more efficient to mine larger asteroids (more gems per damage dealt), but it is also riskier if enemies come later.

Upon picking up a gem, a sound effect is played, with lower-pitched tones for larger gems. If the gem would exceed the ship's cargo, the extra gems are lost. A ship cannot pick up more gems when its gem cargo is full, but if it loses 1 gem, it can pick up a gem and make the excess disappear.

Ships can buy 1 extra life for a full cargo of gems. Gems also function as extra shields for ships: when shield is zero, all damage received will cause that quantity of gems to be knocked out of the player as well as losing the amount of score equivalent to the amount of gems lost. These gems can then be picked up by anyone including the ship that dropped them.

In Team Mode, you can give gems by holding "V". This is a fast and efficient way to help your teammates upgrade, especially those who just joined. Picking up gems given by teammates, however, does not give you any score.

## Ship Capacity

Each ship of level L can hold 20L² gems. The number of gems currently in the player's cargo is shown by the red bar on the top left of the in-game GUI.

## Team Mode Stations

In team mode, each player is assigned to a specific team and its space station. Each station, if undamaged, will have a total of two gems depots available to the players. Each level base has a specific gem capacity that, when filled, will repair one random module (if damaged) and one capacity that will upgrade the base (if not Level 4). Gems can be exchanged for credits after the base has achieved Level 4 and full capacity, though this will no benefit the base directly in any way. If a station takes damage while it has gems in storage, it will begin to slowly drain from the module with the rate increasing as the shield level drops.

The player can also enter a depot and then leave the game safely. Assuming the base has not yet been destroyed, the player can accept the rescued ship upon returning and will not lose any of their points, ship, gems, secondaries or credits.

Note: In team mode, there is also a mechanic that if an asteroid is mined, only the ship that does the greatest damage to it can collect the gems. The other ships will simply fly over the gems like they have a full cargo. When a few seconds have passed, and the gems are uncollected, anyone can grab them. This is to help prevent gem stealing when mining, although it is still possible to gem steal when mining by using a heavier ship to knock the other ships away from the mined gems.

A station of level L can hold 800\*2L-1 gems.