jpmschweitzerandClaude Opus 4.6
68867894e9
All 36 commodity stubs fleshed out with lore context, production chain descriptions, and economic intelligence briefing voice. Key treatments: fusion_fuel (D-187 8:1 ratio), services (location-bound mechanics), brands distinguished from commodities per D-185. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2.0 KiB
Rare Minerals
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Rare Minerals |
| Tier | raw |
| Elasticity | unit_elastic |
| Base Price (Tractus) | 80 |
| Bulk Class | precision |
| Unit | tonnes |
| Production Ubiquity | concentrated |
| Demand Model | market |
| Commission Certified | No |
| Compact Contested | No |
| Shadow Viable | No |
| Panic Threshold (weeks) | 0 |
| Description | Exotic crystals, rare earths. Scarce, location-specific. Critical bottleneck for high-tech manufacturing. |
Rare minerals — exotic crystals, heavy rare earths, actinide-adjacent compounds, and precision-grade inorganic substrates — are the single most important supply-chain chokepoint in high-technology manufacturing. Electronics fabrication requires 0.5t per output unit; alloy fabrication requires 0.3t; drive core assembly requires 0.4t directly, plus additional mineral content in the alloy input. A rare minerals shortage cascades simultaneously into electronics, advanced alloys, and drive cores — and from there into nearly every final good that depends on those intermediates.
Production is concentrated, not distributed. Rare mineral deposits require specific geological conditions that most terrestrial and asteroid environments do not provide. The systems that have them hold structural economic advantages in the technology supply chain that cannot be replicated by investment alone — the geology is either there or it is not. This concentrates production in a relatively small number of systems, and the trade routes that move rare minerals outward from those systems are among the most reliably profitable freight corridors in the Reach.
No Commission certification required, no shadow channel. At 80 Tractus per tonne and precision bulk class, rare minerals move as high-value compact freight, not in bulk. The absence of a shadow market reflects both the difficulty of separating extraction from certification-free sale and the fact that the bottleneck commodity in three separate production chains draws too much scrutiny for informal trade to operate at scale.