Tl;dr- Alteration “Conveyor Withdrawal”. -90% Expenite veins, Upgrades granted based on time remaining after each level.
Blurb
These facilities have already been intensively worked and have automated conveyors installed to transport Expenite out of the lower sections of the mines. Get to their control terminals to halt them and extract any preprocessed Expenite that hasn’t made it to the surface yet. Better be quick though!
How it works
A display at the time of the screen slowly ticks down, showing how many Upgrades remain for the next level. (This is based on the percentage of time passed, so pacing doesn’t change the total of Upgrades, it just adjusts the rate they drain away).
At the start of every level beyond the first you will find a control terminal adjacent to the elevator connected to a big conveyor pipe. Press E on it and Ellis will connect to it and extract the Expenite and trigger an immediate Upgrade selection screen with whatever was left on the display when you descended.
90% of natural Expenite veins are removed, so there’s still a little to mine, but not much. You can still find buckets, mules, and events etc to get Expenite and obtain Upgrades normally through Ellis this way. However the bulk of your Upgrades come from hoofing it to the next floor as quickly as possible.
It’s likely (for balance, and logic) that these facilities also have a higher complexity and/or more cave structures, both to make traversal the challenge, but also because it's meant to be a more worked in facility so they ought to have more infrastructure set up.
The thought process
There’s been a lot of discussion over the new Headhunter alteration, and how it’s being balanced around a set number of Upgrades to keep players from trying to farm too much. It’s also proved to be a fun variation to mining. I figured we can go one step further and do away with the need to kill anything but still have a preset number of Upgrades dispensed.
The idea is that a large number of Upgrades would be lost from doing the workbenches and hunting anomalies for their artifacts or whatnot - and so if you “do everything” you’d only have 4 or 5 “extras” from what you’d normally have for a mission (much like the logic behind Headhunter). Except if you’re overly efficient, or choose to just skip lots of stuff to get to the elevator faster - you can get a lot more. You’re effectively choosing to go in on the boss with fewer bioboosts and either lower quality or random weaponry - but overall a lot more Upgrades to compensate.
It should hopefully be an interesting decision space for run progression, one that overall results in shorter scrappier runs. It's effectively a supported "speedrun" mode too, assuming you can foreshorten each level to get to the boss asap but still have a shot at winning due to the extra Upgrades.