Build your colony. Mine the future.

Miner 2149 — Palm OS Strategy Game

Asteroid Belt // Operations Console

Play Michael Baker's classic Palm OS space-mining strategy game free in your browser.

01 Launch probes and choose an asteroid.

02 Select the bulldozer, then tap beside the mother ship.

03 Advance one day to clear the site.

Mission briefing

Introduction

The year is 2149. The invention of the Dark Matter Drive has made traveling between the planets commonplace. Mankind has spread among most of the planets of the solar system.

Unfortunately, the Dark Matter Drive requires energy in the form of diridium, a rare compound that was initially manufactured from asteroids and meteorites that landed on Earth millions of years ago. With the supply of diridium on Earth nearly exhausted, the economic viability of the off-world colonies is threatened.

As a former mining consultant, your economic viability is also threatened by the closure of many Earth mines. Recent advances in mining and construction have made it possible to obtain diridium from large asteroids circling in the asteroid belt. It is dangerous work, but the riskiest jobs usually have the greatest payoff.

The off-world governments have offered financial backing to anyone qualified to construct and manage a two-year mining operation. Six months ago, your application was accepted. Your team of twenty has trained extensively. Today, you risk everything in the hope that your mining operation will bring riches you have only heard and dreamed about.

Your transport is now boarding…

Field manual

Playing Instructions

Miner 2149 is a simulation based on interconnected formulas. Everything you change can affect the outcome of your colony.

Starting your operation
  • You begin with a 1,000,000 credit stipend to build your colony.
  • Launch up to five probes. Each costs 17,000 credits and reports on one asteroid.
  • Class 1 asteroids are easiest, with more ore and fewer disasters. Class 5 asteroids are the most difficult.
  • Your mother ship supports the first twenty workers with food, quarters, and life support for 21 days. Nothing can harm the colony during that time — no disasters, no time shifts, no walkouts — but good fortune can still find you.

To begin

  1. Use the building selector at the bottom left to select the bulldozer. The selected tool and its cost appear below the selector.
  2. Tap a smooth area immediately next to the mother ship.
  3. Press +1 on the Advance bar. Bulldozers take one day to clear a space.
  4. For longer jumps, tap the clock on the Advance bar and choose any number of days up to 20.
  5. Select a building, then tap the clear space to begin construction.
  6. Tap a construction site for project information. Use Undo if you placed the wrong building.
Screen controls and reports

Level — Switch between an asteroid's three levels.

Operations report — Monitor workers, workforce, morale, wage, life support, food, health, occupancy, and deaths.

Production report — Review mines, processor capacity, power, sell price, diridium, storage, and the 30-day projection.

Options — Turn Disaster Mode or gridlines on, save or load games, or resign. Your colony autosaves after every advance.

Advance — +1 and +7 move time forward directly. The clock opens a grid to pick any number of days from 1 to 20.

Wage — Adjust daily worker pay. A typical wage is 600–700 credits, depending on diridium prices.

Diridium — Tap the storage container to sell processed diridium.

Undo — Reverse the last building placement.

Disaster Mode

Disaster Mode raises the chance of a disaster to roughly ten times normal. Cave-ins, plagues, meteor storms, and power plant explosions stop being setbacks you recover from and become the thing you plan around.

Turn it on from the Options menu. The game asks you to confirm first:

  • The asteroid class still matters, and it compounds. A Class 1 asteroid in Disaster Mode is dangerous; a Class 5 asteroid in Disaster Mode is close to unsurvivable.
  • Disaster Mode colonies are ranked on their own boards, one per asteroid class. See Records.
  • A colony only counts as a Disaster Mode run if Disaster Mode was on for every day of it. Switch it off at any point and the colony is scored as a normal run instead, so you are free to experiment without being locked in.
  • Bringing a colony through the full two years without ever leaving Disaster Mode is the hardest thing in the game, and the only way to earn one particular device frame.
Buildings and terrain
Building or terrainPurposeDaysWorkersCredits
BulldozerClear smooth areas for building.116,500
Diridium mineExtract ore; build directly on an ore vein.73045,500
Hydroponics gardenGrow food for about 200 workers.101265,000
Tube connectorConnect buildings and expand quickly.2013,000
Life supportSupply air for about 400 workers.101565,000
Worker quartersHouse about 50 workers.9158,500
Space portTransfer sold diridium to waiting ships.102065,000
Power plantSupply electricity to colony buildings.153097,500
ProcessorConvert ore to tradable diridium; supports 3–4 mines.152097,500
SickbayCare for up to 300 injured or ill workers.121278,000
StorageHold processed diridium until it is sold.91258,500
Ore veinPlace a mine here. Bulldozing destroys the vein.———
Mother shipProvides essentials for the colony's first 21 days.———
Meteor defense and strategy

During meteor storms, the mobile laser platform moves to the best vantage point. Tap inbound meteors to destroy them. The platform requires power, and firing increases its recharge time.

  • Build only beside a completed building, in the four cardinal directions.
  • Clear smooth terrain before building, but never bulldoze an ore vein.
  • Plan ahead: construction takes time and every structure costs credits.
  • Watch expenses, food, life support, morale, and workforce closely.
  • Build a power plant, space port, mine, life support, and processor early.

Adapted from the original Miner 2149 Version 3.0 documentation, copyright 1998–1999 Michael Baker.

Hardware

Field Kit

The colony administration issued a lot of handheld hardware over the years. Three units ship with your posting; the rest are earned in the field, and the game will not tell you how.

    Colony archive

    Records

    A board for every asteroid class, in normal play and in Disaster Mode. Bring a colony through its two years well enough and your name goes up. The names already there held the belt before you.

    PlaceCommanderScore

    Transmissions

    Mission Log

    Dispatches from the crew rebuilding Miner 2149 for the browser: what shipped, what we got wrong, and what the twenty-five-year-old Palm binary keeps telling us.

    1. Transmission 19 System online

      The records go up

      Every asteroid class now keeps a board of ten, in normal play and in Disaster Mode, and bringing a colony through its two years well enough puts your name on it. The places you have not taken yet are held by the colony’s archive. See Records.

      Technical detail

      Records live in this browser, one board per class and mode. The archive’s names are added whenever a board is read and never stored, so they can never crowd out a place you earned. Beating the top of a board is still the original’s personal record, with its own congratulation; any lower place is the port’s addition, and asks for your name the same way — eight characters at most, as the Palm did.

    2. Transmission 18 Parity check

      Five million to beat

      The original never congratulated a record nobody had earned: an empty high score starts at 5,000,000, held by Mr. Nobody. The port had been calling any finished mission a personal best. Now each asteroid class keeps its own record, and you have to beat Mr. Nobody to set one.

      Technical detail

      Version 3.0 kept a single high score and compared it without adjustment; the asteroid class rode along only in the Tycoon Club code it showed registered players. A record per class is a deliberate divergence. The “Hi Score” line under the start screen had been painted into the artwork. It is drawn as text again, and with no record set it matches the painting pixel for pixel.

    3. Transmission 17 Bug exterminated

      Undo knows when to let go

      Undo could refund a building from a colony you had since reloaded, or one a day had finished or a disaster had flattened, writing the old ground back over whatever stood there. It now takes back only your last placement, and only until the day moves on.

      Technical detail

      The original has no undo at all, so there was nothing to match: the record of the last placement simply outlived everything around it. It is now forgotten whenever a colony is entered, new or loaded, and at every advance.

    4. Transmission 16 Bug exterminated

      The colony comes back the way you left it

      Load a saved mine and it now returns exactly as it was. The level you were working, the module you had selected in the store, and whether you could afford it were all quietly wrong before — and all wrong in ways that looked like the game working.

      Technical detail

      Three faults, one cause. Each screen rebuilt itself from the save by applying its own hand-picked subset of it: one restored the store caption without the sprite that shows which module is lit, another drew level 1 over whatever level the save actually named, and a third set the cannot-afford marker but never cleared it, so it survived until the next selection even after you sold ore. None of them was wrong on its own terms. Each was wrong about what the others had already done.

      Everything the colony knows now moves through a single owner, and the screen is redrawn from it rather than patched by whoever happened to change something. During development the colony is handed out frozen, so a change that goes around that owner stops the game instead of silently desynchronising it — which turned up four more places doing exactly that within two minutes of the first playthrough, one of them running at the end of every single turn.

    5. Transmission 15 Under construction

      Virus detected

      Something is loose in the Mother Ship's control system and it has stopped answering the usual instructions. A handset is being certified to go in after it, over three escalating rounds: isolate, contain, purge. Whoever clears it will keep the unit upon successful completion.

      Technical detail

      This event never existed on the original game. It was introduced in the modernised version to add new challenges and interactions for the player while remaining faithful to the original game experience.

    6. Transmission 14 Under construction

      Disasters worth playing

      Four of the original's disasters play out as animations you can only watch happen to you. The meteor storm stopped being one of those. The shuttle crash, the power-plant overload and the mine cave-in are next.

      Technical detail

      It's a more rewarding experience to interact with disasters that require you to engage with the new mechanics directly rather than passively observing them.

    7. Transmission 13 System online

      Something in the ore

      A handheld nobody will admit to issuing has turned up in colony inventory, along with a screen color to match. It appears on no manifest. Finding it is left as an exercise.

      Technical detail

      The strike that announces it is a green-screen plate re-encoded so its background is true black, then composited with mix-blend-mode: screen — under which black adds nothing and the bolt adds light. There is no alpha channel and nothing is keyed while you watch, which is both cheaper than processing 4K frames in the page and a better match for what lightning actually does to a scene. The clip is only requested by players who have earned it.

    8. Transmission 12 Parity check

      Meteor storms scale with the asteroid class

      Meteor defence used to be equally punishing on every asteroid.The laser now recharges a little faster on the easier classes, and the platform shrugs off a glancing hit. Class 5 is the original difficulty players experienced.

      Technical detail

      Higher class asteroids recharge more slowly: 0.5 for class 5 to 0.7 for class 1. The laser platform forgives 0 to 4 pixels of meteor collisions as a glancing blow. Meteor speed is is unchanged from the original game: 30 − class × 6.

    9. Transmission 11 Bug exterminated

      The mother ship keeps its word

      Your colony is promised twenty-one protected days. Two events had been reaching straight through that promise: a time shift that skipped you forward, and a walkout that took your workers.

      Technical detail

      Checked against the version 3.0 source, which draws its event without consulting the day at all: the original really did fire these from day zero, so this is a deliberate divergence rather than a fix. Only the harmful pair is held back — the alien artifact and the processor boost do nothing this early, and the survey and the rich vein are the opening's only good luck. The gate suppresses the effect and not the draw, so the random sequence is unchanged and a future comparison against the original still lines up.

    10. Transmission 10 System online

      Disaster Mode gets its own ranking

      A colony played entirely in Disaster Mode is now ranked, in a category of its own. Switch the mode off for even one day and the run goes back in the normal book.

      Technical detail

      Since Disaster Mode is the hardest challenge offered by the game, it deserves its own ranking category. Players who complete a run entirely in Disaster Mode have demonstrated exceptional skill, and their achievements are recognized separately from standard play.

    11. Transmission 09 System online

      The sky fights back

      The meteor defence screen is now a playable disaster-mode challenge. Hit a meteor high enough and it cracks into two halves you then have to clear between them; manage it and the core pays out. Let one land on the platform and you are repairing while the rest keep coming.

      Technical detail

      A morale bonus needs zero misses. The diridium bonus needs a cracked core. Skilled play produces improved outcomes.

    12. Transmission 08 Palm archaeology

      Updating to version 3.2

      Commanders can now advance a specific number of days using the clock menu. The Disaster Mode option has also been added, allowing for more challenging gameplay scenarios.

      Technical detail

      The clock menu allows you to advance from one to twenty days in place of the previous fixed amounts. Disaster Mode replaces the Auto Save toggle. Auto Save happens automatically now.

      These changes give players more control over the passage of time and introduce a higher difficulty setting for those seeking a greater challenge.

    13. Transmission 07 System online

      New Commander Interfaces

      Every handheld frame in the game mounts original artwork built from scratch for this project. Commanders have different opinions about which are the most effective. The choice is yours to make.

      Technical detail

      Eleven units, every one of them custom hardware crafted for this project. The Field Kit carries the note for each unit as you earn it.

      The names and the service notes nod at science fiction you may recognize.

    14. Transmission 06 System online

      Signal reacquired

      The colony went quiet on 3 August 2023 and stayed quiet for three years and four days. Nothing was abandoned out there. The mine, the ledger, and the code were all still where they had been left. On 7 August 2026 comms were reestablished and the site answered again.

      Technical detail

      The project started as a personal project with a focus on maintaining the integrity of the original experience while modernizing the supporting infrastructure. Every change was carefully considered to ensure that the core mechanics of the game remained faithful to the original vision.

      The project was shelved for a period while the creator was occupied with other commitments. Implementation resumed after a few years, bringing the project to its current state.

    15. Transmission 05 System online

      One day in seven hundred

      Until this point nothing happened to the colony that a commander had not done to it. Then the news started arriving on its own: prices moving, a rich vein turning up, workers walking out, a visitor at the airlock claiming to be an engineer. Roughly one day in seven hundred brings something — which sounds like nothing until you remember a full tour is seven hundred and thirty days long.

      Technical detail

      The one-in-seven-hundred draw is the original's, and it is still the number the game rolls today. That is exactly why the virus event four years later had to be built to fit inside it: an eighth disaster would have moved the odds on all seven of the existing ones.

      Several constants landed in that same afternoon's work and have not moved since — the price shift of ninety days plus five, the rich vein paid in units of fifty, the engineer's fee of fifteen to thirty thousand credits, and the walkout that takes ten per cent of your workers plus ten more for every step up the asteroid class. They are still spelled that way in the rules module, because rounding any of them to something tidier would be a different game.

    16. Transmission 04 Parity check

      Where the diridium is

      Asteroids stopped being drawn by hand. From here every mine is generated at launch: smooth ground, rough patches that will not take a structure, the mother ship, and the ore. Harder asteroids carry less of it, and the deeper you dig the more there is.

      Technical detail

      The vein count is from the original game: a draw against 7 - class added to 6 - class, floored at one, so a class 5 asteroid has less ore by arithmetic rather than by adjustment. Level 2 gets one extra vein and level 3 gets two per pass, which is why the bottom of a mine is always the richest part of it. Rough areas run the other way — random(3) + class — so the hardest rock is also the hardest to build on.

      This was the first place the port copied the original's formula instead of inventing one, and the line in the map generator still carries a pointer back to the line of source it came from. That habit is the whole project now.

    17. Transmission 03 System online

      Surface depth animation

      Advance a day and the asteroid surface does not simply change. It comes back a row at a time from the top, each row landing with a ragged run of inverted tiles at its right-hand end that settles as the next row arrives. It was the first thing that felt like playing on a Palm handheld rather than a web page.

      Technical detail

      Ten rows on a seventy-five millisecond timer. Each row inverts a random three to nine of its tiles, counted in from the right, and the row above it flips back to normal as the wipe passes. Nothing about that is decorative: a 160×160 monochrome screen has no fade and no alpha to spend, so inversion is the only transition the hardware ever had.

      A first pass three days earlier could only redraw one fixed level. The 17 January version made it a system: any of the three levels, and an optional wipe to blank rock first for a mine nobody has touched yet. It has deterministic unit coverage now, but the timing and the width of that inverted band were settled by eye.

    18. Transmission 02 Palm archaeology

      Hand-built, sprite by sprite

      Seventeen days after the first stake went in, the colony had a face. Menus that opened, buttons that pressed in, and the game font. The game's images were crafted from the original, one at a time and packed into a single sprite sheet. The interface typeface was rebuilt as pixels rather than an approximated web font.

      Technical detail

      One commit carries the shape the project still has today: a sprite atlas and its PNG, three Palm OS bitmap fonts in regular and bold, and the first hand-written modules: the application, the buttons, the game data, the save and load.

      Bitmap fonts rather than a scaled typeface, because the original's text is one-bit at a fixed size. Anything with anti-aliasing on its edges would produce a different screen, not a smaller one. Every line of the game's text is measured against a grid that assumes those exact glyph widths.

    19. Transmission 01 System online

      Breaking ground

      The survey stake went in at 3:02 on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2021. It marked a file with the project's name and nothing else. Two minutes later there was a page, a canvas and a hundred and twenty-six lines of JavaScript.

      Technical detail

      The first real file opens with a function that turns a hexadecimal string into a buffer of clamped bytes: which is the shape you need if you are going to lift bitmaps out of a twenty-three-year-old Palm OS program and put them on a screen. Before there was a game to run, before there was any game logic at all, the first question the project asked was how to get the original's pixels out.

      The rest of it is scaffolding: a 640×640 stage, an info window, a top bar, Pixi 6 off a CDN and no build step. The canvas has been 160×160 for a long time now, but the dependency and the renderer are the ones chosen that afternoon.

    Inbound — Playable disasters, and a way to compare records beyond this browser.

    This log is curated. The full, factual record of every change lives in the changelog.