A mining field looks generous until you have to cross it in one unbroken line. Star Miner drops you on the edge of a grid dense with ore and asks a deceptively small question: where do you step in, and which single path do you trace before the exit closes behind you?
The trick is that you never double back cheaply. Every tile you take is a tile you commit to, and every detour toward a five-point crystal is fuel you are not spending on the way out. The field is built to tempt - a fat cluster of big ore in one corner, a lonely crystal marooned behind a matterfield, a fuel canister that only pays off if you were already heading that way. Greed and arithmetic pull in opposite directions, and the whole puzzle lives in that gap.
Terrain is the quiet second layer. Slipstream tiles carry you for free; matterfields drag at two fuel apiece; wormholes fling you across the board to their twin and then both snap shut, so the shortcut you plan is a shortcut you get exactly once. Read the field wrong and you strand yourself a few points short of the portal with the tank reading empty.