EAsteroid Belts
An asteroid belt is a resource deposit made of countless asteroids, scattered through the sectors of nearly every system in the Expanse and worked by fleets sent out to extract what they hold. What a belt yields is never random: six mineral tiers run from common sand to the rare voidglass, and where each one turns up traces the same line as the region's security — the richer the ore, the further it sits from lawful reach.
An asteroid belt is a resource deposit made of countless asteroids, scattered through the sectors of nearly every system in the Expanse and worked by fleets sent out to extract what they hold. What a belt yields is never random: six mineral tiers run from common sand to the rare voidglass, and where each one turns up traces the same line as the region's security — the richer the ore, the further it sits from lawful reach.
What a Belt Is
A belt is not one asteroid but a field of them: enough rock and ore, drifting together in a single sector, to be worked for as long as a fleet keeps at it before the deposit runs dry and slowly refills. Belts sit alongside stations, gates, and containers as the fixtures that make a sector worth visiting, and they show up on the minimap the same way any other sector feature does — spot one, send a fleet, extract.
The Six Mineral Tiers
Every belt in the Expanse holds one of six minerals, ranked low to high value:
- Sand — the common ore, plentiful and easy, mined by every crew's first run.
- Ferrite — the next step up, still common enough to anchor a growing economy.
- Cobaltine — a mid-tier ore that starts to demand a longer reach from home.
- Vexite — dense and valuable, found deeper into contested space.
- Nullium — a scarce, high-value ore held only by systems few crews reach.
- Voidglass — the rarest mineral in the Expanse, found only at the deep edge of the map.
The Value Ladder Is a Map of Power
The mineral ladder is a map of where the Nexus Protectorate is not. Sand is mined only in the Ethereal Expanse, the safest and most heavily garrisoned region in the galaxy — voidglass is mined only in the Quantum Reaches, the Binary Provinces, and the Outer Periphery, where sentinel presence falls to zero. The richest ore sits exactly where the law cannot follow.
This is not an accident of world design, it is the setting's argument made visible: authority that depends on presence cannot exist where no one can stand watch, so the deep dark stays exactly as lawless as it is rich. It is why the Crimson Corsairs thrive at the bottom of the ladder, and why Khareth commanders push past every lawful belt chasing the deepest voidglass vein — for very different reasons, aimed at the same coordinates.