One minor subtlety: the version number has finally been advanced to 4.1 - so those predicting "Odyssey Update 20" were finally wrong.
Receive a regular income from your systems, with the amount depending on how developed they are
That's an interesting answer to the "why would you colonise a new system when there are thousands here already?" question.
The new Refinery Contact can be found in Refinery markets and Industrial settlements - this contact allows you to turn your mined resources into a refined product, including the new material, haematite, found in rocky asteroid fields
Use for rocky asteroids beyond some core mining?
It looks like the Refinery Contact can do the obvious conversions of ore to refined goods - e.g. two Bauxite into one Aluminium.
The interesting question here is whether this has come with a rewrite of the market pricing, because in 4.0 if you're at a Refinery station you could sell one tonne of Bauxite for 1200 credits (assuming no useful BGS states) and buy 6t of Aluminium from the market (again, in neutral BGS states) with the proceeds, so a 2:1 ratio through the Refinery Contact is twelve times worse than you'd get through the markets.
If there's been enough market price (and perhaps market
quantity) rewrites to make the Refinery Contact at least sometimes useful that's really going to shake things up on the general trade and mining side too even outside of colonisation.
