Aluminium is the resource that quietly gates most of the early repairs in Breathedge 2. You cannot pick it up by hand, you cannot scrap it off the train, and until you have the right tool it will sit on the rocks outside your base looking like ordinary asteroid texture.
Quick answer: Craft the Thumper, fly out of the base into the Outskirts asteroid field, and drill the orangey-silver patches on the large floating rocks. Each deposit gives two Aluminium before it turns into a depleted node.
The tool chain that leads to Aluminium
Aluminium sits in the middle of a short crafting dependency, not at the start of it. You need a mining tool before the ore does anything for you, and that tool has its own prerequisites. The order below is the whole path, from your first pickup to the point where Aluminium starts paying off.
| Stage | What you gather or craft | What it opens up |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Metal from the balls floating around the train | Enough material for a basic crowbar |
| 2 | Crowbar | Lets you pull more Metal and Plastic out of the environment |
| 3 | Thumper | The mining tool that extracts Aluminium from asteroid ore |
| 4 | Aluminium | Feeds the Cutter and the repair recipes around the base |
Note: do not go hunting for Electrical Tape before this. The Cutter needed to strip tape from the broken red pipes is itself an Aluminium recipe, so the ore has to come first.
Where Aluminium deposits are in the Outskirts
Every early Aluminium node is outside. Head through the exit of your base into the open space of the Outskirts and look at the large floating asteroids drifting nearby, rather than the debris and wreckage closer to the train.
The deposits are small ore patches sitting on the asteroid surface, and they read as a distinctly orangey-silver metallic colour against the dull grey rock. From a distance they blend in. Once you are within a few metres they stand out clearly, and the game labels them “Aluminum deposits” when your reticle is on them. There is no single mandatory rock, so if one asteroid comes up empty, drift to the next one in the cluster.
How to mine Aluminium
Yield per deposit and how to confirm it worked
A single node hands over two Aluminium and is then finished. You will know the extraction registered in two places. The node’s label switches to “Depleted deposit” and stops accepting the Thumper, and the ore shows up as Aluminium when you open your inventory.
If nothing happens when you use the tool, the cause is almost always one of three things. The node has already been mined out, you are holding a different tool, or you are simply too far from the surface for the interaction to register.
What Aluminium is spent on
The Cutter is the first meaningful sink, and it is the one that matters most, because Electrical Tape is locked behind it. Tape in turn goes into the Nutri-Pack creator and the kettle inside the train, which are the devices that give you proper food and drinkable water instead of raw apples and chewed ice.
Beyond that, Aluminium keeps coming up in repairs and gear recipes as you work through the Repair Train objectives. Given that each deposit only yields two, it is worth clearing every node you fly past rather than mining exactly what a single recipe asks for. Stock is cheap to build up early, and backtracking across the asteroid field on a half-empty oxygen tank is not.
