Chance of Ruins
I’ve added the chance of alien ruins to the game window, so it can be adjusted.
It is normally 20% for any terrestrial world, terrestrial moon or small terrestrial moon with gravity > 0.4G and temperature between 200K and 360K (about -73C to +87C).
Recovering Technology and Ship Components from Ruins
In order to prevent unbalancing tech advancements occurring while excavating very large ruins, the maximum tech advancement you can achieve from recovering abandoned installations will be based on the tech level of the ruin race. The max development cost of any associated tech will be:
(2 ^ (Ruin Race Level + 1)) * 1000;
This means a level 1 ruin race will have tech up to 4000 RP, a level 2 race up to 8000 RP, etc. with the maximum being a level 5 race with tech up to 64,000 RP.
When standard components are selected for recovery (such as gravitational survey sensors), they will be the best available component within the above limit. If no component of the specified type is available within the limit (for example when the random selection is a 5000 RP Asteroid Mining Module for a level 1 race), nothing will be recovered.
Ruins in Sol
There is a very small chance that one of the larger bodies in Sol may have alien ruins. This can happen on Mars, Mercury, the Galilean Moons, Titan, Triton, Pluto or Eris. This is only about 5% for Mars, 3% for Mercury, 1% for Titan or Ganymede and fractions of a percent for the others.