You play a mining giant who just want to earn a living. To earn this living, you send out probes around the globe (sprinkle them around - but watch it, they cost a bit) which detect the presence of valuable minerals. They will grow in size when they pass a vein.
You now know where you should blow up the earth - don't be stingy with the explosives (they're not so expensive). You'll need a fair bit to get to the core. With luck, you'll to uncover the red goodness.
Once you have unearthed some treasure, deploy a mine (careful, it's a bit pricy all this digging) to retrieve the goods and earn your coin while tilling the earth bare!
[UPDATE: I spent a bit of time after the comp tweaking things in the "improved" version: you're punished by your shareholders if you blow up non-mineral-producing earth, you can mine the ocean now with (expensive) oil rigs, and I added some polar ice caps... just for fun]
I found lots of red stuff by just blowing up stuff at random positions without ever using scouts. Even with bomb tool selected the Earth rotated when I clicked, this caused some bomb misplacements. I actually blew up roughly 1/4 of the planet before getting bored, does the game have other levels or a win condition?
Mining is a strange game: The only winning move is not to play. Also, this is LD - so the things like "enemies" and "some kind of point" were excluded due to time constraints ;)
Love it. Would love for the world itself to have depth ( really give the digging into it some impact - you can see these chunks ripped out of the earth ).
I'd also consider changing the colour of the minerals from red to gold. Red made me think I'd uncovered magma.
Great idea, and it fits the theme perfectly! Map generation is great, but I wonder if it would be feasible to make it join on the sides, not to have this vertical separation (not sure if I'm saying it correctly ^^) I'm having trouble to beat it though, but I'll keep trying. :)
Nice job for the map generation.