Miner

"Miners are rated below Builders, but they are sensible, proud and strong. Miners know the raw, inner ways of worlds. Respect them, and they will treat you well, teach you what they know, and return you to your family with all the discipline and skills a Manipular needs to advance."

- Bornstellar's ancilla

Miners were a rate in Forerunner society, ranking below Builders but above Lifeworkers. Their duties involved planetary and stellar engineering, and by extension the acquisition of resources for the ecumene, including the Builders' plentiful construction projects.

Overview
Miners were generally seen as tough and pragmatic, and their manner of speaking was characteristically direct, lacking the tact most of the other rates were used to. Miners were most comfortable when on a planet or working with planetary material.

The Miners were responsible for the artificial formation or destruction of planets and the manipulation of stars, usually to harness them for energy collection. Miner stellar engineers were colloquially known as plasma jockeys. Their planetary engineers were capable of creating planets by melting down an asteroid field and shaping the resulting mass into a protoplanet which could be fully cooled in under 10,000 years. They would also occasionally destroy entire planets to gain access to the resources within. X50, a satellite of Draetheus V, was an example of a Miner orbital reformer installation used in planetary engineering. The artificial moon was equipped with an energy beam capable of dismantling its parent planet within hours, although Miners are suggested to have been capable of even more energetic planetary destruction. For more local mining operations, Miners used mining ships which could rapidly excavate large masses of minerals and ore by using powerful energy fields.

The Miners were masterful engineers and scientists, and competition was fierce among the rates to recruit their expertise for prestigious construction projects and research efforts. Their collaborations with the Builders were particularly fruitful and inspired, with both rates drawing upon each other's strengths and insights to create miracles of matter and energy. Among these collaborations were efforts to grow new slipspace cores from flakes extracted from the Precursor core at Maethrillian, experiments to tap exotic natal dimensions to mass-produce stars, and the creation of permanent rifts into slipspace.

Proud and pragmatic, the Miners' wisdom and counsel was respected by all rates, though their lack of interest in politics prevented them from ever reaching the pinnacles of power in the Ecumene Council. However, without their work and knowledge there would be no megastructures, no peerless architecture, and no grand Forerunner starships that traversed the stars. Miners were responsible for planetary and stellar engineering-the foundation on which the other rates' contributions were ultimately built. It was the Miners who broke apart worlds, reforged them, or stripped them bare for raw materials, as needed. Their rate delved into stars and shattered planets to extract the rarefied substances the ecumene needed to fuel its great engines of creation, and while Miners may have indeed cared little for political machinations or displays of power, their kind did hoard many secrets about the Precursors and Forerunner history-secrets that have presumably remained unknown even into the modern era.

Long before the eruption of the Flood and revelations of the Audacity, the Miners had a keen interest in the Precursors, hoping to unravel their forebears' secrets to better their own arts of extraction, creation, and manipulation. At the direction of the eldest of their rate, Miner Manipulars scoured the stars and exotic depths of slipspace to find planets, moons, and stellar masses that possessed a strictly prescribed set of signature traces. At great cost and under the utmost secrecy, the most promising of these were hauled to a specialized world engine at the periphery of the ecumene for deconstruction and analysis to reveal the enigmas within. What they learned from this exploration and study is unknown.

During the height of the Forerunner civilization, Miners had activity in the Sol system, specifically Mars, then known as Edom. After disobeying his father, Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting, a Manipular from a wealthy Builder family, was sent to work with a Miner family inhabiting Edom.

Known Miners

 * Clearance-of-Old-Forests - member of the crew of Audacity during the journey to Path Kethona.
 * A Miner who assumed the carapace of Catalog after expediting a planet's violent destruction, murdering his crèche-mate, along with twelve other Miners, out of jealousy.
 * Bornstellar's stepfamily on Edom.

List of appearances

 * Halo: Cryptum
 * Halo: Silentium
 * Halo: Spartan Assault
 * Halo Mythos
 * Halo: Point of Light