Exocraft has degraded to just targeting the mine, regardless of the guardians.

This has led to issues where some people are trying to play the game as it was intended (destroy guardians, then mine), while others swoop in from off screen and kill the mine only, with no regard to the other player(s).

My suggestion is to make the mine untargetable until at least one guardian has been destroyed.

The payoff should scale with the risk involved.

For example:

If you make a cluster (group of guardian[s] with the mine) worth 20-500 crystals times the number of guardians, eg. a cluster of 2 guardians with the mine would be worth 40-1000 crystals. The guardians would have a different amount of hit points (depending on their size) and the mine would be a flat amount of hit points. The payout would split depending on the amount of damage done by each person. To further illustrate this idea, A 2 guardian cluster has a 50 point mine, a 150 point small fireball and a 300 point large crab.

Player 1 takes out the crab and Player 2 takes out both the fireball and the mine.

If the cluster was worth 500 crystals, Player 1 would get 300 crystals and Player 2 would get 200 crystals. If Player 2 instead just took out the mine, Player 1 would get 429 crystals (300/350*500) while Player 2 would get just 71 crystals.