"Metal from other sources" - What is it?

I would imagine scuttling structures/units?

The Vasari have technologies that allow them to gain resources from destroying enemy capital ships. When an enemy capital ship explodes, your capital ships collect the wreckage and debris and process it into raw resources for you to use.

These are the 'other sources'. AFAIK, the TEC and Advent have no such capabilities.

If that is right, then the other players had massive metal income from that, and it rose very sharply for all their civs as a function of time. They would have had to scuttle their entire fleet and base structures to get that kind of income. And I was Vasari, if anything, I would have had the most from reclaimation, but I had zero. They were TEC and Advent, (plus, I had already researched all the nanotech upgrades on resource reclaimation and had been in a few big battles).

If you are right, then my Vasari civ is bugged in some way, as it had a flat line zero on the summary for the entire game under "other sources"

If anyone knows for sure, let me know. Here are the items under the "Metal" summary tab:

Metal income rate
Metal available
Metal gained from asteroids
Metal gained from refinery ships
Metal gained from the black market
Metal from other sources
Metal sold on the black market
Metal sold to other players
Metal spent on ships
Metal spent on structures
Metal spent on research
Metal lost to other sources
Metal receive from allies
Metal given to allies

Pesky, if that is true, why did they have rapidly rising levels of metal from other sources, but I as Vasari, had zero? I had been in a number of battles as well, pirates mostly.

Would the metal from the black market infinite resource bug show up under "other"?

Their 'other sources' were obviously not the one I mentioned(which is a true source only available to the Vasari). Perhaps they explored their planets and found big metal supplies as relics?

If they were sporadically exploring and discovering metal, then you would expect to see periodic spikes of "discovery" amounts. Their summary curves all resembled a steep upward line from the start, then around mid-game slightly leveling off to a more slowly rising, but still rising, and continuing to the end. There was no stepped activity as one might expect. Moreover, all three other players had almost identical curves, very little difference.

Didn't look like "discovery" increases at all, too steady, too consistent. I would have thought scuttle or destruction reclaimation also, except for the fact I was the only Vasari, and had zero metal income from "other sources" the whole game. But I definitely was fighting pirates and others during the game. I had the most planets, so most of my fighting was vs. the static pirates at the various planets.

maybe spacedebris is right and they were all utilizing the exploit in the black market (some kind of exploit that gives massive amounts of resources, but needs 2+ players to do), especially if all of them had close to identical curves.

check for an automatic replay.

TEC can get metal from "other sources" through Pervasive Economy.

I was just about to say pervasive economy but someone beat me to it.

I'm pretty sure that the end-game graphs don't properly represent values changing over time when the value changes infrequently. Look at the graphs like "Planets Owned", "Fleet Cap", etc . . . the lines seem to rise smoothly across the span of dozens of minutes, but if you mouse-over the graph you can see that the value was constant for the entire length of the rise, then suddenly became a new value.

. . . in that case, it's possible that you are seeing "discovery" spikes, but the spikes themselves are hidden by the way the lines are drawn on the graph.