Depends on the scale of “going down”. Many mines are in the mountains and the material has to be brought down to lower elevations. The mine entry may be lower than the nearest pass but still a lot higher than the destination of the ore.
Great game, really nice visuals and nice (very trippy) soundtrack. I tried to be a “good” cult leader, trying to ressurect everybody that “died” (most got sacrificed before they could die of old age), but some people should stay dead. And mourning and sadness is just another reason to put everybody on shrooms again
“Evolutionary reason” does not necessarily mean that a feature is an advantage. Mutations are random and then positive or negative selective pressure act on them untill the mutation is either extinct or is adopted by the whole population. For features without selective pressure the same thing still happens it just takes longer and is basically random. So different populations of a species will always develop different features even when given the same environment.
So for most of the features you listed: yeah it just happened.
Then OP has to die in international waters. And I think ships usually count as part of the country they are registered in. So if you die on a cruise ship it still counts like dieing in that ships owner country. And its not trivial to move a corpse out of a country, there are laws about that. So the country they plan to die in very mutch matters.
An open pit at an elevation of 1.5km still means the bottom of the pit could be 1km higher than the place the ore is processed at