Mining and Prospecting

[Aeryck 862]

TL;DR Nobody liked my idea so changed my suggestion.

Thanks for the responses. It seems like the idea of completely changing the way ore is mined is not liked, so how about just giving us the option to destroy veins in 50 actions like rock tiles?

 

For example, add another mine option (I know, we have a bunch already) like "mine_ore" that would allow you to harvest the vein or use the standard mine_forward/up/down to destroy it.

 

 

After reading through the big mining discussion in Town Hall I decided to post my suggests here. There's a whole debate going on over there as to whether the grindyness of mining is driving new players away but my suggestion wouldn't greatly alter the grinding aspect so much as make it a more fluid and realistic process.

 

My suggestion would be to;

1) Combine ore with rock to eliminate the polka-dot effect of veins and reduce the necessity to mine huge caverns to find small amounts of ore.

2) Add greater usefulness to Prospecting skill. On second thought leave prospecting as a way of pinpointing and determining quality.

 

So the first change would be to blend all ores and rock together into one tile type. The tile would then contain trace amounts of the various ores. There still might be a chance that a tile contained only rock, but many would also contain 1 or more ores. Upon analyzing a tile you would receive a message like this:

 

You find that the rock contains small traces of iron.

 

Mining this tile would produce an 18kg piece of rock and a 2kg piece of iron ore. This would reduce the need to mine out huge caverns to find that single iron vein and instead reward every action on a tile with a bit of ore. This would also give a more intuitive indication of nearby ores. No more (blindly at low prospecting skill) chipping your way through a mountain until you find iron. You would know you were getting closer to a large deposit as each tile produced more and more iron per action.

 

 

Here's the second part; mining a tile would still destroy the tile in around 50 actions. Any trace ores generated by the mining action would be capped by the Mining skill or the ore quality, whichever being lower. In order to extract only the ore you would need to reinforce the tile and use the Prospecting skill mine it.

 

You carefully begin extracting the ore, taking care to avoid destroying the surrounding rock.

 

Mining a reinforced tile would produce a greater amount of ore, while damaging the reinforcement. Rather than having a fixed number of ore in each vein you would be able to continue mining until the reinforcement reached 100% damage, at which point the tile would be destroyed. The amount of damage done with each action would be reduced with an increase in Mining skill, which would also increase the ql cap. Since there would be more tiles which contained ore there would not have to be as much in each tile. You might get say 250 or 500 prospect actions out of each tile, rather than between 1,000 and 10,000. With the removal of BSB decay there is no need to have a single tile last for 3 years now; just mine 500 units out of it and move along.

 

 

 

Edited January 14, 2016 by Aeryck

[zigozag 918]

I don't like the reinforce&mine idea (Mining metal ore selectively from a 4x4 tile? Are you trying to promote honeycomb tiles? I heard some players want to see bee farms), but the first part is interesting. By the way, have you ever wondered why the examine says that there's a vein of pure <metalname>, but we can only mine ore material from it and never the pure metal lumps?

 

+0.5

 

 

[rixk 830]

That first part works only on low ql ore.. but if you want to get high ql ore, you get from one tile maybe couple of kilograms.. so you would have to mine maybe even bigger halls to first find enough high ql tiles and then to get enough ore..

[Wargasm 1,927]

So I have to mine 100 rock tiles to get 100 gold ore? 

 

-1

 

[Slickshot 1,195]

-1  Too much mining just to receive ore, whereas now once you find ore you receive ore per action mined on that tile as opposed to minimal gains

[Aeryck 862]

Thanks for the responses. It seems like the idea of completely changing the way ore is mined is not liked, so how about just giving us the option to destroy veins in 50 actions like rock tiles?

 

For example, add another mine option (I know, we have a bunch already) like "mine_ore" that would allow you to harvest the vein or use the standard mine_forward/up/down to destroy it.

[Slickshot 1,195]

5 minutes ago, Aeryck said:

Thanks for the responses. It seems like the idea of completely changing the way ore is mined is not liked, so how about just giving us the option to destroy veins in 50 actions like rock tiles?

 

For example, add another mine option (I know, we have a bunch already) like "mine_ore" that would allow you to harvest the vein or use the standard mine_forward/up/down to destroy it.

I'd prefer an option on ore tiles to be "destroy ore."  This is more to the point and also changes the concept of destroying the vein using the basic commands.  No one should have to click "mine ore" to harvest an ore tile instead of destroying it, as that is the primary reason behind having said tiles.  Instead any difference should come in the command to destroy the tile, imo.

Edited January 14, 2016 by Slickshot

[Ayes 3,715]

10 hours ago, Aeryck said:

It seems like the idea of completely changing the way ore is mined is not liked, so how about just giving us the option to destroy veins in 50 actions like rock tiles?

 

Very bad idea. There are a fair number of people who play this game that would then go around to any publicly accessible mines and destroy ore veins, either to just make things harder for other players or with the "brilliant" idea that they could increase their market for selling these ores by reducing the supply of them.

 

The only way I could see this idea having any merit would be to allow it on deed tiles only and restricted to the mayor. Even then, when the deed disbanded for some reason these destroyed veins would not be available for anyone else in the future.

 

The slow tedious way of mining out ore veins by 1,000's of actions seems to work best as is considering these negative impacts from an easy-mode destroy option. As for locating ore veins and their distribution, that seems to work well as is too, so yea, leave it as is. Heck, you can even create an ultimate quality ore vein of your choice by using that Rod of Transmutation, if you are willing to pay the cost.

 

=Ayes=

[Wargasm 1,927]

I couldn't agree more with Ayes.  Destroying veins opens up a new avenue of griefing.

[Klaa 4,872]

Two words: upgraded map