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First idea: Make rock worms not eat gems, and then make them occasionally produce (poop out, if you will) a random gem after eating enough material.
Some potential uses: Rockworms suddenly become less of a pest and more of an ally. Leave them to clean up your exploded rocks and come back to reap the benefits, or set one up in the outpost next to the telepad and leave a teleporting ore rig set to the mining outpost on a mauxite rock. Your erebite and uquil rarity suddenly dissapears~
Rockworm the new bee of mining?
Second idea: Make unloading ore rigs more sane. Currently you have to... click and drag a crate ONTO an ore rig to unload it. What the..? I notice you can use an ore satchel on an ore rig but it always says 0 ore loaded no matter what.
Click dragging or at least clicking ore satchels on rigs would be nice for pre-teleport use.
Usage: Ore rigs pre-teleport see more use because you don't have to lug a crate around anymore *AND* their unloading fits more in line with *EVERYTHING ELSE* so more people figure out *HOW* to do it.
Third idea: Restrict what factors can spawn on an asteroid tile. For instance, ever mined a gem scan and then had it go "Imagoonna BLOW UP" on you cause it was hiding a volitile tile, or ever had a gem spawn *inside* of an abandoned crate because it was on an anomalous tile?
Usage: Being able to tell exactly what's on a tile at a glance rather than being surprised, as the purpose of the ore scanner is.
Fourth idea: Three changes to the industrial pod/putt putt mechanics.
1. Optical meson scanners.
Usage: Self explanitory. You can crowbar out the conclave scanner and make an optical meson upgrade, stuff it in and suddenly you can see ore without having to pop out. Downside: can't scan!
2. Drill-as-you-go.
Usage: If you have a drill installed on a pod or putput, moving *into* an object causes you to use your drill on it, instead of having to frantically click the primary systems command. Improves your mining experience all around.
3. Drill-Vac
Usage: As a potential tie in to above, if you have an empty crate in your ship, ability for the drill to deposit material mined (including rock) *into* the empty crate. If theres multiple you can just have the server pick one and stick with it. Maybe the last one loaded? Whatever.
If this is too powerful to start wtih, maybe make it a secondary system upgrade instead? Use a bit of bohrum and clarentine or whatever.
I'd at least like to see you be able to click drag ore into the cargohold of ships while in space. If you can already, maybe I'm doing it wrong and its not very intuitive?
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Pretty sure there's a scanner right next to the mining pod that has optical meson scanners.
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Ah. Well I missed that.
Good to know.
Just had to edit the ideas: Instead of to a crate, the drill-vac could load to cargohold, and you'd have to unload the ore at a dock.
A teleport unloader upgrade for pods would be hilarious
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Rockworms already do something useful. Pro miners know the secret of the rockworm.
Also erebite is rare on purpose, we're not going to introduce something that will completely reverse that.
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mining is boring as hell imo, but I think it'd be pretty cool if there was a rock worm pen you could dump rocks in and get back gems
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It's actually kinda fucking hard for me to unfuck mining because at the moment I can't really think of any way to mine that doesn't essentially consist of click rocks, get rocks, put/send rocks. The extractor rigs were an attempt to undo that, and I think cog's mining pod stuff is another step in the right direction, but i'm not presently sure where else to go with it.
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well the problem with mining is there's no motivation to do anything for the station, if you're going to send any reasonable amount of base minerals it requires endless trips to harvest base minerals that you could've used to make equipment for yourself
the other main problem is the proportion of time waiting or endlessly wandering around looking for an ore type or hauling ore back or manufacturing to actually doing something is like 10:1 because you mine very quickly and then spend several minutes wandering back with your load of ore, waiting another minute or two to manufacture what you want, and then repeating the cycle until you get bored and go kill people or something i guess
tl;dr way too much user input doing nothing at all
so i guess if you had automated mining drones like digbots that moved far faster, had long-range lights on them, and could automatically load and unload ore at a set deposit point along with a very large and dense starting asteroid area (or seperate drillbots and collectionbots i dunno) you could encourage more productivity instead of encouraging people to steal the pod/suits/gloves and screw off to go die somewhere lonely repeatedly
long story short get rid of the endless wandering to get ore and the endless wandering to bring it back and manufacture something and make automated drones capable of harvesting and collecting ore it would take the pointless grind out of mining to some degree
also i would REALLY REALLY REALLY like to see some kind of ore refining system on the mining station only that refines the raw ores into the finished products we currently use with an input hopper and a conveyor to take the refined product to the manufacturing room that can be upgraded in respect to refining speed, efficiency, and hopper capacity because currently it makes no sense that you can hit a piece of rock and instantly get perfectly refined products ready for use in manufacturing delicate electronics (plus who knows what hijinks you could come up with if your assassination target accidentally wound up in the refining hopper)
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We're still planning on implementing a power-hungry ARC SMELTING area to refine ores into usable ingots and alloys.
I think it sounds kinda silly to send out automated drones to do all of the digging. That just makes mining even more pointless if bots do all the work.
I think I'll set up a bunch of mass driver relays in the mining level, fairly deep into the field. Shove a crate into them and they'll fire back to the mining outpost. Someone will probably get clobbered by them too. Was also hoping Aph would get minecarts done, but he's been having a lot of computer issues, so I'll see if I can get the mine cart system done myself soon.
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Cogwerks Wrote:I think it sounds kinda silly to send out automated drones to do all of the digging. That just makes mining even more pointless if bots do all the work.
well it's supposedly hundreds of years into the future so drones would be an obvious choice, i always saw miners like more of human overseers than hard laborers
i suppose you could resolve this by setting off an area on the other end of the map that has the rarer more valuable ores and gems in higher concentrations that the drones can't get to or something so that human input is required but not the endless grind to get base minerals that are required in large amounts for manufacturing
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The mineral accumulator takes care of a lot of the mindless wandering about when collecting ores, and I'm surprised more miners don't use it. Set destination to mining, hoover up everything in almost an entire screen's radius, have it all teleported back to the mining pad next to the manufacturers without having to deal with ore satchels. You can also use it to send all the money ore to QM without fucking around with crates and cargo transporters.
The accumulator is a bit tetchy to haul through space with how often you slip, though, and its inability to move while accumulating. I would absolutely love if pods got a secondary system upgrade instead of the cargo bay or something that acted like the mineral accumulator while in use, because currently, the pod makes mining ore a breeze but collecting it a giant pain. You either mine out way more than your satchels can hold really quickly, or have to constantly unload a crate, get out, maneuver around the crate and the pod, collect as much ore as your satchels can hold, dump the satchels into the crate, load the crate back into the pod, and start mining again. Replacing all of that with a magical 'teleport all the useful ore to mining/QM' button would cut out so much bullshit busywork.
Oh, and the way that drills and plasma cutters work mean you can bore straight through a volatile tile, get no indication that it's gonna explode like you usually do, and then have the empty square detonate point blank on your pod as you continue to mine and nearly kill you instantly.
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I wouldn't be too opposed to drones to carry out logistics rather than the mining itself - I have my suspicions that logistics is the most boring/annoying part of mining. Carting all the ore back and forth and dispatching it various places is just legwork, which gets tedious real fast. When your main job is bashing rocks a bunch, the tedium might add up.
I kind of wonder if it'd be viable to have drones that you can program orders into in a sequence. It'd be cool to pop up a little interface that contains the drone's current instruction set. For instance, you're setting out, so you set its only command to follow Joe Miner. It'll then doggedly follow you around wherever you go. So later you've collected a bunch of ore - you can load the ore into the drone and tell it to go to back to the outpost, drop all the ore it has, then return to your current location.
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I'll look into setting up a cargo bay that'll hoover up anything you fly over. That might be fun if I can get it to work without being super laggy.
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Cogwerks Wrote:We're still planning on implementing a power-hungry ARC SMELTING area to refine ores into usable ingots and alloys.
I think it sounds kinda silly to send out automated drones to do all of the digging. That just makes mining even more pointless if bots do all the work.
I think I'll set up a bunch of mass driver relays in the mining level, fairly deep into the field. Shove a crate into them and they'll fire back to the mining outpost. Someone will probably get clobbered by them too. Was also hoping Aph would get minecarts done, but he's been having a lot of computer issues, so I'll see if I can get the mine cart system done myself soon. The arc smelter would be really cool if you can send the materials to electronics and engineering to help with the engine, or to Qm for the big bux!!! Maybe efen crafting larger scale stuff too.
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If we're going to set up a power-hungry Arc Smelter, how about setting up a power-distribution system too? Think Microwave Transmission, Engineering has a console and a machine that beams radiation to a specific spot on the mining outpost, which provides miners with power.
No more mining furnaces, if they want power they have to get it from the station. If the station is experiencing power outages, well fuck the miners we're shutting this thing down. The console acts like a really hard-to-use Science Teleporter, so if a traitor engineer wants to set a trap on the station or irradiate the AI, with a little hard work they can change the transmission settings.
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Captain_Bravo Wrote:If we're going to set up a power-hungry Arc Smelter, how about setting up a power-distribution system too? Think Microwave Transmission, Engineering has a console and a machine that beams radiation to a specific spot on the mining outpost, which provides miners with power.
I'm all for having a giant lazer beam to play with.
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