Mining is dead, but it can be revived!

[Studenterhue]

Nah, I mean the generation of the terrain. Progression through the dungeon would be on a floor by floor basis. So you enter from the station, then go to another z-level where a dungeon floor has been prepared. In that floor is a staircase that goes deeper in, to a second floor in the same z-level that's generated while you're in the first, and upon entering that, the first area is regenerated into a third floor, and so on and so forth creating an infinite dungeon.

And occasionally an extra exit is made that takes you instantly back to the station, but requires restarting from the beginning.

I'm okay with roguelike mining as long as miners can carry swords to fight asteroid monsters with. SS13 minecraft edition.

Not that this isn't a bad idea or anything, but it's a bit off topic from the original post now. I'd like to move back on track, what can we do to improve mining? I feel having a new Z level can help out a lot plus we don't need every single asteroid randomized, only areas of some of them. I would like to think with the optimizations done now that it won't cause the game a long time to load into the shift.

I know how much you liked the mining z-level, but I completely favor Frank's suggestion of dungeon crawl style asteroids over a whole new level. A bunch of content split and delivered into multiple sublevel floors feels much, much more approachable and less tedious than one big ol' level. When I'm playing something Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for example, I feel less like I'm exhausting some ultimately tiny portion of a dungeon so insurmountable and more like I'm making real progress through the levels. There's a real sense of progression with clearing floors than just doesn't compare with clearing areas.

However, I don't think either solely new z-level or an asteroid dungeon design will make necessarily make mining better and definitely won't make me want to actually want to play miner (save for documenting the changes for the sake of the wiki). If I had the choice of playing Miner in SS13 or playing DCSS, I'd play DCSS, because DCSS knows how to progress level design the way Mining currently doesn't. With DCSS, with each floor, monsters get more health, hit harder, get more abilities and resistances, and just generally vary much more. Better items and weapons spawn, the level size gets ever so slightly bigger, and, my favorite, level designs gets more and more complex. DCSS knows how to kick players down and punish them for being unprepared/not resourceful.  

That doesn't quite happen the past mining z-level and current mining magnet. Each asteroid doesn't make the other asteroids harder (and to their credit, I can see why it wouldn't). If anything, it makes them easier, since you get  more and more resources for handling asteroids. There's things like radioactive ore and kinda sorta explosive rocks, but, unlike DCSS, those challenges never change while you do.

Mining, again, I think, needs a better sense of progression. It might, it might be in a new z-level, a dungeon crawl redesign, or a simple change in the mineral magnet. I can see you think it'd be better with a new z-level. But I think a dungeon crawl redesign has a better chance of adding the sense of progression I want.