Concerns with Mining (Both the department and Z-level)

[Crumplehat]

Miners spent most of their time in isolation on their own little Z-levels. This has a seriously negative effect on its desirability - I'd rather not play miner to be completely uninvolved in the game

But that's at least half the reason I play miner.

I've been around since before ore was even a thing, and Mining has always been off-station; it's always had its own z-level. If you want a job that gets you away from all the lunatics on the station, mining's your best chance. Sure there's the 10-20% chance of a changeling, but it's a damn sight less likely than your chances of getting murdered on-station. There's also less chance of your job being rendered completely impossible to do, because you don't rely on a single piece of equipment to allow you to do anything at all.

That's my biggest concern here. The move of the magnet to the station, and presumably its reassignment as the primary mining method, would make it a target, collateral or otherwise. One bomb hits that bastard and no more mining. It's also presumably a complex system, so destroying either the console or the machine would almost assuredly render it useless, so the few people who actually enjoy mining would have nothing left to do but fuck around beating up assistants like the bitter hermit sociopaths they are.

The vagabond nature of mining always seemed to bond miners together in a weird way. You knew if you had more than one person hanging around and actually working, you could more or less trust them. There's a weird sort of unspoken rule among most (MOST) miners that if one of them is a traitor or something, they'll generally leave the other miners alone, since they know those guys likely aren't going to do shit to stop them as long as they're left alone; they just don't care. Changelings are an issue but half the time I get killed by a ling on station I end up spaced before anyone can help anyway - at least if I'm in space I can maneuver, maybe lead it into a drone.

Miners can also team up for space adventures more easily than other jobs, and they can even be useful about it by sending souvenirs back. Telesci made a good chunk of that irrelevant, but the only reason for that is the fact that maps exist now so people don't need to go out and find the shit themselves anymore. There's still stuff you can't get to with telesci though.

I just don't know how I feel about this shift; Mining's always been one of my favorite jobs because I can be helpful to the station without actually having to go deal with the people on it.