Miners have too many tools. Condense them into one modular tool.

[Cal]

After playing miner a bit, I've come to the conclusion that they have *too many* tools that do *too many* things.


Pickaxe, hammer, drill, hammer, concussive gauntlets, and that's just from the fabricator.

In the Nano-fabricator, you have 4 more options to make custom tools, bringing the total amount of tools to a whopping 9. Despite this, 90% of the time I see people make the hammer, as it allows large, efficient AOE mining.

I think the best move for mining would be to condense everything into one tool with multiple modes - A power drill.

Miners would start off with one of these and they'd be fabb-able. My suggestion for it is that it would have a low power mode that causes it to slowly regenerate its battery over time, due to power picks being a pain in the ass to recharge on Oshan and tedious to recharge otherwise, and a high power mode that gives it the same strength as the power pick. This would simply be toggled like a chainsaw or current power pick.

Instead of there being a bundle of unnecessary and confusing tools, allow the power drill to instead have mods which can be printed from the regular fabricator to modify the drill. It would be cool if these had visual attachments, but unnecessary.

Mods could have options that emulate and enhance the options we currently have. For example, instead of having a power hammer off-hand, allow the drill to have a seismic slam or something that chews up a ton of its power.



Mod ideas:

Reinforced drill: Emulates the power pick. High damage, low range. This would furthermore increase its damage to mobs and players, to make it an effective killing tool. Perhaps adding bleed as a secondary effect.

Tesla drill: Emulates the long-range functionality of the power drill by replacing the head with a tesla coil. Allows you to mine at a distance, and replaces the special attack with an arc flash that drains power. Removes its melee attack capability.

Pneumatic spike: Replaces the power hammer. Allows your special attack to weaken or outright destroy a lot of rocks at once. Emulates the power hammer's slam attack. Use it on someone to knock them very far. The special attack has to charge in between uses, to eliminate the current meta of making several power hammers and slamming people with them to win fights.

Charge Launcher: Replaces the drill head's low power mode with a functionality that allows it to shoot mining charges that explode instantly. Could be powerful with a hacked charge launcher.


I feel like these changes would allow people to actually use other things besides a custom bohrum mining hammer, and give miners a goal - Make their drill Their Own.

[mintyphresh]

Hell yes.

[Showerless]

It's a good idea, the fact that there's no point in making anything else than a bohrum custom pickaxe after maybe 10 mins of the shift makes Mining work pretty boring and streamlined in terms of actually using what you mine out yourself. Also it would actually give Miners a reason to exit their mining sub on Oshan, since at the moment the risk of being mauled by fish outweights the benefit of using your tools that will be out of charge in a minute anyways.

[JOELED]

I like it, it'd be cool if you could still put matsci cells in them to make them have more power. I really do like this idea!

[Kotlol]

Especially the old blasters are pointless and slow... no one likes them.
If you see one , it's either a newbie, a memer or someone whos gonna 'pretend' shooting things up to troll newbies.

[TDHooligan]

my take is:
keep tool separation but make the customization need fewer Things.
hammer, pick, drill have their defined roles (broad, fast, ranged), so keep them in as base items you modify, instead.

then you can have unified 'Head' parts that are hot-swappable between tools. miners rarely are scarce enough on 1 material to have to do something unfun like hot-swap tool heads. just use matsci effects to affect behaviour.

most of it is a mess because it is ultimately matsci tho.

[Joii]

While I agree that certain minings tools are used an overwhelming amount compared to others, that is the case because there is no reason to use other tools over them, and I think that's the real issue here, there not being enough depth to mining where you /have/ to use different tools for different purposes.

Mining is already an extremely straightforward job that gets fairly repetitive, the current variety of tools, while not necessary, provide some variety to those seeking it, even if a bohrum pickaxe will do the job better. I think streamlining its gameplay even further through simplifying tool choice would just make it more repetitive and tedious, people would likely just find a module they like and stick to it every time, as they do now, but there would be less options for the people that /did/ want to try other things. It also just feels like it waters down the fantasy of being a miner. There's something very cool about the mental image of swinging a high-tech pickaxe or a giant hammer, toiling away in hard physical labor as a QM shouts at you over comms to work harder while sitting in their cushy chair. The choice of having miners use a pickaxe instead of some other more high tech tool in the first place feels very deliberate, for that very reason. A drill just doesn't hit the same, in my opinion.

It also just feels kind of antithetical to the design of SS13 to me. This is game of depth and having countless choices on how to tackle something, most of which are usually redundant, and often confusing, but the sheer amount of how much there is to it is part of this game's appeal. In most games, streamlining something like this would be the obvious call, but in this game, I think we should be looking at adding more complexity, not removing it.

As someone who spends a lot of time in the role, I'd much rather keep all the tools and have the difference between them not only be more pronounced, but have it be outright necessary to use different tools for different ore. Perhaps Erebite can only be safely extracted with the precision mining of a blaster, while the hammer swings very slowly, but is able to break ores that the pick just cannot, and so on. I think that could also lead to some fun coordination between miners where each person could focus on one of the tool types and they could split up responsibilities over different types of ore.

[Lord_earthfire]

I think modular tools and their base-counterpart need to be merged at one point. But this will very likely be tied to a mining-strenght-rework in general, since mining strenght is vastly differentiating between the different tools.

[Kotlol]

The thing is... we have the powered pick axe to run out so you can't fast farm.
When you get the drill that problem is elivated.
The power hammer is stronger, but drains faster.

And the material tools are just better with no power cost. And additionally will not detonate explosive rocks.

Basically if mining has a bohrum asteriod. They gonna make bohrum hammers. It's simple, optimal and happens frequently.

If you want a standard power hammer, you need several materials....that are rare.

Essentially while there are too much options... 80% of them are pointless.
You only need your starter pick and then the bohrum hammer.

So while I love cal's idea. It feels like something is off, can't place why.
But I do think mining tools need abit of a revamp.

[meaow589]

I thought the idea is about other tool like cargo appraiser , geology scanner , radiation scanner. Which is rarely use most of miner just trying to dig it all and expose to radiation intentionally.for me I usually frequently use geological scanner to detect ores and avoid place that danger to mining.like expose to rad.but other mod in refinery is good idea and I love to see more tool in refining /mining fab.by the way please make some more use material like small coil, large coil,lens to it so we can use this stuff more than stupid gun

[Waffleloffle]

I like the excavation tools being separate, since there's an element of playstyle differentiation in each one's technical shortcomings but most of them are equally effective at their job of Breaking Rocks. it's one of the few areas of mechanical width in mining as it stands, and I would be sad to see it get rolled into one tool that you get by default. that being said, a mining supertool that can switch excavation modes on the fly would be neat, and it'd fit right in if it was added to the locked crate loot table

the current custom mining tool infrastructure /does/ support tool mods, there's just... one of them, I think, and it's prohibitively expensive to actually make. adding more of them and tweaking the price costs to something more rational would be very cool, though I myself don't really have the coding know-how to pull it off

[Decarcassor]

Essentially while there are too much options... 80% of them are pointless.
You only need your starter pick and then the bohrum hammer.

There it is. Mining indeed has a whole range of power tools in the mining fabricators, and another range of custom mining tools from the mining nano-thingy. And you can do a fine job using only a power drill in 99% of cases. Any decent custom tool trivialize mining too. Play as a roach to ignore the only early game threat that is radiations and you can mine in your sleep.

The only map that pose some challenge to miners is Oshan due to the dangers of the trench and for some reason rocks appear to be harder in the trench than in asteroids. So while I am for the idea of merging power tools and custom tools into something greater than the sum of their part, currently it wouldn't really change the state of mining overall.

Also if mining tools were to be revamped they MUST take some kind of benefit from seeking advanced/dangerous material. Give miners a reason to want stuff like erebite, carbon nano-fibers, iridium and such. And I don't see that happening as long as you can do 99% of mining work with basic ass tools.

One way to accomplish that would be only have the magnet pull only easy but poor asteroids to start things, while making telesccope asteroïd significantly harder but also more rewarding.

[Glamurio]

I think it'd be cool if tools were upgradeable and they'd retain some of the attributes of the ore used to upgrade them with. If you feel like they take too much battery or recharge too slowly, maybe you could use like a better conductive ore. Maybe harder materials need more sturdy ore upgrades to be mineable.

I wouldn't want the default tool to be good, I'd want it to be kind of shit and maybe have the miner gameplay cycle revolve around "upgrade my cool tools to make my job easier".

[Garash]

There's something that I always found odd with manufacturer tools vs nano-fab tools. It's that they seem to use like 2 different systems for mining!
Manufacturer tools are RNG, on a high roll they break rocks, and on a low they do nothing, and the pickaxe isn't strong enough to roll high enough to break materials, indicating some sort of progression system.
Nano-fab tools however use a health system. No matter how weak the nano-fab tool, and how strong the ore is, spamming hits will eventually whittle down any ore. This obsoletes the manufacturer's progression system!
While deciding on a rework, it seems important to me to decide what the preferred system is.

About the bohrum hammer meta, in theory, the system has more depth. With the right knowledge, you can make tools that are just as good if not better than a bohrum hammer, pharosium/claretine blasters are fun, chitin drills are well suited in oshan, mauxite/molitz picks are perfectly servicable when you need to mine, say, valuables, with no better materials on hand. But people don't bother because a bohrum hammer is "good enough," because of the Nano-fab system!

[Caio029]

that's what i've been thinking about for a long time, but i never got the proper sprites for it.