Mining rework thread

[Song]

I have constructed a prototype system for a Mining Charge.

It's currently WORKING, but it needs some testing.

[Song]

Mining Charges Mod now up and running on Xelerus


(Yes, I'm aware you can be a jackass with these. But they're more of a demonstrator than anything else)

[Song]

On IRC, after talking about my Mining Charges mod, we discussed mining a lot, and we're going to try working on some rewriting of the MAG launcher and a few other things to try and make some alternative mining systems.

[Prophet]

I would be very interested in helping with that, though I have lost my main internet connection so I currently only have access on the weekends.

One thing I have tried that seemed really promising was adding some gems that would drop rarely from asteroids. These gems were valuable and light, ideal for the wolfen and sapphire who suffer from cargo space overload.

Another thing I have been thinking about lately is moving the mining scripts into the <onDamage> event so that the ore extraction scripts can be expanded, for example:

• Only weapons with the mining attribute will be able to extract the gems.
  kinetic and blast weapons can extract ore, fewer tons of ore per attempt. small chance to destroy some of the ore still inside the asteroid.
  all other damage types have a small chance to extract ore, medium chance to destroy ore.
  WMD weapons have high chance to extract ore, high chance to destroy ore.

Additionally, I also have some scripts to collect the ore into the playership so the player doesn't have to deal with all those pesky dockscreens.

I could go on and on with ideas but these two are a good starting point for now, I'd love to hear what ideas came out on IRC, and am very disappointed that I wasn't able to be there for it.

[alterecco]

You were missed Prophet! Will be good to have you back some day (hope it is soon!)

Basically we talked about starting with a change to mining that would not require a rewriting of the current system, but just lessened the mindnumbing boredom of shooting lasers. It should be something that could with ease be merged into vanilla if George saw fit to do it.

The result for now is to develop a couple of MAG charges that do some low damage, and in addition mine. These charges should be available at mining stations and the launcher itself should be offered as an installable at the mining station as well (good probablility of getting it in Eridani). Perhaps the level and price of the MAG will be lowered a bit. The first of the new charges will be the lowest level MAG ammo i suppose. It should maybe be heavy and rather expensive to make for more of a money/time sink.

That is roughly it as far as I recall.

I also argue that major mining changes should be tackled separately, as they are more game changing, thereby needing much more time consuming tweaking/testing.

[Song]

Indeed. The general opinion is to make a few new things (the mining MAGs) for starters, then decide where to go next, and so on and so forth.

[sdw195]

2) Make shooting at rocks fun

Done!!

enter (h1) in the console and have fun

(might not work with any of my mods)

[alterecco]

Here is a Mining MAG

Consider it for testing.

It overwrites the vanilla MAG and lowers it's level/price a bit (to match the NAMI). It also adds a new lowest level MAG, the mining MAG.

It overwrites the vanilla mining station so that it now sells mining MAG's and offers to install the MAG launcher itself.

The mining MAG is heavy and rather expensive. It is very slow and does almost no damage apart from mining, so it is not really an effective weapon against moving targets (this is intentional... but might have to be changed)

[Prophet]

The new mining equipment is a welcome sight, and I would like to add my recent project.

Asteroids will display, visually, whether they contain any items, and change appearance once all items have been extracted.
Ore will be collected simply by keeping your ship close to the mined ore, so no need for any of those pesky dockscreens anymore. I also modified the mechanics so that any weapon has a chance to extract ore, some damage types work better than others and mining weapons work even better. Asteroids now contain junk rocks and gems.

The mod is still in development, and currently is very OPed. I quickly made it stable enough for an alpha release while testing due to my infrequent internet access.

The asteroid graphics are of poor quality, and I apologize. I am no artist. The beautiful gem icons were given to me by Digdug.

I plan on overwriting all the ores to change their pics and possibly modify their prices to try and balance mining.

Quick question: Would you prefer to mine lots of asteroids and sort through it all in your ship's cargo hold, or only a few asteroids contain items, but those items are all worth selling?

[Atarlost]

Making all weapons mine and making ore autocollect is dangerous. A light ship would be at risk of overloading itself when fighting in asteroids, potentially resulting in death.

Even just autocollection could be bad fighting outlaw miners.

Everything mining also may create a risk of lag on older computers.

If autocollection is linked to a device that can be disabled the maneuverability loss death problem is reduced provided everyone knows to turn it off and remembers to do so. Expect lots of new players wondering why their ship suddenly slows down when fighting sometimes. The disabling interface is slightly obscure. People manage to miss even the use interface and it has an associated message the first time you get a useable item.

I think it would be best to have to actively dock with ore, but have the dockscreen auto-cancel.

I think that with auto-pickup auto-squelch is needed, and that would be a pain to set up.

[digdug]

Prophet, I re-masked the images of the ores I gave you.
Feel free to ask if you still want them, I'll be glad to send them to you.

[PM]

I noticed the player will see the loot screen each time ore is collected. Mining can be sped up slightly with a more efficient docking routine. I just uploaded a mod, Ore Dockscreen Overwrite, that bypasses the loot screen and collects the ore as soon as "Bring aboard" is selected.

I agree that autopickup is dangerous. In fact, I almost never use it in other Roguelikes due to penalties an untimely overload will cause, which is deadly during a fight.

[alterecco]

I just uploaded a mod, Ore Dockscreen Overwrite

Excellent idea... and the implementation looks nice. This is one of the things i would like to see go into vanilla as a very simple improvement.

[PM]

Another thing I find annoying about mining is even if the player shoots an ore bearing asteroid, ore may not immediately eject from the asteroid. Also, asteroids can eject ore multiple times. After the asteroid ejects ore once, the player does not know if the asteroid has more ore to mine. If the player wants to be thorough, he will need to shoot every rock many times.

Inspired by the game Sinistar, I uploaded another simple mining change mod, Mined Asteroids Explode. With this, mined asteroids with no more ore to eject explode.

[PM]

After playing games with various ore scanners usable by the playership, I came to the conclusion that a scanner that scans a wide area around the player is very powerful, maybe too much.

What if a weaker NPC does the scanning, scanning one asteroid at a time? If autons did the scanning, the player has some interesting choices. The player can have autons scan asteroids near where the player is mining. All this does is confirm the presence of ore in asteroids the player is already mining, and does not speed up mining too much. Or the player can dispatch autons to scan asteroids by themselves while the player flies off to do something else. This can save considerable time, but puts the autons at risk from enemy attacks. Also, one auton scanning alone is rather slow, but twenty or so autons scanning for ore at different asteroids simultaneously can detect ores quickly. However, acquiring many autons for the purpose of scanning asteroids requires a large credit investment and maybe extra cargo space to carry the autons until they are activated.

I have uploaded a mod, Lander Auton, that adds ore scanning autons among other things.