#New mining activities to balance 10.0 changes?

10 messages Ā· Page 1 of 1 (latest)

toxic magnet
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It might just be me but it feels like there's less to do as a miner with 10.0.

-Roads are less important with the boat life so the usual safety net of crushed rocks/sand is diminished. On "normal" servers there mightn't even be gov payment for roads as they'll be localised to much smaller areas around towns for much of the game.

-Towns concept and new transport challenges mean a miner will probably just be supplying their own town for a large portion of the game which will also reduce demand. TBD what shenanigans will come to exist so supplying other towns will be less desirable or profitable later on. And if a towns mason or smelter leaves..

-As far as I can tell a miner who isn't part of a town is almost stuck mining whatever they start mining at the start of the game as they wont have enough claims for other locations if they've made a house with a workspace beside it. As demand for different mined resources change this could lead to times when the miner has nothing to do for days while waiting for new professions to unlock.

+While I don't expect there will be any big changes in the near future, some refinements could help. For example adding crushed coal (10.01?), different grades of sand for glass vs roads and maybe different types of aggregate vs crushed rock.

+Additional consumers of mined resources vs mason and smelting routes. Would be nice to pretend shale is phosphate rock and be able to make phosphorous from it maybe using the milling and fertiliser professions.

+Additional uses of existing rocks like basalt, granite and gneiss where going on expeditions to collect small amounts of it is worth it without having to setup entirely new mining operations for it. Maybe certain bathroom objects need harder stone or a marble fireplace, mineral wool for fiberglass alternative manufacturing method like quicklime glass or in whetstones if they ever become a thing.

+And of course the age ole mechanics skid steer variant only miners can use! šŸ˜„

soft tiger
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Not sure how miners only supplying locally will reduce demand? wouldnt that increase demand because the supply is reduced?

Any miner is fully capable of mining anywhere they just need to haul the ore to their processing plant so there will be a requirement for more logistics, which brings up to the issue of roads being less important which would be the opposite between locations depending on water access.

The Rock types are representative to their natural properties hence why only limestone does X,Y,Z versus granite or any other rock so that will not change.

Crushed coal is reliant on some asset changes and some new blocks and will make it into vanilla game basegame eventually once these issues have been resolved.

Part of the resource loss or the lack of goods in certain towns etc is a big part of the gameplay design intended with the towns/nations update and while we will adjust and try to balance it accordingly also should not take away from the point that this is intended, towns should be forced to dealing with lack of professions, or overflow of it by adding incentives or improve relations with these players to accomedate their specific needs.

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As for mid game mining equipment its something im looking into post 0.10.0 release

toxic magnet
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Oh ty for a very detailed response!

So I suppose a caveat, my responses will be as what one might call an "unaligned" miner. šŸ˜„

So regarding the first 2 questions, if you could sell to more people before and now you can sell to less, the people you can now sell to can dictate terms more. Sure that works both ways but typically e.g. a mason will use their 2nd star for mining anyway or work parties can just replace miners inputs so its not like you can force them to buy from you whereas they can force you to sell to them or deal with a painful process of moving your production ops to another town with more favourable pricing.

Also grouping and company rules don't apply to towns so a group of friends can setup a town and just buy from themselves and again you'd need to move all your production stuff to somewhere you can sell. If that town is straddling the correct 2 biomes it can provide almost all used mining materials bar shale whereas a single player wouldn't have the LCPs to cover the required spaces so would spend a lot of their game time ferrying stuff that the players in the town wouldn't have to.

I am 100% behind logistics and boats. In fact I think it would be beneficial if it went even further with iron and coal being removed from grasslands and gold from the jungle to encourage it even more. I think it would be cool seeing iron products from the desert biomes being shipped to grasslands, copper and gold from the mountains and coal and shale from the wetlands.

I agree with keeping rock types representative of the real world so what about the possible constituent products from shale such as alumina and oil shales? The differences in aggregate and sand mixes for different constructions or final products is a real world phenomenon but might actually be a bit boring....unless we got new fun machines to make it with. xD Happy to hear crushed coal isn't far off and looking forward to seeing what post .10 holds!

torpid ember
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I'm playing as a miner and it feels slow too but I don't think it's the update. Here's my impressions/feedback on the same points.

Roads less important: For me, roads seem just as important as before, and in this run they are really slow to be created. Mining things are all hand-carried so you can't just run over the mountain and grab 100 crushed rock, you need roads to be able to sell and it's a slow run for roads. I don't think that's v10.0 related, I just think people are slow this game. Basic Engineer scrolls were also slow to be released and I don't think there are many active engineers.

Towns: I think this is likely a problem for more than just miners, if you don't start anywhere near a town or enough people for a town (see my location, south-east of Unica in the desert on the same Island), it does seem more difficult. I am trying to set up a town with a road so it's more likely people will want to come and join the town but 10 people seems like A LOT for a town. Maybe 3-5 would work just as well.

Claims: I think that towns are potentially slowing down claiming for mines, but again that is potentially because in WT you have to buy claims from the central government (federation) and they haven't been set up properly yet (due to restarts, its only just about day 2, and voting bugs) so I don't think this is directly based on v10.0 changes, but rather bug issues (and this is a playtest so thats to be expected). It feels longer because its actually been more than just 24h but in reality the server has only been up for a short period of time if you consider voting takes 24-server-up-hours.

Something I found interesting is that towns can now import/export supplies, and that will make them richer/poorer towns. It's a whole dynamic that I think is really interestig. I think we need to play further (smelting, etc) and see how mining works out before deciding if its broken or not.

+1 for a miner-only midgame skid steer variant though.

soft tiger
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Yeah i concur with that the playtest has been going up and down so i dont think its actually been up in terms of playable hours (especially with the hammer issues) that has significantly impacted the progression rate so that needs to be taken into account. I also suspect that all the new layers and recipes also has a profound impact on it which will take players a few cycles to kinda get in the groove with how it works and how they want to play the game now but that aside i think everyone is bringing up some great points.

ivory smelt
olive gale
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On this same thread I have to wonder why a stone pickaxe only has 100 durability but the axe has 250; feels like maybe they should at least be brought in line

torpid ember
vital jungle
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Mining is one of the most fleshed out professions. I think other base professions (logging, hunting, etc.) need to be buffed to be more in line with mining; not mining power crept over the others even further.