Mining/Landscaping in Stonehearth

I have nerd chills. Excuse me while I jump around excitedly

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Maybe you could draw a rectangle on the ground, then choose the height to make it a rectangular prism and then select how far down you want it to go.

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Awesome, @woollysmash! That basically answers it.

Excited here as well. :smiley:

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Taking notes from Dwarf Fortress is definitely encouraging! I can only look forward to what we’ll get out of it. :smiley:

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Here’s how I think it should go.


##MINE TYPES:


OPEN PIT MINING:

Castle Story style mining, just a little different. Select how wide and deep the mine is by dragging and dropping, and the non-busy Miners (The class is going to get put in probably) will get to work. It is still a pretty good way to do mining, and if this is considered micromanaging, then I don’t know what isn’t


Typical Mine Shaft Mining:

Drag and drop a path upwards, downwards, or to the side, and mine from there. You know what I’m talking about.


##OTHER IDEAS


Support:

So, wooden support beams should be used to keep mines together and stable, so so mine collapses happen. They should be makeable by the carpenter, or if that doesn’t work, they should just automatically appear like scaffolding. They both use wood. They both wear out over time so replace them time to time, or just wait for the dirt on the top of the mine to start falling.


EXPLOSIVES:

BOOM BOOM BOOM! Explosives need to be in the game. Besides killing your settlers and destroying your towns and making goblin hordes beg for mercy, they should be used for mining to take out large chunks to make mining easier, but can make the mine much more unstable.


MINECARTS:

Make hauling out large amounts of rock and other crap easier. Just throw it in there, and let some poor sap haul it up to the surface, or if you want to take a quick ride to the bottom, just hop in and take a ride, running into piles of stone and other peers, and most likely running into a wall.


SCENARIO - MINE COLLAPSE:

If you don’t have support beams, then get some. Without support beams, your mine is susceptible to a mine collapse, which will destroy the mine, ruining your hard work at taking killing everyone in there unless they can get out in time, or their wounds aren’t severe enough to be fatal. Explosives can also trigger a mine collapse.

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well, there’s also this fairly large thread (from May of this year):

as well as some much older threads:

feel free to cherry-pick from any of those for additional materials… :+1:

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In relation to landscaping, I was recently curious as to how grass vs. dirt will be handled, in terms of occurrence in the world, benefits/penalties, and removal and replanting. Will we eventually have a way to transport ‘grass’ to other locations, like terraforming? And will grass re-grow over dirt normally, like most games (see Minecraft, for example)?

Also, I think maybe having a different penalty to walk speed on these types of terrain might be nice to have–dirt and mud is harder to walk through than a field of grass, for example. Someone from the development page post suggested that instead of roads further speeding up our villagers that they instead use the current walking speed for when travelling on them (using it as the cap, rather than the base). I sort of agree with this, since settlers seem to already move pretty quickly in the game and there’s always options for faster travel in the future, like horseback, cart rails, or some kind of dimensional plane portal. What do you think?

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Will our slavescitizens be happy if they were to live underground? Or are they going to need to live topside? Cause I can already see hollowing out a big cave and building a town inside of it to be a fun project.

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I think it would be cool to have them be happy under- or above-ground for now. However, I think in the long run they should be a little less happy living underground since we are going to get DWARVES as a playable race. The Dwarves should of course thrive underground. :yum:

Even if they’re unhappy underground, surely you can do +happiness things to offset that unhappiness? Seems reasonable to me.

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I didn’t know about the Dwarves. That would make more sense, in that case. If they’re going to be the beardy miney type of dwarves that is. :slight_smile:

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Pictures everywhere of the fields and trees that they can’t see while living in their dank holes, maybe.

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I’d wager a good way to make the non-dwarves and dwarves happy would be to include lots and lots of bioluminescence. Glowing mushrooms, animals, algae on the walls which will amaze and impress your settlers.

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Perhaps Gems too could emit a small amount of light. Then you could make your streets out of Rubies and Sapphires and watch them light up at night.

Warning, covering your buildings with tons of gems may attract unwanted attention.

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I agree that we should be able to edit the landscape. I think that would add a really nice aspect to the game and would allow you to have a lot more control over the way your town looks.

I think the miner class idea is also a great idea. Kind of like an old Minecraft mod called like towny or something, you would create a miners hut and chest and he would just begin strip mining. I think Stonehearth’s miner class could work something like this.

No, I think you should have to designate which areas you want mined, otherwise it’ll be hell to plan things properly. Imagine if the farmer class decided that it knew best about where to farm, and what to farm - you end up fighting with your units about where to do stuff, which is bad/frustrating gameplay.

On a completely separate note, the idea of strip mining brought to mind this, but for Stonehearth:

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Maybe an underground view mode?

And you could specify mining areas (options for ore, for stone, for everything) the same way you specify hunting areas for the trapper. Mining only ores or only stone would make them create tunnels, mining everything would make them clear the specified area.

Something like this should work fine IMHO:

http://cdn.gnomoria.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/mining_ui.png

Specify where to dig, and they’ll go dig. If you find some nice minerals, then decide whether you want to mine them or not (remember, there may be good reasons for not mining out a particular spot… remember you found lava above there earlier etc?).

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This would be my preferred choice as well. Perhaps the height of the tunnels can automatically be set to the size of walls so that there is some consistency in room size.

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I’d rather not have a massive hole in my Stonehearth map, that would be rather odd. However I agree that the random miner could be bothersome. I’m just kinda tossing out ideas. So on that note, if not random mining, if not mining out a crater, how could we do this? Maybe a selector tool like the one in MCedit?? All of the blocks become partially transparent and you can select an area and then push/pull the selected area to expand or contract the are you want to mine.

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