Mining Permanent node's? or strip mining?

I’m of two minds when it comes to limited resources and digging out area (these are two distinct concepts). Limited resources always drives me a little crazy since it means no ‘ideal setup’ will last forever. On the other hand, limited resources are more realistic and will also force you to explore most of the map.

Digging out/altering the terrain through harvesting also means that I’d be forced to ‘change’ a setup I might really like  (I’m already waking up with cold sweats imaging clear-cutting the starting region and turning it into a plain), but it’s also the more realistic of the two options.

-Will

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Im hoping the world will be much deeper when the game is released, so we can stay in one area if we wish.

Perhaps we can have both, infiniite supplies and limited supplies?

I dont think it would fit to have any sort of unlimited supply though…

A spicial Mining Mode would make it easier to dig out areas and locate ores perhaps?

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I belive radiant said something about making the world infinite at some point?
Using chunks?

Replanting trees needs to be added for sure.

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I’m very sure there will be an infinite-of-everything-mod. If there won’t be, I might make one. If it is infinite, I’m very sure there will be a finite one.

If it’s both, we’ll see. It sounds like something that sandbox might offer, however attention should be paid so the sandbox mode doesn’t end up as the joke that Anno 1701’s sandbox mode was.

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That city is called Murder Bucket. Why?

I believe @RepeatPan just found the image and as such has no idea why the city is called that.

Precisely. My towns would be named… differently.

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I was referring to the entire community not this thread :wink:

At least 23k people own the game, I’d say we’re a vocal minority :stuck_out_tongue: This stuff is always fun to discuss and work through potential problems, and if it makes Radiant think of something they perhaps (somehow) didn’t previously then great, but I don’t think in the first instance we should be the driving force of an integral gameplay feature :stuck_out_tongue:

So no ‘murders’ or ‘deaths’ in the title then?

Cities rarely advertise their… speciality in their name. There’s simply no need to state the obvious in my opinion.

So it goes.

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on the subject of city names iv always named my settlement in Stonehearth Wolf Haven, and if everything pans out what may happen is i’ll make another settlement and call it something else like Titanus, Draconis, Atlantis or some other city like name. It’s pretty much the same strategy i have for Anno 1404 and 2070. Build a small settlement and progress it to a certain stage then build another and make that the metropolis.and import all the goods in to fulfill the settlers needs, In stonehearths case it will be for production as well ( like soldiers and the like )

I have not read all the above but i prefer to have an unlimited source of ore but with an extreme slow gather speed.

Why is that?

If you go back to the middle ages you will find cities that have been built because of iron ore mines. These were mined for centuries, no matter how efficient. So in SH you would be able to build an economy around it for long term and not just a military camp like in Age of Empires, as you know the mining is there for ever.

Furthermore, the game world is infinite big, this means you are forced to have cities and several outposts you need to maintain on a longterm as one side ores are rare but still unlimited to gather

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I doubt that any city was built merely because of ore. Medieval cities were rather complex in their nature. I’ll use this Wikipedia article for my explanation:

Mining was extremely inefficiently, and more important, it was very finite. Cities were not built because of mines, mines were built around cities. I can imagine smaller camps (a few huts, maybe some farms, a few forges) that were founded, but definitely not a whole city. There is only so much you can gather without any professional tools.

Little anecdote: If we were to “lose” all our technology today, we would very likely be unable to restart our civilisation. We have mined about every ore that is easily accessible from the surface without any tool and the only way to gain ores nowadays would require powered tools - which required metal that we wouldn’t have. See also the article I’ve linked: “By the 14th century, the majority of the more easily accessible ore deposits were exhausted. Thus, more advanced technological achievements were introduced in order to cope up with the demand in metal.”

I personally understand and agree that the idea to have to move a mine site is a rather annoying task, but one that must be done. If properly balanced - i.e. you have to move at some point, but not every few hours - and easy enough, I would welcome it. Add it to the system I’ve proposed with upgrades and layers, you could have, I suppose, a near-infinite (or even infinite) bottom layer, which would do exactly that - but it would be very expensive to operate, and likely yield very little.

If infinite-but-inefficient was the only type to exist, it would be really annoying to have any decent production going on. You would be required to have multiple (maybe even dozens) of mines, each with their own camp (or as you’ve stated, a whole city) and then manage each of them. This would likely result in a micromanaging overkill, something which they want to avoid if I’m not mistaken.

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I just wanted to pull back on this point…Stonehearth is, first and foremost, a city builder. That is fact. Tom has said it multiple times on livestreams when asked about exploration and multiple cities, that the main point is to build a city. Just exploration and moving around with no base is supported but by no means encouraged and the game itself discourages that with the settlers having no inventories so you would have to make sure wherever you ventured had some food, and you wouldn’t be able to farm.

And thus actually the game is an awful lot more like SimCity than it is Minecraft, as it is a city builder.


I quite like the suggestion of a building that is a ‘mine’. I also enjoyed Settlers (II)'s way of doing it and SimCity’s but I just wonder about @RepeatPan’s suggestion of a geologist. I like the idea, but perhaps we would need some sort of above ground indicator of where the ores might be? This could of course simply mean that if it is say a mountain it probably has ore and you send the geologist there, but I think there needs to be some kind of trigger for sending the geologist somewhere, as him just wandering randomly around the map seems a bit odd, at least to me.

The other issue of a geologist would be that to start mining, you need two classes, one of which becomes somewhat useless. The geologist, I would say, would definitely not be able to be its own class, simply because of how useless it would become. If it was an advancement of the miner and thus could mine as well, that would be fine. I just don’t like the idea of having this completely useless guy sat around, unable to do anything else because he has already scouted out the area I am building in for all the resources I’m looking for. :stuck_out_tongue:

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That’s easily doable using broad searches. I suggest that a geologist has multiple search modes. For the following pictures, grey will be unknown area, and shades of auburn will be the ore concentration.

The first one would be the surface search. This is a relatively imprecise (many false positives) search that can cover a lot of area.

I would say this area could be about the size of the starting area (the visible one). This gives you a rough idea where ores could be - not every deposit found this way exists or has more than a few units (therefore, making it worthless for a mine).

The next modi would allow you to search more precise, in a smaller area. This survey takes longer but has little to no false positives, and is severely limited in its size. In this example, it could yield something like this:

Now you could be sure that this area would have larger ore deposits, It’s a good place to start a mine.

I would kind of disagree about the geologist class being useless on its own. If we added this multiple-layer system, they would be needed to find out if there are more ores in deeper layers. They could also be necessary to extend or upgrade mines - which means that while many miners mine, a few geologist work on the mine itself.

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Or rather than making it a particular area you could set it to a large region instead ( when i say region i mean a region that could hold a small city) thus you’d need only have a geologist do the task once in a region and then promote him to miner if you have high amounts of materials you are looking to mine for.

Much like how the islands function in Anno 1404 and 2070 where the islands have a certain amount of materials regardless of where you mine them and of course the more mines you have the more you deplete the resource. Although you would need some way of differentiating between mining say iron and copper. ( maybe different mines? or production selection? )

I agree, there could be a lot of functions/ abilities bundled in to the class - as a prospector it discovers potential mining areas, and also could work, like you say, to understand whether to expand a mine or not. Having a geologist visit and maintain mines would increase ore yield as the unit could provide ‘direction’ to the miners?

The unit could also work to identify unknown mined ores and gems? Perhaps a ‘quality’ system is introduced and the geologist could identify the quality of ores/ gems increasing their value/ use? I believe Dwarf Fortress/ Gnomoria employ a similar system? Although I have found this to be a bit of a fiddly ‘micro’ system …

I’d agree that there would have be a certain radius to it all, whether this is large or not I’m unsure, it would obviously be easier to manage less mines covering larger areas, however the whole point of @RepeatPan’s discussion draws on the idea that if you really want maximum gains then you pay attention to a system. Placing a mine in a random location and gain some ore from it, but your results would be poor.

Not necessarily, you could simply have a mine with any and all ore being mined. Although if you wanted to place a specific focus on a certain ore then the feature would be useful.

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I really like the idea of “boosting” mines through geologists. Maybe you could assign them to a mine, just like you assigned miners (I assume they are assigned? Or freelance-ish?) to have a permanent boost.

Maybe they could be used to identify ores or outcome. Minecraft has various mods that play with this idea: You can smelt an iron ore directly. Or you can refine it and smelt it to gain 1.2 ingots. Or you can refine it again to gain 1.5 ingots. Or again, to get 2 ingots + 0.25 ingots of something else (iron/copper, silver/lead)… The point being: The more effort you put into refining, the more you get. You can stop at 1, but you can continue to 2.25.

The geologist may come into action here. What does a mine yield exactly? Rocks? Raw ores? Or already “refined” ores? Depending on that, an geologist may improve the yield of a mine (by giving more ore per “transaction” as well as byproducts) or it could refine the ores in its own location outside the mine.

Basically, it could create a chain that would be similar to Miner (gathering) -> [ Geologist (refining) -> ] Smelter (convert/use),

If I’m not mistaken, this only applies to goods, and is somewhat independent of the resource (i.e. all resources are equal, the value of a, say, sceptre depends on the raw material used + the variable skill of the worker). I think it would be rather pointless to invest time valuing a product that you are going to convert soon enough anyway.

However, maybe they could do something about the mines, i.e. identify their efficiency and what the rest deposit looks like? I mean, logically, the more ore there is, the faster you can get rid of it. So the emptier the deposit gets, the slower your mine works. You should have some sort of “X tons of ore mined in the last week” indicator to see that - but a geologist could tell you “This mine is likely depleted. I would recommend to move on”?

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Why not do both thing? So for example some ore despoits are inifitive but they are located under dungeons or protected areas so you need to take the goblin camps out ot get to them. Smaller ore despoits are located all over the map and are not so heavy guarded.

most of the discussion until now have been about how to combine them :slight_smile: