[Suggestion] Cave Quality of Life

Suggestions
1

tl;dr at bottom

I love mining, the way hearthlings go through one door in a cave and travel through my complicated system anywhere they go is plain entertaining, but building complicated cave systems is annoying.

First off, building a cave up or down is a complicated and tedious affair. Hearthlings should be able to tunnel stairs down, instead of just straight up or straight down, currently the only way to stair down is to dig a large section forward, then layer by layer have them dig out the stairs.

Secondly, when you’re in a mountainous biome, it’s really easy to get lazy and build houses in your cave, making rooms is really easy to do in caves. I’d like a downside to this, I feel living in a cave while efficient would be detrimental to a hearthling’s mood. Additionally, I’d like if we had the ability to replace cave walls with walls of our choice, currently you can replace floors, and to replace walls you have to tedously mine out the entire thing row by row and then replace it with slab, it’s a slow process and when you x-ray, you still see the walls, turning on slice does nothing.

Thirdly, caves need more life. You can dig a long straight cave with no supports and no lighting. I’m not saying this stuff should be required, but I’d like some incentive to do so, like faster mining and more yeild for having cave supports and lights, or faster walking in-cave. It would be great if you could have hearthlings automatically do this, but that’s asking for a miracle, and could prove annoying if you want to make an intersection where they’re placing a support.

Fourth, mining needs to be handled like building. If I want to expand my cave roof, they should build scaffolding and ladders to help them do so, additionally, building anything upwards is plain impossible. You can’t mine up without slicing, the camera won’t let you.

Speaking of the camera, x-ray is a treat, but I’d really enjoy a hearthling viewpoint while travelling through my caves, but that’s a more general suggestion.

Last and finally, we need more pickaxes. Miners break blocks in one hit, which is fine, but if I only have 3 hearthlings that can mine, it can prove to be annoying if I’m trying to cave somewhere. Adding additional pickaxes that give hearthlings the ability to dig multiple blocks at a time or even just giving them a speed boost while in the act of mining could prove to be useful.

For those who wanted a quick summary of what I’ve said:
1: We need the ability to mine stairs in tunnels without having to do it layer by layer
2: Downsides to making a house in a cave, being able to replace cave wall with a regular wall without destroying x-ray.
3: Supports and cave lighting having an upside that isn’t just aesthetic, maybe with cave-ins or having buffs to cave related activities,also maybe have hearthlings autoplace them (maybe with the option to turn autoplace off)
4: Mining being treated like building, so that digging straight up is handled by building scaffolding instead of needing to build ladders manually
5: Pickaxes that add buffs to mining

3 Likes
2

I do like this idea personally, cause it feels like being so zoomed in with the camera, just to get mining done, gets rather irk some cause just the wrong fidget or just turning the camera, the camera just shoots backwards or out of the cave a billion miles away(just slight exaggeration). But as for the health of the hearthians, they should develop something like the shakes, or have like a chance per day to become more sensitive towards light, and if in there for to long they can potentially become blind,all this is if there is no light or significant lighting placed in the cave.

1 Like
3

My Settlers dislike living in the cave homes I build them. Housing happiness of 4. I had to abandon my cave homes and build buildings up above to make them happy. Housing happiness over 8! And this made my husband sad. He is excited to play, but is waiting for end release to play. So he drools over my shoulder. Anyway he was hoping to make his realms more DwarfFortress like with the whole town underground. And seeing as my people would rather roast in the hot desert sun, I thought well if we added Dwarves who like to live subterranean-ly then that would give him his option.

And I haven’t built any slabs or things underground, just floors, I was worried it would break things.

My husband did have a suggestion, and I couldn’t figure out how to manage it. He liked the idea of me placing houses over my cave homes and making it the basement, with stairs. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how.

4

Definitely this. Mining stairs down is easy enough, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to mine upwards to the next level directly above a hearthling’s head.

5

though not much has been said about them by the team, dwarves will be added after the initial release of the game, as they were one of the unlocked kickstarter stretch goals. :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

Sweet! :smiley: Thanks so much!! I’ll go tell him!

1 Like
7

I guess, once dwarfs are in, they will implement alot of features for tunnel building. Building tools especially designed for building underground. So I guess stairs will come around that time. :slight_smile: