Well yeah, I understand that it is Alpha but I believe that people today rather get used to something new and shitty when they should basically protest and do something about the shitty changes. There were countless of players against that and then everything just went quiet and then after a week suddenly everyone loved it. Not sure if those (who hated the new mining system) just told their opinions and left, everyone got used to it or only the fans of the new mining system wrote how good it is. Whatever it is I really hate when someone changes the completely everyday mechanic of the game to something completely new where everyone in the god damn community have to adjust and they just accept it. Am I the only one or is the new system worse? How the hell can it be better than the old one? It's less fun, less unique, quicker and sloppy. I used to mine when I had enough of wildlife and attacks on my base. It was a pause for me but now it is just ****. Isn't the point of the game to actually suffer a little with mining and everything else so the game is more interesting than to just rather get the resources in a second? I've heard that you can get a 6k gold deposit in just 15 minutes if you mine correctly with the new system. What? How in the hell is this fun? So basically this system will never get changed. I mean there could be an option to choose between old and new system but I doubt that something will change. Thank you for your response Philipp.
as far as i know they changed the system because of the new heightmap system or something like that. I can't imagine that this is the result we will get when the game is finished. At least, i hope they either change it or make a option to enable the old system (maybe related with the old planet system, would be okay for me. i also had fun with the old planets ) And no, its not only you, i also don't like the new system and i totally agree with what you say, that the old one was a good pause. i always have a look at the new versions they release, but with my girlfriend i currently also continue playing alpha 6, because we both liked it more.
I would play Alpha 6 too but the problem I see is that simply old mining system probably won't be back ever again, not even introduced in options where you could choose between old one and the new one (like you've suggested). So that basically takes all the fun away. Why would I be stuck at Alpha 6 while I could have all the new things which are great made apart from the crafting system that recently changed a little and the mining system. And this basically means that I would have to play Alpha 6 for ages or even forever. Let's say I could somehow get used to the new crafting system. But I never will get used to the new mining system... No way There is probably a small chance that old mining system will be once again introduced/added back in the game but I hardly believe that's possible simply because things at developing are going in the wrong direction. I've also heard that planets will be stationary and that seeds won't exist anymore (so basically randomized planets will be taken away and replaced with stationary ones). The game is going in the completely wrong direction than it should go. Some people like the changes but I now kinda see the grind festival of fiber to create bullets and then those ant holes which you need few minutes to mine and then you leave because that's how fast the mining goes now. What a shame.
I think we have to wait and see in what direction the game will go in the future. I still play Alpha 6 (for the moment - not forever), not only because of the mining system. But also because i have more bugs with the current version and together with my girlfriend we work on a own big scenario, which is just for alpha 6 atm. And we have a lot of fun with alpha 6. Well, of course you can continue playing the current version and ignore the mining system, i just wrote that because you wrote in your first post that youre out, so i thought, if the new mining system makes you stop playing empyrion, go and play the old version. Mabye next year will make it better again, stay optimistic and if not, you maybe still can arrange with it
Apart from the changes on the ore deposits from voxel to “sub-surface ore rocks” (SSOR), I've seen a large amount of players complaining about the new "Autominer (AMiD) will deplete deposits" feature, and stating that this change alone took away the heavy impact and importance of end game mining. As reasonable as that would be, there was a reply from Sivrav saying that it was a needed change and a realistic one. Survival is my favorite game genre. That being said, a more realistic game makes for a more immersive experience and, so far, improves the game as a survival one aswel, in fact I liked to see the added complexity to the auto miner devices (AMDs). But, on the other hand, why should we stop reality improvement just there? We could and should make a good discussion out of the reality of ore mining, hoping that would give us leads and possibilities to creatively solve these issues: 1. First of all, if we take in consideration the default amount of ore deposits and how rich they are on most empyrion planets, we would end up, maybe, with 5 deposits worth 4k of a single ore type. If we consider iron for that matter, mining a whole planet would be worth like 40k iron ingots (5 x 4.000 x 2). Maybe thats enough to build a big capital vessel, and that's unrealistic as it gets, having a whole planet mined dry of iron just to build a single ship. 2. To be honest, using AMD's to dry out surface deposits seems a waste to me, we got this complex end game top technology device using alien auto-miner cores, and we use those for what? To deplete resources that may be reached by common drills. 3. On most multiplayer servers, there is this issue where new players will struggle to get ore, or advanced players will struggle to find spots to place their AMDs, finding that most deposits have been fully mined, always requiring some kind of workaround from either the devs or the server owners. Some players will say that there are many ways to solve those issues, but we could try and think out of the box to find an interesting solution that would add depth to the gameplay, as long as more imersion and realism, and improve the end game. 4. A world's terrain is kinda complex and consists of multiple layers that weren't reached until certain kinds of technology were developed. To this day, there are still layers on our world that weren't reached by human hands or high technology drills. As an example, there is layer named pre-salt that holds a huge amount of petroleum on the coast of Africa and Brazil that has proven a chalenge to extract from (check the first picture). So, all these things considered, I've come up with a possible solution, and I call it Deep Ore Mining. It would consist of really deep ore deposits on each planet that can't be reached using drills, like the example above, so only AMDs would be really able to mine from there. Not that it would need any real deposits to be reached, just virtual spots were you could place your AMDs so they could work and mine at a given rate (so this should be easy to implement). The possibilities are endless, also the customization of that feature: I - I feel the devs wanna keep the game balanced and don't feel like giving out a unlimited supply of any resource, and I couldn't agree more with that. The thing is there are other ways of limiting ones access to something. One of those ways is limiting by the resources needed to keep the auto miners working, in other words, energy consumption rate / ore output. If the energy consumption is high enough, no one will use the auto miners forever. That would give another level of importance to energy and boost its price in the market, and due to the fact that solar power just made out to public and other sources of energy are being discussed, there couldn't be a better timing for this. This is a feature that requires customization, testing and feedback, though. II- Make the auto miners a bit more complex and customizable. For example, you're allowed to place only one AMD on each deep ore deposit (or maybe more), but you may adjust the intensity/power of the device, giving out a higher ore output at the cost of more energy consumption. III - Instead of a deep deposit consisting of a single type of ore, the planet could virtually have multiple layers of ores, where the deeper the ore, the rarer and more resource it needs to be mined from the AMD (yet another configurable feature). Example: Akua inner layers consists, from the surface to the deep, of: //Common ground(real)//Rock layer(real)/ then unreacheable using a drill from this point: /Iron(virtual)/Silicon(virtual)/Cobalt(virtual)/Copper(virtual)/Neodymium(virtual)/Planet core//. Where the deeper you wanna mine, the more costly it will be. It requires some common sense aswel so the energy requirements aren't game breaking. IV- The deep ore deposits may deplete, or not. That should be figured out with further discussion. We may get all this for just customizing the way AMDs work, and I feel thats a simple and good way to go that may be easily adjusted by the devs in case any balancing is needed. I realize this is hardly a feedback only reply and more like a suggestion post, so I'll post it under the suggestions aswel, but since the dev's have been looking into this, I felt it would be a good idea to share these thoughts over here. Hope you'll forgive me for this huge post, and thanks for your time.
Done quite a bit of mining using both the CV & HV Mining Turrets this last week on experimental branch. Basically most of the issues/frustrations could be resolved with a change to a 'ball' type turret & addition of keyboard ship controls while in turret. And a rebalance of mining speed and reach for the HV. {the ball turret would have a much greater arc-range than current} HV: in order to attempt to be 'faster' than drone mining, must mount turret facing down. Position HV a few meters outside cylindar of deposit in order to not drill out beneath the HV causing it to fall into hole. Result is the limited turret arc often results in unreachable nodes on far edge. And not uncommon for deeper deposits to have nodes beyond the reach of the turret. It still takes minutes -longer- to mine a same size node with HV Turret compared to drone mining, this is just the actual mining time. This is clearly due to the turret mining out a much larger amount of ground than the drone method. Typical stone mined is ~50% of ore mined with turret while drone/hand mining results in ~15%. Certainly the HV turret mines material faster than the T2 hand drill. And if I were digging out for a large bunker I'd want one for the bulk of the work. But for ore mining the turret actually takes longer so, at least in SP, the turret is a step down from T2 drone mining. CV: Biggest pain point actually turned out to be lighting. Sure the limited arc is a teeth grinder but once your eye gets better at judging where to position the CV you don't have to move quite so often. But the darker ores... seeing Silicon on the dark side of an asteroid requires it to be lit up. Adding a barrel mounted spotlight to the turret would be a great QOL improvement. Though ideally some kind of visible indicator showing the area the turret can reach would be really useful, there still needs to be some light source to reveal the ores vs rock. --sidenote: could be random but it seemed like the space drones preferred to target the mining turret? Hate to bring it back up but HV fixed drill mining: tried it again. still really painful. way too much motion, too difficult to control. could only make myself do one comparison. wound up with ~75% stone compared to ore due to tunneling in and expansions to turn around. so took more than twice as long compared to drone mining, ignoring flight time of specialised HV to site. Conclusion: seems like either the HV fixed & turret mining would need a significant speed up or hand mining a significant nerf; in order for the more 'advanced', HV mounted mining methods to be noticeably better, i.e. faster. Nerfing hand mining will see some folks getting out the pitchforks & torches (I'll be hiding in the crowd, heh), so maybe, as others have said, there should be new reasons for the HV mounted drills? Deposits way up on the sides of cliffs where the turret would be a clear winner? Quite deep, rich veins (if SSORs then very tightly packed in a line) where the fixed drill HV mining rig could really shine? I know an automatic mode has been mentioned. Personally I haven't used even the automining nodes in quite a while. I prefer doing it myself. So ideally I would like to see the manual use of drill rigs/turrets be a long term part of my SP gameplay.
I think the easiest way (in terms of user friendliness) to fix HV-Mining or HVs in general would be to have the fixed drill (and possibly fixed guns) not being static facing forward but being gimbaled instead. Not that it turns them into a turret, a small arc from left to right and from up to down let's say 15 - 25 degrees. Steering could work like => you switch to the drills from your cockpit and turning changes to "drillmode" which means the first 15 - 25 degrees mouse steering only effects drill direction and only if you turn a bit more you steer the HV it self following that direction. The pros: - HV can still follow the terrain but it is much easier to drill downward naturally, making turns and wide curves within the ground - don't have to mess with front and/or back hover engines turning them off and on in the menu - very easy to make a pathway/tunnel that feels natural and intuitive The cons: - takes a little practice to not oversteer and turn - for bigger HVs more gimbaled drills are necessary That way you can make use of HV drills and improve them much. I would even suggest to make them stronger (tier 1) and the range of tier a good lot longer. Multiple drills should only speed up the process in removing terrain/ore but not yield more ore. In addition to that i would even like a gimbaled Version of the fixed minigun. But while drills should stay parallel to each other to grant a smooth tunnel and pathing, gimbaled guns should center at a crosshair depending on where the target is we are aiming at. That would put some use to miniguns on a HV other than area mowing trees and critters ;-) Speaking of drills: drill turrets (since they are beam-based) should have a greater range, which makes them really worth being the top tier of drilling. There is no imbalance in it since it doesn't destroy enemy vessels/structures. Counts for both HV and CV turrets => HV 40-50 meters, CV 80-100 Meters (maybe a little less). OH and before i forget, same for the multitool turrets too. Deconstructing is only possible when you removed the enemies core manually before hand anyways. HVs are tied to the ground and it is a real PITA to deconstruct (or repair) something that is high of the ground or really deep within a crater (abandoned mine) at certain points they become useless. Same goes for CV turrets. CVs tend to be pretty large compared to a players character and SV/HV. Repositioning can be a real PITA more often then not. Those changes would make investing in top tier drilling and multitooling worth while.
Today I played a bit alpha version 6 of the game, I personally found the old mining system preferable, do not get me wrong. I hope this comment is helpful in some way. I like the game, but it is very annoying to mine, besides those drones near the fallen ships that come to shoot you. I hope that in version 8 these fallen ships get more distant between them and increase the amount of deposits because I think it will be kind of boring to walk a few kilometers to find a deposit and then a few more kilometers to find another. Note: I'm a novice player, bought the game in the winter promotion and I just came to enjoy it a little in these last weeks.
