Alpha 7 - FAQ and Feedback: Mining

From the standpoint of user experience during mining (with the hand drills) I believe this new mechanic is a hit.

The key pain in the old system was, it was tedious: basically standing watching paint peel as you shoot it with a heat gun. Yes the colors and flashing lights were pretty, and for the first X hours (where X is a parameter taken from the users personal interest in mining, mineralogy etc.) it was fascinating. I myself have a hobby background in mining and minerals so to me, part of the allure of this game from the very beginning was that you were "simulating" high-tech futuristic mining. For the first ~hundreds hours, I delighted at hand drill mining.

Then I discovered the T2 and realized how slow and tedious all that mining I had already done had been. Then eventually even the T2 became tedious.

This new system mitigates the inherent grindiness to a great extent. Instead of a "wall of paint" you are looking for nuggets. This is more engaging, though I expect it too will eventually grow tiresome.

The Ore Scanner, from a "oh neato" standpoint is well conceived. I tried a start or two with Gear difficulties harder than Easy, and I found the challenge of surviving on Omicron and accumulating enough ore without the scanner to be pretty interesting. I do believe that some folks who are complaining about "needing to get to level 7" and "the lack of cobalt" are being a bit overwheening. It really is NOT that hard to find enough cobalt to build the scanner. Shoot ten drones and I bet you are set, or break 30 rocks. Or raid a neutral POI.

While I don't agree that "it is too hard" I still have to agree that, its overall contribution to game play is questionable. If you start on Easy gear, you get it already so the dynamic of having to survive without it is moot. Once you get it, it is just something else to take up inventory space much of the time, but then something you regret leaving behind when it comes time to make use of it.

A related issue: While it definitely helps to hone in on those nuggets, it is certainly not the equivalent of ground penetrating radar. It is possible by jumping around and changing one's viewpoint to get a vague sense for the actual trajectory and distance from oneself to the nugget. But because the outlines exhibit distance correlated scaling (they are smaller the farther away they are), what appears to be a big juicy nugget can sometimes turn out to be a small piddly one that was just very close. What appears to be the closest and best nugget can in fact be behind and below several others which can lead to odd sinuous, snaky maze-like mines. A small and apparently inconsequential nugget can in fact be the pick of the litter, except that it is too far away.

With all of that said, here are some ideas for how to leverage the ore scanner for additional layers of enhanced game play (and I observe you have placed it into its own little tech tree slot so maybe you are already planning this . . . brilliant though, letting your customers feel important by making them feel that your ideas came from them )

1. Add multiple tiers to the Ore Scanner: T1 offers the basic functionality, perhaps even a bit LESS resolution than at present, i.e., merely show the geometric center of the ore mass? T2, offers a bit more functionality (e.g., about what it has now), T3 provides distance, volume and perspective information on each nugget, T4 speeds up the T2 drilling functions whenever the drill is pointing in the direction of a deposit, T5 mines the **** for you, and also does your taxes . . .

2. Integrate the Ore Scanner with the other mining related gizmos in the game (vessel based drills, auto miners etc.)

3. Make Auto-miners TRULY auto. You build them, and then give them a command to go mine a particular deposit . . . off they go on their merry way. Combined with leaving the option to "NOT Deplete" deposits, this would allow the new mining dynamics to dovetail with the auto-miners in a copacetic way.

 

I just signed up to say that after the new update I've stopped playing EGS.

I bought the game on steam sale a long time ago didn't care for it at the time and shelved it until a few weeks ago. I was really impressed with alpha 6 and quickly racked up over 100 hours in two weeks playing co-op with a friend. I built some efficient mining HVs that could mill out entire deposits rather quickly. It was great because I find mining rather boring and tedious. Now when I mine with those HVs nothing happens. The holes just get bigger. I am not mining resources for a CV with a T2 drill...

It's a shame because I was really liking this game. Hopefully something will change.

 

@Hummel-o-War : the crazy auto-miner idea . . . hadn't thought of it like a drone, but it is a bit drone like.

It would hover along very close to the ground traversing to the deposit you sent it to, then set down and stay there forever, just like the existing ones. Basically you build it, tell it where to go, it goes there and stays there till you go get it. Or, if the code to make it traverse is too awkward, just make it *poof* magically appear there.

Automated mining drones could also be cool!

Just ideas! It all depends on what the ideal dynamic you guys are striving for.

 

Sort of.

Yesterday, I wasn't having a lot of luck with an HV mounted with 4 drills. I eventually hopped out and worked with a T2 Hand Drill. With the HV, I'm usually looking at the HV from an external view somewhat distant from the HV. I couldn't see any of the little blue circles.

Add that to the HV jumping around all the time and its proclivity to dig down instead of level, and HV mining was super frustrating. I've not tried the upper tier HV drills. Perhaps things get better then.

I mined out an asteroid (in orbit) by hand too, as there's no drill rig for an SV.

 

Yes, it seems the HV miners are intent on going straight for the planetary core and also jump around like a cockroach on a barbecue grill.

 

I was thinking about the new mining system while I was "Zen-Mining" mining an orbiting asteroid yesterday. Asteroids in orbit still use the old system. I had just come from mining on Akua and the new system. I know the change to mining was a necessity because of other changes to the maps.

I started to wonder why the system had to change as far as players are concerned. The old system probably knew node by node what type of material it was, thus knew how to appear on the screen, and coughed up whatever it contained. The new system's rocky hotspots also know this too, but they're not integrated into the invisible mesh of nodes that represent the ground. They only cough up their ore when you directly assault the hotspot, aka the rock.

But the system could cough up ore for mining the ground within a certain radius of a hotspot. You'd place one invisible hotspot instead a "vein" of them. Any time you mined, it would check to see if any invisible hotspots were within the radius. If so, you cough up ore instead of crushed stone. The trouble would be that there would be no visual appearance to the ore.

Or maybe I don't know anything about the subject and this is all rubbish.

 

I like your thinking, and as far as I'm aware it reflects reality.

The most productive gold mines in the world (down in South Africa): the ore just looks like rock. Nothing recognizable as "gold" results from it until that ore is thoroughly processed. Granted, those seams they are working have MUCH higher concentrations of gold in them than the surrounding rock, and even more compared to "typical" crustal rock. But the quantities that have to be excavated to yield one gram of gold are probably on the order of tons per gram (This article is saying between 1 and 5 grams per ton of ore excavated).

The other thing is: the Tautona Gold Mine, (or any mine that focuses on a specific mineral) also yields other pay dirt as well. In the case of a gold mine, I would think that small quantities of a plethora of minerals are harvested (iron, nickel, tiny quantities of platinum, etc.). Even the "useless" rock itself probably winds up getting used in one way or another.

I'm not sure how much of this is really salutary for this game's design, but it is worth the devs at least considering it.

If they wanted to, they could make the following changes and be COMPLETELY in tune with reality (more so than at present actually);
(a) make All "ore deposits" yield trace amounts of most of the other types of ore;
(b) make all bedrock yield trace amounts of most types of ore;

This would mean, you could just start digging ANYWHERE and be harvesting small trickles of almost anything and everything. As long as the yield per effort/time was sufficiently higher for the actual ore deposits, this might even be a salutary game mechanic, though I don't assert that so much as just speculate about it.

We already have this in some sense in the form of the surface "rocks" that you can break and which yield seemingly random but probabilistic amounts of various ore.

 

In the movie "Gold", they were super happy when they found 8 grams per ton.

In game terms, I doubt we (players) would be happy with that kind of return. Of course, it really depends on automation. I mean if my HV is clearing mountain sides and smelting the tons of ore so that I can have 1,000 Iron Ingots, then I'm okay with that but I think we'll need a larger planet.

 

In the above line of thinking I was bummed that the "within radius of the node" approach to coughing up ore didn't have a visual effect. That is, the ground would just look like ground.

But it occurs to me that perhaps "particle fx" might solve that. Particle FX also work on a radius, right? So if you're within the radius of the invisible Promethium deposit marker thing, then maybe you could see some subtle blue non-moving particles?

For that matter, even if you stayed with the current approach to mining, you could perhaps add some particle fx to make them a little easier to find for folks without an ore scanner?

 

Lower ore deposits means more time in transit between deposits which equals lower yield. More work.

 

HORRIBLE IDEA, HORRIBLE EXECUTION.
You have COMPLETELY ruined mining with this dumb idea of digging around in t he ground looking for a "pill" of minerals. Did any of you ACTUALLY TRY playing HARD starting game and dig for minerals without your precious SCANNER? I think not, otherwise you would have experience what I have EVERY SINGLE time:
1. More often than not, you end up with a cave 3 meters to every side of where the mineral is indicated to be and guess what? NO MINERAL. Yes, you can walk right up to and past the mineral indicator in every single direction AND NO MINERAL. This is even with the PLENTY of mineral at each location chosen.
2. You now actually have to dig to the true depth listed (usually something like 11 meters straight down). Used to be that was the CENTER, and you would reach the top of the mineral area in much less depth, normally 5-6 meters and you'd start SEEING and COLLECTING MINERAL. What does that now mean?:
a. You use 1+ fuel to EVEN REACH THE MINERAL DEPTH, forget actually FINDING IT THERE AS STATED ABOVE
b. You now have dug STRAIGHT DOWN SO FAR THAT YOU CAN'T GET OUT WITHOUT USING 1+ fuel to DIG YOUR BUTT OUT.
c. So now, whereas the game was perfectly balanced that nearly all the time in a Hard start, you would barely have enough fuel to get some of each mineral, now you something like 10 fuel (which you only get in Medium), and THEN THERE'S STILL NO GUARANTEE YOU'LL ACTUALLY FIND THE DAMN PILLS WHEN YOU DO DIG DOWN TO THEIR INCREDIBLE DEPT
3. This is supposed to be realism? HA don't make me laugh, so let me see if I have this straight, I dig and dig and dig and dig, square METERS AND METERS of STONE to make a whole in the ground that is something equivalent to 10 meters cubed in area that I've removed and then BOING, magically I hit a "pill" of mineral, 1/20th the size of what I've removed and BOOM! I have scored the same QUANITITY OF MATERIAL IN A COUPLE SECONDS WITH THE PILL THAT EQUALS THE VOLUME OF STONE I'VE REMOVED??????? WHAT? WHAT IDIOT CAME UP WITH THIS IDEA???
4. The game is suposed to BE FUN. Y es, mining was always a BIT OF A CHORE until you built some awesome hover craft miner, BUT NOW, you spend THAT ENTIRE SAME TIME GRINDING AWAY --- NOT LOOKING AT PRETTY MINERAL SLOWLY ACCUMULATING... NO! YOU STARE AT THE BARREN, SINGLE COLORED STONE MATERIAL AS YOU DIG AWAY AT IT, DIG AWAY AT IT, UNTIL--- WHALA, MAGICALLY YOU ARRIVE AT SOME PILL OF MINERAL THAT IS --- WAIT FOR IT --- CONSUMED BY YOUR DRILL IN 2 SECONDS AND YIELDS AS MANY UNITS AS YOU SPENT SEVERAL MINUTES DIGGING FOR TO GET THERE????????

LUNACY. SO SINCE I'M YET TO EVER (*EVER) SEE A DEVELOPER ADMIT THEY TRIED A *DUMB* IDEA, AND ROLL IT BACK, I'LL JUST CHANGE MY REVIEW IN A WEEK TO SHARE THIS LUNACY WITH WOULD BE BUYERS AND PUT THE GAME ON THE SHELF.

For the life of me, I'll never understand how developers get swayed with lunatic ideas that haven't been tested, don't fit any model of reality, and plain are just not fun.

GIVE BACK THE OLD MINING MODEL, because:
1. you at least spent your time LOOKING AT AND ACTUALLY COLLECTING WHAT YOU SOUGHT, INSTEAD OF BEING BORED OUT OF YOUR MIND DIGGING IN THE STONE LOOKING FOR THE MAGIC PILL, WHICH EVEN WITH A SCANNER IS A COMPLETELY BORING EXERCISE.
2. you don't need 10 fuel packs to even collect some basic mineral in HARD starts, and then only if you CAN ACTUALLY FIND AND COLLECT ONE OF THE STUPID MINERAL PILLS.
3. You don't have to DIG half way to HELL to find some mineral 14 meters down in the ground.

...nuff said... back to 7 Days or Ark where the developers haven't completely lost their mind.

and if you think I know not of what I speak, check my hours playing the game.

 

More to the point: the game is completely UNPLAYABLE without a scanner. Used to love the replay-ability of the game on HARD starts, maybe, but sometimes maybe not, just barely enough fuel to give you the basics for a motorcycle, then a basic base after stripping the local shack and then daredevil run into a friendly depot while under fire to grab either more fuel, or, the all precious single NEODYMIUM so that you could then upgrade your mining tool.

Now the game is ruined for replayability on Hard. You dig and dig and dig for tiny PILLS of mineral in the ground, most of the time can't even find them once you have a 5 meter cave circling the location point indicator, you've also dug SO FAR DOWN you can't get out and now you need twice the fuel packs to mine FEWER MINERALS than before, and that's even if you can find a pill once you dig down.

Worst of all reality-wise, you get about 70 stone digging down to the PILL, removing a HUGE VOLUME of stone that yields that 70 stone, and then WHALA -- MAGICALLY, from mining a TINY PILL for a COUPLE SECONDS, you SUDDENLY HAVE 70 of the MINERAL???

What? Did no one even think about the VOLUME OF AREA REMOVED TO YIELD WHAT YOU GET??? Let's review:

a. HUGE CAVE of empty space mining stone: Yield = 70 stone
b. TINY PILL (SUITCASE SIZED) of mineral: Yield = 70 mineral

Whoa, time to go play Ark or 7 Days until someone comes to their senses...

 

Not "great" on easy start. What fun is it DIGGING FOR A BLUE OUTLINE???

Where is the realism or enjoyment in that????

 

....or sorta like it EXACTLY WAS BEFORE THEY SCREWED WITH IT.