First of all, you really need an ore scanner. a. Mining is actually faster now than it was with the old system (if you have an ore scanner, which you should get yourself as early as possible) Until then, i usually mine rocks for the basic ores or try my luck without scanner, which also works quite well, if you know where to dig. -> see d. b. It takes less fuel now, if you have an ore scanner. c. boring is subjective and i really don't see any difference there, and i mined a lot. But i won't argue on that. That's your opinion. About Stone: I for myself need them a lot, as i build my base with it, so some few hundred to thousand stones is nice side effect while digging for some iron or promethium. If you don't need them, just trash them. d. i'm already pretty skilled in 'guessing' the ore deposits as it's always some kind of distributed pattern, either a cylinder with set radius and depth or a worm-like pattern. So you can adapt to it quite well even without the ore scanner. e. I agree, that the different modes may not be balanced yet respectively balancing will change with every new feature. So balancing will most likely be off whenever a new version with new features comes out. That's where you come into play and tell them about your experiences and how to balance it in a constructive way, so that it works out better for you. But you just state that it's broken, and that's not helpful. f. my first impression of yield was that it even was too much per ore pebble, but that's just me. Now i feel, it's just about right. But i respect your experiences there and it depends on the difficulty balancing again. Lastly: You can also change it all in SP. It's a per deposit setting in every playfield yaml. Just create your own scenario. Conclusion: You have to bear in mind that this is not a finished game, just Early Access alpha, proof of concept. So this may not be playable in every aspect of a finished game. And it's not supposed to. It sometimes will need some work to get the experience you like. Every new version may break the game. The devs have to try out new things and thus some of the existing features have to be thought over and/or be reinvented as they are just not compatible anymore with some newly added features. Imo the devs seem to be even way to hesitant in changing stuff as they try to keep the old savegames playable, which is very nice of them, but i'm guessing, also hinders development a lot. That's the drawback of early access for the devs. In a non public environment you could just throw everything overboard more easily and start over with some features. As regards mining: For implementing handcraftable heightmap planets ore deposits in their old way can't be fully implemented anymore, because with using splatmaps they can't control radius and yield anymore. So this had to be changed for implenting those heightmaps (which are great) Most likely there's some changes/improvements based on our feedback to that feature in the future again, who knows, but reverting everything instantly just because some people don't have the patience to wait, test, give constructive feedback and see what's there to come in the future is certainly a step in the wrong direction and hinders development. The fact that Empyrion is that playable in this early stage taken into account the fast development for such a small team is just amazing. I'd suggest you give more constructive feedback how to improve the new mining system, and not just say it's wrong, broken and it needs to be fixed or even needs to be reverted completely. /jmc
My point is that each person has their own concept of an acceptable level of reality. There is no correct setting, but there are settings that will be umpopular. While you and I are Ok with Promethium as a propellant, Taniyama is not. And, while you're Ok with Oreos and Milk as a propellant, I am not. If you get far enough away from reality, you'll shed enough players to make the game unpopular.
And again this is an assumption, not "truth", and if you try to extend this argument to a description of "reality" will will get on hard science and come to the conclusion that reality is still something we are unable to explain completely. So whatever level of realism you or another player will pretend to know "is right" this will only be a very personal opinion, based on nothing but assumptions. Give me numbers for "players will leave the game if" and I will take this seriously. Players crying for realism are not : they want a specific value or dynamic or color or whatever to suit their fancy, and this means "I don't care what others think the game should be". So I am essentially applying the same principle: I "fancy" a complete game before the end of time, so I don't care about people complaining on the name of objects in game or if the player is required to turn left instead of right. If their was too much "relative realism" in the game players would prefer reality. Mining is nothing like what we have here, and not even a "gameplay" element in "reality" : it is tedious, boring, dirty, tiring, complicated, costly, and requires a huge amount of human and material resources just to get 1 type of ore over a much longer period of time than what is required in game.
Cool, so we're on the same page. Each player's reality is their own. It is an assumption and it can be proven true for individuals. Obviously I cannot give you counts of players that will be attracted to, or repelled by, changes. If I could, I would be an game industry savant with such dazzling brilliance that this debate would never have happened. But this discussion does show that individuals do react unfavorably to changes. I can conclusively state that certain configurations that significantly depart from my conception of reality would drive me from the game. They're mostly nonsensical and are unlikely to happen. (Cookies/Milk) So, my number is 1. And you're correct not to panic over it.
This new drilling concept sucks in every way possible: a. it takes LONGER b. it takes more FUEL c. it's more BORING as you drill STONE, STONE, STONE and then finally, please god, a tiny pill of ORE d. it's more BORING as you drill towards a BLUE OUTLINE e. it's BROKEN so that in Hard you have around a 50% chance you will never actually find some ore at the location indicated. f. TIME of drilling, and YIELD of material is COMPLETELY MESSED UP. Tiny PILLS of ORE give you almost half the yield of all the MASSIVE amounts of stone you had to remove to get to it. Actually, after thinking about it Brianmi is right. The old system was much better. You knew were the ore was, yes it took time to get it out, but you knew were and how much there was. I miss strip mining entire area and making big holes everywhere. You know what else I miss? Magnesium, I want some realism back into the game. If you want to make manufacturing ammo more difficult? Simple, use the following, add charcoal & lead. Make the new ingredients, lead, copper, magnesium & charcoal. What does magnesium & charcoal make? Yes, that's right, gunpowder. And you'd have two more new resources to play with.
That’s really unfortunate for you because the mining will not be reverting to the old method. Eleon has said that the change was necessary due to features they are and will be implementing. Repeating the same complaints over and over won’t change this. What I don’t understand is why people are trying to mine without an ore scanner. You can mine boulders and get plenty of resources to get you started. You can also use those resources to craft an ore scanner. Also given the new balancing changes, why are people insisting on hard starts if they find them so unpleasant? Why not just do an easy or medium start or use the console to gift yourself an ore scanner? I feel like people adopted a play style in 6.0 or earlier and refuse to change it now that the game has changed. And honestly, this is the best part of early access games. You frequently have to change your approach with each update. This is what keeps me from getting bored with the game.
Taniyama, you're complaint is not really valid about realism. They stated that magnesium was moved to late game in order to reduce number of different deposits you had to work with during early game (easier to learn the game if there are less source of materials). You should then complaint about the fact that you personally want more stuff to work with rather than realism. Staying on realism, why can't you imagine a world with some radioactive propellants for cinetic weapons but you don't seem to have any issue with getting in orbit by pointing straight up for 1km at most? (Plus, promethium being the new precious ore is totally another subject than mining) I'm just asking you to be coherent with yourself, sorry if it does sound mean, I prefer when people really take the time to think before they write anything. Getting back to mining and correct my first post I was talking about mining WITHOUT the scanner; when you finally attain the deposit marker, you do mine a beautiful large 5 meters in diameter sphere and still not finding anything and gets frustrated because you ran out of biofuel without having found anything. Actually mining WITH a scanner is quite pleasant as destroying these pebbles feels satsifying. Now, one clearly have to go for surface stones instead of deposits until scanner is made (or even HV miner) but the game flow itself doesn't point you towards stones; newer player (and reviews...) would be more enclined to play if they were oriented towards mining stones instead of deposits at first. This could be done by either the tutorial or being able to only mine stones with T1 drill (hard to make current players liking it but could be THE way with fine tuning of stones number and making it obvious that it can't dig, being a jackhammer or something like this). For the scanner, I read that it'll be included with drills, that's just great
Over in the Scenarios discussion, Piddlefoot tried configuring layers and had some interesting results. I wonder if this might help the conversation here in some way. In this example, the first value for each row is clearly WHAT is to appear. What is the second value? (I can't look at the YAML files to see if there is a description because I'm on a break at work.) What I'm thinking about is would it be feasible for the Devs to implement some kind of proceduraly generated layer, or a run-time determined result, from a specification contained in the YAML, such that a list of Ores and their probabilities were specified: Grass Rock Random (75% Rock, 20% Iron, 5% Copper) Bedrock And then on a node by node (what are each of the terrain points called) basis, randomize what is there. The potential appeal here is that you would just dig at various places around the planet and see what you got. With an HV, you would move lots of dirt and sift out the ore you wanted. You could still have Rocks on the surface and still have some concentrated ore deposits that had to be found in one way or another. You could also have the pure layers, like depicted in the example.
Zztong, that's an excellent idea and more natural. It would also bring HV's back into the fold and make using them beneficial.
About HV's, i made a quick video what it's like with 6 T2 drills. Only today learned it uses Ore Scanner. No idea why i was previously keeping the scanner in actionbar... don't do that. It belongs to inventory. The video has 2 kinds of mining, first a meteor and then a full silicon vein. I started this playthrough in Omicron on medium. First killed some drones to craft motorbike, loot POI's, dig some rocks and for the last step mine a little bit of what's missing of base components. I think the "kill drones" part is completely optional too. You do sort of have infinite health considering you can just go to Adm, die in oxygen deprivation or some poison, respawn there and loot things back. There should be 1 or 2 Farm POI's on starting planets which give berries and other things you can eat. Even free O2 stations to use, as does Adm. But Adm has another benefit of all sorts of medical stations, armor swapper and repair. But if you play on hard, i wouldn't need to mention any of this. Also 1 tip for hover mining; you may notice i'm mining a whole lot of the room instead of going for the ores directly. That is because HV's do their best to flip over. If you dig yourself a narrow tunnel, you'll end up cockpit downwards. So i make the mining area wider, and also try to mine from up to down. If i see ores below me, i won't get them before other ores higher than that are gone.
I'll have to try those T2 Drills. By the time I've been able to unlock them, I've usually not needed them. Anyways, mining a meteor looks really painless. Mining the silicon vein showed it was possible, though my own preference would be that the HV was capable of more control. You ended up with what appeared to be a vertical shaft. I'd like to be able to manage a 30-degree slope -- or whatever angle of slope I desired for the effort. Have you ever tried to cut a level tunnel through a mountain? I was more clearly able to see the effects of the Ore Detector in your video than what I remember. The difference would be you were on the moon and I was on Akua and that we had different lighting. I might have been zoomed out further too.
As I understand it, all except the random ore part is possible with the current system. I'm not sure this would address concerns that you have with mining at the start of a game. I could see it being kind of cool with larger-scale mining with an HV. Are you saying that even with a hand drill that digging down a couple of meters and then mining through an "ore lottery" would be more appealing than digging down a couple of meters and then searching for "ore rocks"?
I might not mind the new model if it actually worked, but continuing a game from Alpha 6, my old mines still behave the way they always did. Fine. Except new mines are empty. I have the ore scanner, but no blue outlines, no ore, no nothing, I dug all the way down to lava. Nothing on Agua, nothing on the moon. Do I have to start over to get things working again?
You can try mining out the ore veins you can, and meteors should start dropping at.. i don't remember, when there are only 60% of deposits left on the planet.
You do as you want but it is recommended to start fresh after major updates. If you continue a save from an older version you might get "bugs" which are not really bugs : some updates do break saved games, since new features are added and some values change, recipes, etc.
I'm trying to mine out a Promethium deposit on Akua in the Mountains right now and its not going well. My HV has 4 T1 Drill rigs. At about 50% of the deposit mined, I had a hole from which could not effectively extract the HV. It was too deep for the thrusters to fly it out and the HV was vertical so I couldn't jump out. I could have solved it by using the manual drill, but I kept at it and eventually worked the HV out. Now I'm having trouble getting the HV back into the hole in such a way to get the other 50%. With a T2 manual drill, I'd have been done long ago. One problem I face is the controls. I need more hands. The mouse requires me to constantly grip it, which eventually invokes pain and soreness from my wrist. I've mapped the LMB to a key, but holding it, and hitting the arrow keys for turning, and hitting the thruster keys is too much. I need one of those foot pedals for the LMB that they sell. Even though I haven't gotten the Zasc to make the T2 Drills, I guess I'll fire up the console and gift myself a few just to try them. Update ... I tried another deposit with T2 Drills. This was Akua in the Plains. Obviously, the flatter starting ground helped at the beginning. The T2 Drill's extra range made cutting into the deposit at a managable angle easier, though eventually you end up on uneven ground and then the HV pitches about violently unless you spend extra time managing your tunnel. I was able to mine the entire deposit without getting stuck. The extra range helps out a lot. I found at one point I could not see the blue outlines of the ore. My HV's lights were washing out all of the color. I turned those off and I could see the ore again for a while, and then eventually I couldn't see again, nor could I really see the tunnel. When your view is back from behind the HV and when lighting (from any source) is washing out the blue outlines, you can't see where to mine. Of course, my drill rig probably needs some improvements. I wonder if I would be better off if my drills were a bit wider then the HV itself. Maybe I need another RCS too. Update 2 ... I decided to try the Drill Turret. Its limited ability to move vertically limited its effectiveness. Also, you can only control one of them at a time, so you mine much more slowly that if you have multiple drills. Its nice that you don't run out of Drill Charges, but it doesn't seem to be any faster than a T2 hand drill. I'm not sure it had a very long range either.
I added an edit to my video post a while ago, explaining how i mine. But a tunnel currently may not work well, at least with miner ship i made. I mean if there are walls next to HV it somehow starts drawing itself towards them, and in a short moment it's rotating the hover engines towards the roof and your up is down... etc. I just always like to make a wide bowl like shape of the ore vein, it's easier to control the HV that way. I'm not worrying about getting out, that's actually the easy part. i may have put a ton of thrusters at the back, but as long as you make sure hover engines point towards ground, they will speed you up towards any direction the terrain is going. Shift+space will flip it right way in case of emergency as long as you have boosters.
Been wondering if making the T1 HV Drills available at say Level 5 might be a reasonable tweak as things stand right now? The T1s are actually useful to mine the surface boulders. Slapping one onto your starter HV is mainly just a minor QOL improvement. And since the boulders are really just a 'getting started' resource, I don't think that earlier access would have much impact to progression? Actually since they are 'always on', power draw wise, they'd add a Prom sink so peeps would have to weigh that in deciding to add one... For me it just gets a little bit repetitive popping in & out of the cockpit to mine the boulders. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
I think it is difficult to balance those basic survival elements (resources, hunger, oxygen) in a game where you can and are suppose to build big vessels and bases. I simply doesn't make sense that you have to mine for hours to build a vehicle that can mine when it doesn't do it faster or more efficient. Especially when there isn't enough resources to get of the planet. And you shouldn't have to strip all the POIs in order to get of the planet. I think in Empyrions special case, mining and food should be only the survival elements for the very first few minutes/hours. But i a game about building massive space vessels there needs to be a dynamic system of external threats like environmental hazards, unintended attention from an alien race (attack waves get stronger depending on the players equipment/vessels/level what ever, dependent on the the planets difficulty they are on). But not some invisible threat like high "gravity, you can't get off the planet anymore" and other physical correctness BS. More in the line of Storms, lava eruptions, floods, asteroids... things that start slow and you can actually see coming making you to either run away or prepare to hold out and repair after. Mining and food gathering should not be the main focus in a survival game with huge space ships and giant bases. We are not on a island surrounded by dinosaurs or by stupid zombies after an apocalypse, are we? ;-)
Sorry for the late reply, but I’ve only just had tome to read your post. Actually, it has everything to do with realism. So they've dumped down the game for the dummies? That's not very nice! Plus, I've seen a lot of games a lot more complicated to play than this one. Nope, I know what I'm talking about. I think you’re talking about “Kinetic” weapons? Actually, I do have a problem with the 1k orbit, but I also understand the limitations, both of the person playing the game and the technology. No, they’re part of the same subject. It’s the chicken or the egg. I think I’m been very coherent. Apparently, you’ve totally missed my point.
