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A way for dedicated miners to play, stripmines


Gottchar

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The Problem:
Currently almost everybody is a miner to some extend, but the tools and talents do not lead to a substantial growth in ore gain. While more machines lead to more machines, ore is gained at a rather static rate. This of course has a good side, as otherwise the whole planet would look like an advanced factorio world in a month. Still, the boringness and unscalability of mining not only hinders unlimited growth, which is good, it also limits trade and specialization, you may have noticed how ore usually sells for more than whatever you can build with the ore.

 

Solution:
Allow people to become dedicated miners, but in such a way that it needs constant dedication and effort to have a well working mining operation. Just like a factory always needs some tweaking, changing and expanding (hopefully even more in the future), a stripmine should not just be set up and  generally and constantly generate ores when this is done, but need supervision.

 

The idea:

 

Enviromental changes:

Instead of just useless dirt and high value ore, there should be something in between. Soil with a certain amount of minerals, or "low yield ore" if you like that better. Soil with a 1% hematite (iron) content would mean it is too tedious for normal mining, but if you had a more large scale operation it would be worth it.

 

The following elements/items for a stripmine:

- A static scanner
- Static drills/extractors: These are set certain grid coordinates and just extract all minerals in those coordinates. Imagine seperating your land into cubes the size of a static core L, each drill would try to work a cube of that size. Selecting the drill gives you an interface that lets you choose a depth (in 100m steps) and a 2d grid of squares, pick on and go. You can not queue them up. Assuming you have a scanner, some or all of those grids were already scanned, so you can choose whatever you think is best currently. (sidenote, while I call them drills, they are not actually drills, they are more like your mining tool)

- Oil: Oil is like fuel for drills, they always need a little, made in chem industry. Higher tier oils may lead to better yield/speed.

- Soil seperator: Like a refinery, but for mineral rich soil. So for example "Hematite rich soil" goes in, "Hematite" comes out.

 

Also, sooner or later (as there is currently no regeneration) you will have to pack it all in again, move it a mile and set it up again.

 

Conclusion:

I hope it is evident that I would not want to upset the whole economy and flood the markets with a huge supply of afk farmed raw materials. But I do think there should be a way for dedicated mining operations which on one hand lead to yield, but on the other are not too simple and can just be left alone for a week to come back and find 100 full L containers.

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I like it. Or maybe something similar just using asteroids instead, so that you dont tear up the landscape too much. I agree there should be some form of mining that isnt just players with space pickaxes. It's silly to think thats the only way to gather resources in the year 12,390. And I think your idea would be a good way to balance the desire of the players to have more variety in mining methods, and the devs requirement to not make mining too easy to abuse

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This sounds like a great idea, reminded me of the space engineers mods that let you turn dirt into very low amounts of ore instead of having nothing to do with it. The mining in DU defiantly feels a bit to static at the moment with no real growth except skills.

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