# Balanced Mineral Systems and You.
*Penned by ArcaneMusic. Appologies for any typos.*

Mineral balance has quite literally, always been an afterthought within Space Station 13. Within the current systems in place as of the date of writing (6/17/23, Lavaland mining), there has never really been a clear definition of how many minerals the station should have, how much something should cost, or what's fair or not by comparison to any other item in game.

## Some past mistakes we've made.

I'm going to spare you most of the history lession, but the original mining system, astroid, was a static map designed to hold "*more minerals than any crew of players would ever be able to use*". This is by design, as any miners back then had none of the advanced tools that we see now like plasmacutters or bluespace bags. It was quite literally pickaxes and oreboxes, while manually rushing to the largest and most plentiful static ore spawns in order to not have to do more mining.

Mining's core design began as slow as hell, and over time got faster and faster to better accommodate the game becoming better refined. We added the KPA, KPA upgrades, mining mechs, more asteroid mobs, Lavaland, Icebox mining, more ruins, megafauna. But by far the ultimate death knell in minerals having any claim to being balanced was the Plasma Cutter. With that, suddenly we made it possible to mine out ***all of lavaland***.

Now, obviously, megafauna prevent that outcome from happening 9/10 times in-game. But as lavaland similarly was designed to contain far more minerals than a player could ever use in a single shift, even being able to mine out 20% of it for upgrades results in the crew never running out of minerals ever, in the span of one round. This has been fully dissected and confirmed in this [PR **here**](https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/75437), however, if you want to check my work you can take any collection of silo logs from the public parsed logs, download them, and run the script in `tools\silo_grapher\silo_graph_script.py` in your local copy of the code to confirm. This resulted in a number of conclusions from my currently expanding dataset:

### Analysis

* The only minerals, the vast majority of time, that see a large percentage of use are **iron and glass**.
* "Rare" minerals do not see nearly the same level of usage in a given round, due to the fact that these resources are only called upon in extremely small fractional increments when compared to Iron and Glass.
* When sheets of a material were worth 2000 units, printing a stock part was worth 1/20th of a sheet. As a result, **Gold, Silver, Titanium, Plasma, Uranium, Bluespace Crystals, and Diamonds** were placed in a balance position where they would quite literally never run out.
* Even when placed in a time-based consumption metric, on average the only resources that would ever stand a chance to run out were Iron and Glass. And even then, when miners would return with ores on those rounds, they would return for 2-3x the amount, resulting in the only period where these resources would run out to be within the first 5-15 minutes of a given round, *unless there were no miners*.
* One miner can singlehandedly supply a crew of 70+ players with minerals, in a single deposit, for 90 minutes, even if they die within the first 20 minutes.
* With the limited amount of consumption of most of these resources, these rounds still saw unobstructed amounts of printing, item use, and interaction with all possible lathes.

## Going forward

Mineral balance should be able to integrate into a number of existing balance mechanics that already exists within Space Station 13. If it sits alone as a standalone system, then it's going to result in something very close to what we have now. It should be something that represents the progression through the round that the crew have managed to make, while simultaniously giving the crew objectives and goals to be able to work towards.

### Goals
* **Players should be faced with decisions partway through the game that requires levying mineral resources.**
* Eg: Advanced medical resources now cost silver to print. An event triggers that sends hurdles a massive living virus cloud towards the station. The crew can choose to either produce sanitized silver rods to mass drive at the cloud to try and kill it, or can buck up and produce advanced medical equipment to try and cure the crew of the virus instead.
* **Minerals should have a more unified identity as to how they're used, and in what quantity.**
* If everything uses small fractions of every mineral in the game, there's no way for any one resource to run out. Getting close to running out of a resource means that the player may need to get creative. Maybe you need to use botany to grow some uranium? Maybe there's an alternative item you can use, but made from something else with different rules? Maybe the same thing can be acquired through a different economy?
* **Addendum:** Materials should have differences that mean that having *some* kind of one material doesn't meant that it acts identically to others in most cases. Theoretically, a non-structural material like meat would be able to make walls and floors of it, but when subject to space would be flimsy and not airtight.
* **Not everything needs to be be printable with minerals.**
* Some things should be available exclusively through other systems without feeling a need to add it to the lathe. Many items have been added to lathes over the years simply because "nobody will ever use this if it's not in lathes".
* **...however, everything is allowed to have minerals in them, within reason.**
* If it wouldn't cause issues with any of the other goals or anti-goals (Namely infinite quantities), it's perfectly fine to apply quantities of custom materials to anything as long as it's not necessarily going to break the math or produce infinite resources somehow.

### Anti-goals
* **Players should not be prevented from acquiring basic job equipment and gear at the start of the game.**
* The end state should not be that every mineral runs out and we call that "good balance". However, we should see that few minerals gets less than 5% of their total used throughout a whole round.
* **Materials should not be available in infinite quantities, without being capped by another resource, such as time, credits, health, or otherwise.**
* Any resources with infinite quantity produces infinite supply, and as a result zero scarcity. If you can press a button and make a new sheet of material every click, then anything that can be produced that's LESS VALUABLE than that material is instantly far less valuable when the alternative is FREE.
* I'm looking at you, meat datum material.
* More specifically, "datum" material objects currently aren't allowed to be anything useful. If everything gets its own material datum, then you can make one of those material datum objects out of anything. That's why the most you can do with material datum items is finishing girders, aesthetic floors, and building chairs. Otherwise you'd be able to make a synthsteak factory, convert the steaks into meatrods, make meatgirders, meatwalls, meatdoors, and meatwindows, and make a meatstation, barring some air cans. Steaks however just take a monkey, some cryoxydone, and a single syringe of blood to produce a theoretically infinite amount of them. By fixing this, maybe we could allow for datum materials to be more flexible, but not... beefstation 13.
* See goals addendum re:material diversity.
* **Players should not lose access to roundstart resources and minerals to account for individual player's gamestyles.**
* AKA: Maps should start with roundstart minerals, but we might want to maybe auto-place some of them into the silo, while others should remain in storage rooms independently (Scale silo mats to roundstart players???)
* **Minerals should not be so prevalent OR irrelevant to decision making that they are vastly better or vastly worse than other resources in most circumstances**
* In other words, if minerals are so populous or so scarce that you always/never use them, we go back to the drawing board and start tweaking some numbers again.
* This is also to promise that the credit economy shouldn't replace the mineral economy, only that it should offer choices. Maybe tools stay cheap and credit-wise tools get less expensive to boot? Maybe we change the mineral requirements on other high-demand items to compensate?
* **Not EVERY ROLE on and off station should need to interact with the mineral economy.**
* We've run into this with silicons, and golems, and charlie crew. These kinds of roles shouldn't have to worry about the consequences of the mineral economy UNLESS they SPECIFICALLY have those systems integrated into them by design or by choice.
* Eg: Golems shouldn't need to worry about credits, ashwalkers shouldn't feel like they need lathe-based items to compete against miners, and the librarian shouldn't need to worry about the amount of plasma in their PDA unless it's part of their round-specific goals.
* In other words, "if I'm playing a non-technical or non-mechanical job, materials shouldn't have a role in gameplay UNLESS I decide they should".