# 2025-6 Mining Thoughts ## Current problems ### General Issues - Miners can progress into lavaland far too quickly right now. Previously, the only way to "instamine" were advanced cutters, but with addition of raptors and mining MODsuits you can move anywhere as if nothing is in the way. - This also applies to lava, as both of the afformentioned "tools" also give you lava immunity, which makes lava rivers completely harmless - This directly leads to the second major issue, that being de-facto complete defanging of almost all lavaland fauna. The only mob that poses any sort of threat by default is Bubblegum, as all other mobs can be simply outran by digging away from them, and they won't be able to catch up. ### Arcmining Related Issues - Arcmining's vents are incredibly RNG, as if you get even a single unlucky mob spawn or vent location, you're guaranteed to fail the vent no matter how hard you try. Even if you're lucky, you either need an AOE heavy loadout (damaging PKA AOE, Clarke with a PKA, hierophant crusher) or a second miner to assist you in clearing out the vent, as mob waves operate solely on a timer, and mobs themselves often prefer targeting the drone rather than the player. - Some mobs, like bileworms, are completely unfit for vent defense, while others are heavily location dependant. Mulitple waves of legions can guarantee a loss, as you simply cannot kill the legions and their skulls fast enough before they break the drone. - Having a chasm or a lava river next to the vent also guarantees a loss if any watchers or legions spawn, as former can simply fly above any terrain danger, and legions can wander into lava and spawn skulls from there. - Vents, in their current state, go completely against both the [Arcmining Design doc](https://hackmd.io/@Arcane/r19wrh8P2#Non-Goals) and the [Mineral Design doc](https://hackmd.io/@tgstation/B1necpsPn)'s non-goals, being an all-or-nothing material source. If miners don't do any vents, which happens quite often, the station is left with very little ore, while if at least one good vent has been done, its flooded with resources that miners don't need to put any effort into getting afterwards, producing up to 46 sheets of materials per boulder every minute from every vent. - Boulders from vents go to the stationside refinery from which you need to manually pick up points, which results in miners stealing points from eachother, sometimes getting thousands of them without doing anything at all. The amount of payout from having even a single active vent is also absurd, quickly breaking the point economy. - Megafauna vents should not be a thing. Wendigo and Frost Miner are not meant to be fought outside of their arena (due to former's destructive potential, and latter's partial reliance on terrain difficulty/area restrictions), while Bubblegum and Collosus are meant to be single high-value targets, and spawning multiple allows miners to have a second chance at obtaining rare loot (not talking about how none of them are designed around the idea of vents) - (I'm not sure its even possible to "defend" a vent from any of those except drake without extreme cheese honestly) ### Gear Issues - Mining MODsuits are in a very weird spot due to their slowdown. The intention behind their design was to trade base speed for the sphere form, which is faster allowing safer retreats, but limits your combat capabilities to clunky and delayed mines. - This does not work as slowdown doesn't affect just traversal, but combat as well, making them significantly worse at fighting, potentially forcing out more of said retreats than you'd need to do with just normal armor. It wasn't as much of a problem in pre-arcmining lavaland, but now harrassing mobs by constantly retreating doesn't make much sense to do. - However, said slowdown is completely nullified by having a mount, which means that the best way to use a mining MODsuit is to completely disregard its main feature and use a separate mobility tool, while still benefitting from higher armor values and MODules (inbuilt mining bag and GPS allow you to free up pockets, and you can install HUDs or sonar to further boost its effectiveness) - All raptors are either borderline useless, or balance-breaking, feeding into other issues with mobility and MODsuits. - Yellow raptors, when ridden by a settler, allow you to reach speeds higher than you'd be able to on foot while negating any gear slowdowns. - Green raptors are significantly tankier and can eat a ton of damage, while also allowing you to instamine roundstart without mining any ore (unlike the mining MOD which requires at least some effort), making most mining equipment useless. - Due to how mounts and factions work, mobs often aggro on raptors themselves and not the owner, giving miners an additional 270/400 HP depending on the raptor breed, and complete projectile immunity. - All other raptor breeds (bar extremely rare (0.9%) black raptors) are nigh useless compared to those two: red's melee attacks rarely connect even after the buff allowing them to attack while ridden, purple's storage is very clunky and of questionable usefulness, white raptors cannot heal themselves and having more than one raptor will often result in bodyblocks or friendly fire, while blue's milk is completely useless when you can get same heals by picking mushrooms. - A lot of tendril drops have either been removed, nerfed, or reworked, resulting in most things you can get being either of questionable usefulness (shared bags, dark shard katana, ship in a bottle), not worth the effort to use (eye of god, cursed heart), or completely outclassed by roundstart gear like concussive gauntlets. ## Solutions? - Removing common methods of instamining, or delaying them further into the round. Currently, there are four common ways of rapid mining: green raptors, MODsuit drill, PKA AOE and plasma cutters. By nerfing some of them and delaying others until a certain point into the round, mining can be slowed down to a sensible point where you can't just tunnel through the entire lavaland in a minute (a bit more than fourty seconds for a settler on a raptor) - MODsuit drill could be brought in line with normal drills, taking a bit of time to mine the rock when bumping/clicking it - Green raptors would probably be okay if they weren't accessible roundstart, either by having roundstart raptors spawn as chicks, or by restricting them to wastes-only spawns. - PKA AOE would be okay if nerfed back to 3x3 instead of 5x5, possibly reducing the cost to compensate for the nerf if needed. - Plasma cutters are in a weird spot, as rapid mining is their entire idenity. The best way to nerf them while keeping them relevant would be by refocusing them on being a tool to get somewhere quickly at a high cost, requiring a large amount of plasma for every shot. If it is still too strong, it could instead use charge cells that miners can buy from vendors or create in protolathes, requiring an inventory space investment from miners intent on using cutters. - Nerfing easy lava traversal, while adding other ways to lay bridges to avoid softlocks. - Raptors' ability to move over lava could be restricted to a certain breed (good replacement to blue's udders) - MODsuits' sphere form could require a bileworm hide upgrade (which isn't used anywhere besides a musical instrument at the moment) in order to withstand lava, and have an overheat mechanic limiting the movement to crossing rivers as opposed to using them as mob-free highways. - RCDs could require an upgrade, or be outright banned from, to be able to place plating over lava, but in that case lavaproof rods would need to be moved from BEPIS (bitrunner) tech into either the techweb, or a crafting recipe. - Using boulders to lay temporary platforms over lava with their lifespan scaling with the boulder's size is a good way to add an ashwalker-friendly way of crossing lava moats. - This will also indirectly buff goliath hide boats/saddles, and give the ship in a bottle its only use back (although unless made reusable, its usefulness as a single-time crossing tool is questionable at best). ### Arcmining stuff - Vents require an overhaul to how they spawn mobs. Some mobs need to be banned from vents, while others should have their AI priorities adjusted for them to avoid unwinnable scenarios. - Its a good idea to have vents spawn specific mob combinations, which would both make the flow smoother by having specific mobs be designed to target the miners and others the vent, and make balancing them easier as we'd have a clear picture of the vent gameplay with less RNG around it. - Adding a range limit to vents. Watchers, legions and lobstrocities have a habit of backing off from vents, sometimes resulting in them outright losing interest in miners or the vent itself, or (in case of legions) forcing miners to chase them down and risking losing the vent no matter if they do or don't. If mobs get a range limit added to them, to avoid vents being cheesable its probably a good idea to add one to miners too. (The drone requiring a constant connection to the station through the miner who started the vent and stopping if they go out of range is one way to do it) - Making vents lay catwalks or afformentioned boulder platforms over chasms and lava when activated similarly to how they clean out surrounding terrain should solve the watcher/legion issue. - In order to make slower mining speeds not completely cripple the miners, natural ore spread would need to be buffed, which would require vent output to be reduced to even it out. Having ores give out less materials (and points?) is also a possible balancing lever. - By making ores spawn more around exposed rock we can incentivize exploring the natural tunnels even more - Vents need to have a better system for distributing points, either having separate pools for point pickup at the refinery for each miner who participated in the vent clear (already tracked), or giving out points each economy tick similarly to paychecks. - I am not sure how to tackle the all-or-nothing issue with vents as it seems pretty inherit to them, only way to "solve" it would be making individual vents produce less resources than the station consumes, or force the station's consumption to ramp up throughout the round (somehow) - Arcane's proposal is to make vents provide frakking, which would regenerate minerals throughout the wastes during the shift. ### Gear Stuff - Mining MODs need a rethinking of their design, as their poke and run gameplay is inherently weaker than being able to simply avoid hits and win fights head on. - An option would be making the sphere form more agile and capable of mining rocks outside of clunky bombs, which would make it more desirable for casual exploration. In this case, bombs can get a reduced range (5x5 to 3x3) but a lower CD. This would also compensate for the inbuilt drill nerf, reinforcing the sphere as its mining mode. - Another major downside is the MOD forcefully dropping all currently held items, which could be solved by adding a magnetic harness to it and allowing it to auto-holster crushers and resonators, with the clamp module removed as a tradeoff (not that its widely used). - With these changes they should probably get their slowdown back, making them a dedicated traversal, mining and exploration outfit not suited for direct confrontations. - Making roundstart raptors spawn as hatchlings and require tending to in order to let them grow up should resolve the immense power spike that miners get roundstart from getting raptors, and should help balance settlers out a bit. - I like the idea of making raptor chicks slightly larger, and letting them be worn on the user's back until they're fully grown. - Moving raptor aging from a plain delay to requiring to be fed meat and ores would make miners have to put effort into getting a good mount, making it feel more rewarding. - Making raptors capable of eating meat would also make it less useless for miners (only ashwalkers cook monster meat most of the time, as you can always just get instant donkpockets from capsules) - Raptors should let you see their health status when examined, and have them be able to regenerate health from eating ore and meat will let miners reliably heal them as right now you either need to steal sutures or spend legion cores on them constantly to make sure they don't die under you. - Making base health raptors redirect projectile hits to their rider and be a lower priority fauna target (unless they attack first) should increase their survivability. Increasing red raptor health to 320 should make them pretty balanced around this, so red and green raptors will have a dedicated DPS/tank combat niche, if greens' ability to instamine is to be nerfed. - If child raptors are made non-dense but keep some of their abilities, white raptors will be able to act as a niche as a heal support you can bring alongside you in battle, or wear on your back if you really don't need a backpack (especially good for ashwalkers) ~~child soldiers, ahem ahem~~ - In this case, purple raptors should be changed to not grow up beyond the chick stage, and act as a full backpack when worn on your back while providing some additional benefits, like being able to use them to fly for a bit to traverse over chasms and lava. As an alternative to flight, they could be made as fast as (or faster than) yellow raptors, but have limited running stamina, allowing users to use them as portable getaway vehicles they carry on their backs. - Tendril (and partially, megafauna) loot should have a more cohesive identity and designated use cases rather than a significant chunk of them being random items without a use for miners or the crew. - A lot of our loot is alternative weapons, like shard katana, punching mitts, soulscythe, cleaving saw, etc. While having some is not bad, most of them aren't very practical for lavaland and thus are of questionable usefulness to miners, nor is the fauna balanced around being fought with them. Miners generally prefer to stick to a single weapon as weapon swapping is impractical due to inventory interaction delays and limited space, and PKA/PKCs are a better all-rounder pick, especially when upgraded. - Other "utility" items, like lava staff or paradox bags, don't have a designated niche and are pretty hard to use for gimmicks. "Ability" items like eye of god suffer from a similar problem as additional weapons, being rarely used in cases where they'd shine the most (megafauna) as keeping track of the cooldown and remembering to use them takes away from your concentration on combat. - The solution would be focusing more on armor and eqiupment upgrades, as opposed to weapons and active abilities/tools. Having more craftable/upgradable equipment, both from megafauna/tendrils and normal mobs, would both make it more relevant as well as allow miners to have more custom loadouts tuned to their preferences. - Implementing synergizing gear/accessories/talismans could allow us to focus more on the loadout-building aspect of equipment, make mining more replayable and give players more hunting goals to choose from. - Some of the crusher trophies need a significant tune up, compared to how difficult they are to obtain, some trophies (blaster tubes mainly) have extremely underwhelming effects, while others (blood-drunk miner's eye and ice block talisman) are bordering gamebreaking and make balancing fights a nightmare (in case of blood-drunk eye, this ended up with some fights being extremely challenging without it, so just reworking it will be a huge nerf to crusher unless an alternative is provided). ## Possible problems due to said solutions - Its hard to predict how these changes will affect the mining MODsuits, and whever poke and run tactics will get stronger if the fauna becomes (directly or indirectly through removal of mining as an escape tool) or weaker. - Slowing down the pace could make mining less engaging if its not compensated by increase in threat. Current "storm cycle" duration may also pose a problem with slower gameplay, although its worth seeing if capsules alone would be enough (as they're almost useless right now), or if the delay between storms needs to be increased/storm duration itself reduced (to make capsule usage less annoying) - The opposite is also possible, if it goes well, making individual mining cycles longer with bigger enforced breaks could give miners an opportunity to engage with the crew more, even if its just to get heals at medical or suit upgrades at robotics. - This could be achieved either by making both delays and storms significantly longer (lame way), or by adding "superstorms" with lighting/other weather effects threatening miners even in shelters/normally stormproof gear. Latter would still incentivize them to use shelters, which is, ironically enough, a very good way to force miners to interact and possibly cooperate with eachother in my personal experience. - Doing so will probably require giving shelters a minor redesign, and changing how storm safety works if we're planning shelters to be destructible from bad weather. Ruins are also something to consider, only exception to the storm threat should probably be the ashwalker base. - I don't think that the mineral economy could be put in a worse state than it is right now, but its still worth keeping an eye on whever the station can get enough minerals with reduced exploration speed. - Implementing certain parts out of order and then burning out on the doc could lead to pretty bad results, the best order would be: Changing mobs and vents -> Implementing the exploration slowdowns/ore distribution changes -> Rebalancing the remaining roundstart equipment -> Reworking raptors -> Reworking gear and trophies - This doc can be atomized without significant problems, so its probably better to do so to see how well each redesign sticks, as they're mostly linearly dependant on eachother and not all interconnected ## Long-term ideas - Slower exploration could allow us to implement separate lavaland biomes with different fauna, flora and ore distribution without them feeling blended together. - Higher focus on passive gear could allow us to phase out mining point rewards in favor of lavaland-sourced consumables, like making buff or healing stews from plants and meats. - In order to keep miners returning to the station, some of the gear could require reloading or maintenance at static stations. Recharging suits/cutters with "purified plasma" as opposed to raw ore, detoxifying from high-power buffs at medical, etc. - If biomes are implemented, some of them could require gear that needs to be made stationside, either researched at RnD or using lavaland materials, requiring miners to get up to get upgrades to safely progress deeper to get better loot. - Slower exploration also lets us implement some infrastructure building, possibly making the outpost relevant. Also see the player-dev-projects M.U.L.E.-based resource transportation idea.