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[Chthonic]

So!  We're finally getting mine carts!

This is a bundle of suggestions for improved mining under the new regime (I'm sure they've appeared in whole or in part previously, but the advent of minecarts make them more relevant).

First, the mine-a-tile job would produce a pile of rough stones.  Each tile on the map might produce several piles of rough stones before being cleared, and the amount would no longer be based on skill.  This would also slow down mining quite a bit, taking advantage of the new capacity for hauling, and prolong the useful lifespan of minecart tracks.

Rough stones could be used for building walls, in stone-fall traps, as a raw material for stonecrafting, or be crushed into gravel at an ore crusher.  The ore crusher could be powered, giving us an additional use for windmills and waterwheels.

Gravel could be used as fill to create low-quality walls/embankments, for gravel roads, or smelted for ore at a smelter.

A separate designation would be used to (Q)uarry blocks from map tiles (this would remove the "carve blocks" job from the mason's workshop).  Blocks would be used as the raw material for the mason's workshop, or for building high quality walls.  High mining skill would improve the speed and frequency of success with which blocks are quarried.

[gurra_geban]

I can just reply with that i like this suggestion in general.

Mining needs more depth

[Starver]

So do I understand that this is a thread put all the suggestions so far seen, around this matter?  (It looks like it, these being ones commonly come up with before.)

If so, I think you missed one particular refinement of the idea, that I agreed with (if not mentioned), myself, at some prior time...  Skill does matter, and affects relatively how much of the mined-out stone tile ends up as dust, gravel, rubble or chunks (in ascending order of size, descending amount of quantity, and greater skill needed for the latter than the former).  BTW, I'm using 'chunks' instead of 'block' or 'slab', as these have other meanings in the game, but I'm talking large here.  As large as existing 'raw mined rock' can be assumed to be.

Maybe you get a choice of whether to 'blitz' the rock (pulverise it, nothing but dust, whether that causes cave-in-style 'bad air' or just abstracts away) or to try to quarry it to one degree or another (slower, but with a skilled miner you get your necessary 'chunks'.)

And while you need rubble-or-above for trinket-sized rock-crafts, you need chunks for furniture-sized rock-crafts.  Which is not to say you can't create a load of trinkets from a single chunk-sized piece.  Rubble is only really usable as building material (filler, to bulk out the rubble/chunk walls, but maybe on its own for road-surfacing, at least.  But maybe more use if concrete-style tech is developed, which the Romans managed to do so might be considered available to the 15thC-ish level of tech that DF is sort of pegged to... although I expect full-on tarmacadamming of floors to be only available through modding).

Any no-skill miner can (slowly!) bash an opening, of course, dust effects allowing, but to extract the increasingly usable non-dust mine-product (in 'quarrying' mode) takes skills with the pick, and has a time penalty.  Although a legendary miner could probably carve out the raw materials for tables through the hardest granite at a higher rate than a novice miner manages to just open up a similarly sized room in a talc layer...  If/when lack-of-prop/support-pillar cave-ins get reimplemented for larger open areas, I also reckon the skilled miner could eke out a larger area without danger.

I don't know how minecarts are going to work, but you might only be allowed one or two 'chunks' per minecart, compared with a whole heap (i.e. a number of basic units) of gravel.  Not just weight-wise, but also due to size constraints.  Unless the carts are flatbeds, in which case the opposite might be true (pile more slab-like chunks on top, but a gravel pile is likely to fall off unless it's a small pile.  But I see hints that there could be the ability for different carts (primarily material?) possible to Mod, at the very least, so having flatbed and 'bucket-style' carts as separate and better-for-their-own-specialism rolling stock might be possible.

[Chthonic]

So do I understand that this is a thread put all the suggestions so far seen, around this matter?  (It looks like it, these being ones commonly come up with before.)

Sure--this was just me brainstorming on the train yesterday.

If so, I think you missed one particular refinement of the idea, that I agreed with (if not mentioned), myself, at some prior time...  Skill does matter, and affects relatively how much of the mined-out stone tile ends up as dust, gravel, rubble or chunks (in ascending order of size, descending amount of quantity, and greater skill needed for the latter than the former).  BTW, I'm using 'chunks' instead of 'block' or 'slab', as these have other meanings in the game, but I'm talking large here.  As large as existing 'raw mined rock' can be assumed to be.

I was thinking that blocks might be the large, carefully extracted pieces of stone--the things that miner skill comes in handy to produce--which would be used for carving statues and tables and chairs and so forth. This would also mean that all those random blocks you get in the caravan might be useful for something other than building constructions one painstaking block at a time.  The low skill rubble would be used for things like crafts (how big a rock do you need to make a goblet?) and crushed into smaller bits for smelter fodder or discarded as tailings.

[Williham]

Mining needs more depth

I see what you did there.

[ravaught]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=93624.msg2632566#msg2632566
I had previously started a thread regarding mining blocks directly that ties in with this suggestion. One of the things I would like to see with this is that the available methods of mining change with the available tools. For example, mining with a pick would give you rubble and chunks that could be shaped at the masons into blocks or used for whatever, but having a wire cutter (metal wire with crushed diamond in it) or some other tool would allow you to cut blocks out directly at a vastly slower rate.

This would work even better if you were allowed to cut different sizes of stone blocks. Large blocks would be faster, but generally only usefull in large construction like walls. Medium blocks would be used for crafting workshops, tools like pots and nest boxes, and certain furnitures. Small blocks would be used for crafts. The benefit of the system comes in a couple of forms.

First, cut blocks would add a value modifier to any object made from them versus the chunks/boulders, and in the case of construction would be faster and more durable as well. It would also help slow down the production of stone crafts by the simple expediency of slowing down the rate with which raw materials are acquired.  With mine carts this could also add some elements of complexity to the game. Maybe large and medium blocks needed a flat bed cart while chunks and small blocks could be fitted in the regular mine cart. I am not certain if using the carts is going to effect hauler skill levels, but would be kind of neat to see carts have the potential to derail based on the hauling skill. Maybe the impact would work like a combat roll against the blocks with the chance to reduce them to dust or chunks depending on what they were originally. A large block could produce 6 chunks and some rubble, a medium 3 chunks and some rubble, a small block 1 chunk and some rubble, and chunks would produce rubble.