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[diefortheswarm]

Toady is currently working on improved mining and may not make any major changes.  As of yet he does not see a way to do it that will work out well for the game.  Maybe if we all brainstorm this problem we will see a solution.  Given the information toady already released I think he was toying with a system something like this.

Miners can be given orders to mine tiles in different ways.  Each type of mining produces a different product and takes a different amount of time.

Rubble - Useful for metal ores.  Metal ore must be converted to rubble before it can be smelted.  This is the fastest way to mine a tile and the easiest mining product to remove.

Small Stone Blocks - One tile can yield several stone blocks.  Used for stone crafts and maybe some small items from the mason workshop.  Can be quickly hauled away but not as fast as rubble.

Large Stone Blocks - Useful for stone furniture, floodgates, and other large items from the mason workshop.  Have to be hauled to a storage bin individually which takes longer.

Statue Block - Useful for making statues.  Requires a high quality cut stone block which takes longer to produce then any other block.  May have a quality modifier.  Takes the longest to haul away do to it's weight and be hauled individually.

[NW_Kohaku]

I've dropped skill-based mining drop rates for the time being. I'm not sure there will be other mining changes for this release.  I don't yet see a way to make something like rubble or different sizes of rocks a net positive for the game, so I'm just going to stick with the larger intermittent boulders for now to keep things moving.

The problem with rubble and such is that it is going to add items to the game, and the game lags badly as more items are added to it.

I think that a better solution would be to introduce a "mullock" item type that represents any sort of waste material from mining.  Hopefully, mullock could be treated in a manner differently from other materials, and be some of the first stackable materials, and we could simply amalgamate mullock into blobs that could be shoved into landfill walls, or exported off the map to simply be dumped out of sight and out of mind. 

That would give some gameplay benefit in the sense that mining is slowed down a little and you have to manage waste materials, so that mining isn't quite so easy, but also not kill the game with lag.

[Demonic Gophers]

I've been thinking about this a bit.  It seems to me that, for wheelbarrows and mine carts to be a significant component of the actual excavation process, it needs to be necessary, or at least strongly desirable, to clear out a space before mining the next tile.  Otherwise people will just ignore the mined-out stone until they have a use for it, whatever form it's in, like they do now.  This could be done by making mining require an empty tile where the miner stands, or by making tiles cluttered with rock drastically slow down mining or movement.

I also think it would be useful to differentiate between usable chunks of stone and gravel/rubble/mullock/whatever.  As Kohaku points out, we need a way to deal with waste stone that won't murder our FPS, either efficiently removing it from the map or converting it to a form that doesn't contribute so much to the buildup of items that must be tracked.  My though, for what merit it has: mining could create a unit of rubble at the mined-out tile, and a unit of rubble or usable stone at the miner's location, depending on skill.  Two units of building material would be needed to construct a wall, while one would be enough for a ramp, floor, staircase, etc.  A unit of rubble in an empty tile would form a natural ramp of (type of stone) (rubble/gravel/etc.).  Adding a second unit of the same type of rubble would convert it into a natural wall of that sort, while adding a different type would convert it into a generic rubble wall, with no material information saved.  Optimally, dumping rubble onto a ramp next to a cliff would cause it to fall off the side of the cliff, forming a pile below, but I suppose that stable pillars of rubble make as much sense as walls made of soap.

Rubble of a metal ore could still be smelted, so players wouldn't lose metal if a low-skilled miner dug out part of an ore vein unless the rubble got mixed in with waste stone.  Rubble could be used as fill between solid walls, dropped into rivers and lakes to build dams, causeways and the like, or just piled up in a valley somewhere to get it out of the way.  As aka010101 noted, it could also be used to make gravel roadways, which would eventually wear out and need to be replenished.  Abstracted piles of tailings off map would probably be reasonable.

I think it makes sense to have alternate designations for quarrying, in an effort to get as maximize the usable stone produced, and excavating, to turn solid rock into movable rubble as quickly as possible.


Naturally, any attempt to make dealing with waste stone an important aspect of excavation will make it slower and more difficult to dig out a fortress.  Some players will consider this a good thing, and others a bad one.  I don't know what would make both sides happy, besides maybe an init option to turn rubble off.

[aka010101]

Since we're on the topic of rubble, and what to do with it, I'd like to bring up something that's bugged me for a while, dirt, when mined out, vanishes completely into thin air.
Now, as changing this would likely lead to ungodly piles of dirt everywhere, i have a few suggestions for dealing with it, and the rubble resulting from mining.

First one is simply have an option to fill tiles with it. It would be an easy way to fill empty spaces (especially those unwanted murky pools full of of murderous fish.) which could serve both practical and aesthetic reasons.
Another way to deal with the dirt would be to treat clay differently, and the clay has to be dug out before it can be used in crafts. The same could also be applied to sand and glass products (though it likely wouldn't take too much sand to make glass.) Also adding the 'peat' type to soil, would make it something worth mining, and provide another source of fuel.
The simplest one that comes to mind though, is to simply have an order available to dump any excess dirt or rubble off the map... Or, until then, wheelbarrows and minecarts will make the dwarven atom smasher a bit more viable, but obviously this isn't a long-term solution.

[Ribs]

The only thing that bothered me about the new mining process is that there will be less stone for furniture.

But when I think about it, it does make sense that you'd need a very large boulder to make a single statue. But if the same large boulder can be carved and broken into, say, 3 blocks that can each form a wide and tall enough wall to cover a square, shouldn't the same boulder be large enough to make 3 small pieces of furniture?
I think that a good way to work around this would be to allow masons to break boulders into smaller pieces of stone...or make blocks viable furniture making material.

Actually, making blocks a viable construction material would be kind of ideal, because it would also help with carpenter jobs. Making wooden blocks work as construction material would be great. It makes sense to use an entire log to make a bed, but things like crafts and buckets could be made out of smaller wooden blocks.

[NW_Kohaku]

I just would like to link into these threads the utterly massive thread on rubble from the DF Fort Mode forum.

We beat the topic to death over there, and some people have very good suggestions on how to do this.

Spoiler: selected passages (click to show/hide)

I wasn't thinking of compressing it exactly, something more along the lines of Gabions than straight up compressing it into blocks.
They would probably require some rope or chain.

Smelting rubble would only be viable if you had access to magma due to its low yield. But if you have access to magma, you already have a solution to the rubble - just toss it in the magma. If you take that as the default solution when magma is available, then smelting doesn't change anything - except give you the ability to trade labor for a bit of metal.


I said quite explicitly that my proposal would give out metal in proportion to its existence in the biome layer. If there's no iron in the layer, you get no iron. Let me make it clearer: if you excavate every tile in the layer, the amount of metal you would get from smelting all of the non-ore in the entire layer would be identical to the amount of metal you would get from smelting the ore from that layer. So if you excavate 10,000 stone from a single layer of a 100x100 tile embark (about a 2x2) and you get 200 copper ore and 100 silver out of it, and therefore 200 copper bars and 100 silver - if you smelted the remaining 9700 stone as gravel, you'd get an additional 200 bars of copper and 100 silver. It'd require 32x as much labor and fuel to double your yield. With magma, the fuel is free, but the labor remains. If you think that's a good deal - then go for it. But instead of 9700 hauling/dump jobs to the magma, you'd generate 9700 furnace operator jobs to the same magma, plus 300 hauling jobs for the resulting bars. You run into a parallellization problem that you don't have with the dumping in that you can probably task 50 dwarves with dumping, but you're unlikely to have 50 magma smelters constructed and 50 furnace operators. In that case, in order to clear you fortress, you're probably facing 9700 hauling jobs to clear, and an additional 9700 smelting jobs, and then 300 bar hauling jobs at the end of it.


Toss in a cart system with automatic dumping and the cost of the smelting operation relative to the dumping operation now goes through the roof. The rubble dumping becomes trivial compared even to clearing rooms now, but the smelting cost remains relatively high, and the benefits relatively small.

Yes, but we're also sort of taking for granted the most unrealistic thing about magma in this game, which is that it always stays a constant temperature, even if pumped out of the earth for years, and can melt infinite material (as in, transferring its heat energy into that material) without ever dropping in temperature, even if it's a single tile filled with magma. 

Keeping current viscosity should be relatively fine. 

The thing about a possible eruption mechanic would be that it would probably try to just create, say, 10 tiles, or 70 * 1/7ths of magma starting at a certain point, and look for the path of least resistance from that point to put all that magma. 

If there's open air, it would just pump magma up into that.  If there's no open air, it would start testing different types of items blocking its path, including solid walls, for resistance values, and try to break down those materials if they have enough pressure (measured in how much magma it has to spew forth) to see if it breaks down a wall or a door or something. 

If not, then the magma simply waits until there is a change that will let it break through (like opening that door or mining a tile away) or else will wait with that existing pressure until the pressure rises again before trying to break through doors or walls.

If it does have the pressure, it punches through rock to create small magma pipes to fill, continuing until it is stopped. 

If magma recedes, it should leave behind igneous intrusive stone types instead of just empty tiles.  There may be a small chance of an igneous intrusive ore or gem.

Well, I'll point out that a long time ago, before Toady invented the 3rd dimension, rivers and magma rivers would flood. I suspect we'll see a return to that kind of random dynamic at some point, and I think Toady mentioned several years ago that he'd like to see eruptions, provided they aren't too catastrophic.


I also wouldn't be surprised if in the future using a magma forge 'consumed' 1/7 magma each time its used. That'd effectively offset the lack of cooling by requiring you to have to constantly fill (either through the automatic fill mechanism, or manually) your magma reservoir (pretend you have to remove the bit that's cooled and magically dispose of it). In either case, you'd have to keep a permanent access to the magma open (you could temporarily close it via floodgate, etc.) through which an eruption could do harm. It'd take a system that can now work well in a static state which is relatively invulnerable and force it into a dynamic state which makes you at least somewhat vulnerable even with good planning.


I really miss the seasonal floods. They were fun - particularly when you had no high ground to flee to and crossing the river was pretty much unavoidable.

I don't think the semi-fluid method is proper, but I do believe that, while it will take some work to make function properly, making sand and rubble (gravel) behave as items which share some properties of fluids from an observer's perspective without actually being coded like a flow would work.

For starters, I think we're going to have to give up on a thought of having 5/7 gravel and 2/7 water fill a tile from the start - you would be able to have 5 gravel and 7/7 water in the same tile.  In fact, I still think we'd do best with a 3/3 gravel system than a 7/7 gravel system.

The idea would merely be that when a gravel item was dropped, it would look to "spill" into nearby tiles.  This would mean looking for open tiles adjacently below where it is landing to spill into instead of just staying in its own tile.  No concept of a one tile having 6/7 and the next having 3/7 type deal.  Only non-wallness of adjacent tiles on the z-level below counts.  It would spill randomly into any of those available tiles.  This should create the "step pyramid" concept.  Ramps would be reasonable, and might be created for "free" - as in, they don't count as gravel or need to be destroyed to return to gravel.  It's just an artifact of the sloping nature of the gravel walls created, spread out to the next tile, not a symbol of actual gravel being in the ramp itself. 

If gravel hits the amount that forms a wall and cannot spill elsewhere, it forms a wall.  Dwarves will need AI updates to keep them from doing this stupidly/accidentally like putting a wall in their own tile and killing themselves.

Miners should not stop and wait for rubble to be cleared per se - they should simply suspend jobs where there is no access due to rubble, and go on to the next mining job.  If you have a 3-tile wide hallway going from east to west that you are expanding further into the mountain, the miner might excavate the first northern tile, then the central tile, then the southern tile of that hallway, while allowing the rubble clearing crews to work.  If the northern part of the passage is not clear yet, the mining dwarf will check to see if other mining jobs are awaiting a miner.  If not, the miner will pitch in and help haul some rubble just far enough to give him some space. 

I would also like to reiterate that I think 3/3 gravel in a tile is enough.  Wheelbarrowers could take 2/3 at once, and carts might take something magical like 5/3s at a time if need be.  Being visited by a single hauler should be sufficient to clear a tile enough for mining to continue, in any event. 

Gravel/rubble should have at least some sort of option for auto-dumping, the way that the useless crap from butchering does.  Perhaps a special zoning designation could be set aside just for gravel/rubble, in case you want that stuff going somewhere other than where you want the rest of your trash.  In that way, you only have to designate where it gets dumped, have wheelbarrows or other stuff, and designated haulers.