Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sadrice]

Yeah, but at least for me, slowing mining is only a side benefit.  It's the rubble infrastructure, and the tailings heap itself (as well as tailings dams and stuff) that adds all the depth.  These arguments, to me, sound like "yeah, I can get behind making things slower, but adding fun new features?  no, let's just kludge it".

[friendguy13]

Also think starting is too slow already and making enough bedrooms is already impossible.  Besides you do realize that making an effective minecart system would be as time consuming as making a magma pumpstack a megaproject in its self.

[bombzero]

alright, I never said I was against adding rubble, multiple times I said I was for it if it adds actual depth to the game, however your apparently you SOMEHOW got the idea that I was against the ideas you guys proposed as well, I WANT rubble to block pathways at least partially, I WANT it to be something you have to deal with, however I ALSO WANT it to somehow be a useful item and not just trash, and actually normal stone contained traces of ores everywhere, so please actually go look something up about what you are talking about before shooting my idea down.

I DO WANT RUBBLE TO ADD COMPLEXITY, but I also want it to add something more meaningful than 'trash to be dumped'.

let me present a scenario, say rubble produces... 1/5 or 1/7 of a tile of rubble for each non boulder producing tile. I dig a 5 tile wide, 20 tile long hallway, 25% drop stone not rubble. this leaves me with 75 tiles worth of rubble to clean. I pack the rubble to the sides and have a 3 tile wide hallway, end of story.

now lets say rubble is made on a 1:1 ratio. 2 years into the game the surface is impassible due to monstrous mountains of rubble, invaders cannot reach your fort as you have used the rubble to wall in a large area.

either way rubble has added nothing to the game stone does not have, and won't really change fort design, please present a logical counter argument to this.

oh and if you want realism so much, why would dwarves not sluice rubble to find more ores? sluicing was developed before minecarts in reality so...

[Cellmonk]

alright, I never said I was against adding rubble, multiple times I said I was for it if it adds actual depth to the game, however your apparently you SOMEHOW got the idea that I was against the ideas you guys proposed as well, I WANT rubble to block pathways at least partially, I WANT it to be something you have to deal with, however I ALSO WANT it to somehow be a useful item and not just trash, and actually normal stone contained traces of ores everywhere, so please actually go look something up about what you are talking about before shooting my idea down.

I DO WANT RUBBLE TO ADD COMPLEXITY, but I also want it to add something more meaningful than 'trash to be dumped'.

let me present a scenario, say rubble produces... 1/5 or 1/7 of a tile of rubble for each non boulder producing tile. I dig a 5 tile wide, 20 tile long hallway, 25% drop stone not rubble. this leaves me with 75 tiles worth of rubble to clean. I pack the rubble to the sides and have a 3 tile wide hallway, end of story.

now lets say rubble is made on a 1:1 ratio. 2 years into the game the surface is impassible due to monstrous mountains of rubble, invaders cannot reach your fort as you have used the rubble to wall in a large area.

either way rubble has added nothing to the game stone does not have, and won't really change fort design, please present a logical counter argument to this.

oh and if you want realism so much, why would dwarves not sluice rubble to find more ores? sluicing was developed before minecarts in reality so...

I think you missed part of his response. He was saying that even if it didn't have sluicing, it would be a good feature alone for the exponential difficulty of larger projects, but it is even better with the added stuff. And I think the complexity in fort design comes when seigers actually try to dig under or ladder over walls. You have all this stuff coming to the surface, and you can make a big castle with it, but it is in no way impenetrable with other planned features. I think you are hitting something with the 75% rubble idea though. It would allow for some more flexibility in fort design.

Edit: it seems I have missed more of the discussion than I thought....

[Sadrice]

and actually normal stone contained traces of ores everywhere, so please actually go look something up about what you are talking about before shooting my idea down.

Just out of curiosity, what are these wonderful sources that you're using? My quick googling suggests that sluice boxes were used almost solely for placer deposits for extracting tin and gold, and that it was invented in the last few centuries, but I was unable to find any particularly good sources.  If you have a source that suggests that ordinary stone(not gangue, ordinary stone that doesn't have visible ore in it, layer stone in DF terminology) has ore in it that can be extracted by sluicing, I would be delighted to see it.   My impression of sluicing is that, regardless of when it was invented, it is a method for separating very dense things (like native gold) from less dense things, like placer sand.  It is not a method for magically transmuting stone into ore.  "normal stone" is not a single thing that can have general statements made about it, what it is varies based on your local geology.  It may technically contain metal, but in the vast majority of cases running water through it while it's in a trough will just get it wet.


Also, I personally don't actually care if you are for or against rubble.  We're not trying to seek your approval or anything, so maybe a little less emphasis on that?


As for counter arguments, those have already been presented, many many times.  You've declared that they lack depth.  I disagree.  It would add the logistical challenge of removing the rubble from your mines to a more convenient place.  It would add in another layer of functional architecture as you either build a separate waste hauling system or attempt to integrate it into other hauling systems.  It would provide  a real reason to want to go to the surface.  It would add to the visual impact of fortresses (a single down stair and some trampled grass being the only evidence of a subterranean city?  Really?).  It would add a new and wholly different construction mechanic that would allow possibilities that are currently rather difficult.  It would even make it easier to add somewhat gamey stone shortages by having useable stone be rarer. 


I agree with your objections to rubble being present at less than a 1:1 ratio, it could just be pushed to the side.  It might be worthwhile anyways just to reduce the hauling load, though.  Your surface covering scenario seems to be assuming that people dig a lot more than they usually do.  I don't think you would run into problems with covering the surface without actively trying to do so, and if it were implemented sensibly (piles have ramps), invaders would not be blocked unless you built walls to block them, which you can already do, much more easily.  If you did want to engage in an absolutely enormous excavation project, just set up a better rubble disposal system.  Atom smash it or throw it in the magma sea, assuming those aren't made more difficult.

[bombzero]

seems I missed a whole small chunk of my sentence on sluicing, there was supposed to be an "and other similar methods like rock crushing and the like". my bad.

however what I meant with the surface covering scenario is that at 1:1 ratio that's what would happen for some of us, im guessing your fort remains tiny for decades or something along those lines.

but if 75% of the stone I dug had to be moved into the exact same amount of space it came out of, my surface world would look like a wasteland after only a year or two do to my general tendency to do economy en masse. probably something along the lines of.... 1/5 to 1/3 material return may just turn out better... gotta think game over simulation sometimes man.

also considering mods, mods that add more stuff require more area to put stuff in, so it could actually unintentionally cripple modding.
ah, and on another note a few responses in a different threads lead me to believe that some people don't want slower mining on the basis that it simply means more time to do everything, and less time to do the things they want. Now the people with that argument seemed very gamist, but you have to admit we could basically shut out an entire chunk of the playerbase by making mining take longer.

[xeniorn]

ah, and on another note a few responses in a different threads lead me to believe that some people don't want slower mining on the basis that it simply means more time to do everything, and less time to do the things they want. Now the people with that argument seemed very gamist, but you have to admit we could basically shut out an entire chunk of the playerbase by making mining take longer.

If you check out the model I've presented on page 1, you could see how that could be easily remedied. Two designations - one that is quite fast, but produces rubble (or whatever you want to call it...), which is faster to remove but much less useful (no furniture, no blocks for smooth walls/whatever requires blocks atm anyway, but yes small crafts, yes smelting and yes building it into a rough wall), and another one, much, much slower, which produces blocks, usable in all manners.

Whose way of playing would be seriously maimed by that? As it is right now, supply of stone for furniture is about 1000 times the demand, this way it would be... Only about 10 times the demand. So no problems building furniture. You want to dig out you 1000 rooms fast? No problem, just select the "fast dig" instead of "quarry" method - you'll clear the rooms in no time (i'd still make it a bit slower than it is right now, but the current speed could work as well I guess), but you wont automatically get tons of prime rock material. Since you usually perceive the boulders that are dropped as it is now as trash and just quantum dump it, it's really not a big difference. If you are doing a minimalist fort, again, no problem. The only problem arises when you want to build a humongous megaproject out of blocks. One could argue a megaproject should require you to have huge manpower anyway, but the ones that don't enjoy the "gaming" part, the logistics, can always opt to take the required speed:0 and other measures.

I'd love to hear your opinion on my standpoint here, Kohaku.

[Sadrice]

My fortresses do remain fairly small (I don't enjoy managing more than a hundred dwarves, and I can barely employ that many no matter how much stuff I have them do), but I still don't see how you could cover the surface with just a fortress, unless you regularly clear out z levels of rock for no particular reason, or engage in extreme exploratory mining that reveals every square.  Underground megaprojects might do it, but megaprojects should involve vast expenditures of labor and careful planning, and modding could aleviate the problem anyways.  Very large fortresses don't usually mine out more than a few z levels of total area (I think... Does anyone have actual numbers for total mined area in a large fortress?), and if rubble is made to pile nicely into pyramids with ramps and stuff, as per the sand suggestion, that would easily fit in probably not much more than a single embark tile (haven't bothered to do the math, anyone interested?), even with a 1 mined tile equals 1 tile of rubble heap system.  Unless you're in a 2x2 embark, that shouldn't be a big deal for most people.  If it is, find a different place to dump your rubble. 

I think one of the easiest ways to do it would be to have 1 mine tile equals 1 ramp, and 2 ramps equals 1 wall of rubble, but it wouldn't stand up without ramps beside it and would collapse back into 2 adjacent ramps.  Yeah, as you pointed out, people could micromanage their rubble dumping zones to an extreme degree, and turn a wide hallway into a slightly narrower hallway with rubble piled at the sides, but this would be so intensive on player labor (very much unlike just letting your dwarves automatically haul it to the tailings heap) and so damn ugly that I don't think many people would bother.  People already order the stone cluttering their fortresses dumped, despite it having absolutely no consequence except for increasing construction time slightly and being ugly, and this would be even uglier.  Toady could make the default color for rubble that ugly brown used by most sedimentary rocks.  Few players experienced enough to pull off that sort of micromanaging of dump zones would tolerate that besmirching the walls of their fortress, blocking access for engravers and covering the lovely marble.

Despite being for rubble, I don't want mining to be slowed significantly, with some qualifications.  I think mining should go at current or nearly current speeds, so long as you have adequate removal of rock.  During the founding of your fortress, this shouldn't be an issue.  Assuming the typical 2 miner embark crew, you have 5 other dwarves who were probably just hanging out by the wagon waiting for the miners to do their thing anyways, and the stone doesn't have to be hauled very far.  Later, when you've disabled hauling on those dwarves, and they are productively employed anyways, you might have to set aside some of your new migrants as stone haulers, and remove all other duties.  Otherwise, your mining might slow, or even stop, as the miners have to crawl over rubble.  I would rather that mining is not totally stopped (realism has its merits, but this is a game and I don't think that would be fun), but just slowed.  Also, as you delve deeper into the earth, it's not so easy to drag the stone all the way back to the surface, especially if the haulers are getting tangled up in narrow mineshafts, causing traffic problems.  It might be time to do a bit of careful civic planning, and dig a real city, with wide high traffic routes that go around your main fortress areas and provide easy hauler access, or a nifty minecart system that goes from the mines to the fortress and the tailings pit.  Ideally a minecart could carry more than 1 tile of rubble (ignoring all the physics involved with a minecart taking up 1 tile of space, this is a necessary concession to gameyness), and would be of significantly different weight when laden with rubble than when ladden with ore or quarried stone, otherwise you might have to dig two railways. 

I like the mining versus quarrying idea.  It has appeal from both a gamist and a simulationist standpoint.  After all, if you want to dig a hole through rock with a pick, you're probably not going to be producing many boulders, you'll just get shards of rock.  Whereas if you want to get a big block of rock out of a rockface, you will be doing a lot of slow work with chisels, and it will not be a very quick way to dig a tunnel.

EDIT: about the sluicing thing: found more, used for lots of things, and pretty old (the earlier sources seemed to claim it was invented in the california gold rush, which seemed a mite fishy to me).  Especially great for tin and gold mining, but used for all sorts of situations where you have mixed ore and rock, and the ore happens to be significantly denser.  This isn't used for just ordinary rock, and would not produce anything useful from it.  Ore does not come in nice 1 tile units of pure cassiterite (at least in Dartmoor), it comes in thin veins running through granite, which can be separated easily using what is basically a sluice, but in Dartmoor at least was a slightly sloped ditch dug in the earth, allowing water to wash away the granite leaving pure cassiterite.  This doesn't mean that the gabbro you dug out of your dining hall can be sluiced to produce metals, it means that the vein of cassiterite you discovered must be processed to be smeltable at all.  I think that would be an interesting change, especially if sluicing weren't abstracted into a building but required an actual channel of flowing water, but it would ultimately be extremely frustrating to newbies and a great many other people, and would not be a good addition.  Perhaps ore veins could have fuzzier borders, with pure veins in the center, like it is now, but with a thick layer of mixed rock and ore that could be set aside for when you get around to setting up a proper sluice channel.  This might make lower mineral abundance more bearable.

[DarkerDark]

This thread reminds me of a really old thread where a new player was complaining his fortresses kept failing because everyone was too busy hauling stone outside. He asked how other players managed to stay on top of stockpiling their stones before we kindly reminded him that clearing stone out of the fortress was not mandatory. I believe he posted screenshots of massive stone stockpiles directly outside his fortress (It might have been the 2d version, I don't remember).

If rubble does get implemented, I have a feeling most players are going to find some silly way to deal with it as though it's not even there. I'm already picturing myself using channels instead of the mining designation to build my fort. Channel out the wall, let the rubble drop into the z-level below, then floor over it. Fort expansion time is now based on construction time rather than moving rubble. Worlds with wide open caverns will become popular. Just dig a garbage chute down to the first cavern and dump all your rubble there!

I can see the interesting challengest that will come with managing rubble, as well as the fun new fort designs, but I can also see how it would turn parts of the game into a complete snore-fest as you wait for rubble to be cleared out. I can already see myself becoming frustrated with my miners as they spend half a season walking to my mining shaft just to mine out a single tile, then walk all the way back to idle while Urist McCripple makes the same tedious journey just to put that single bit of rubble in a minecart.

But, hey, ultimately I play Dwarf Fortress for the way it stimulates my imagination, and if cool stories can be had as a direct result of adding rubble, then I'm all for it.

[Iapetus]

A few suggestions on what rubble could be used for (just so it is not totally useless):

* Coal rubble should be usable as fuel (because IRL, it is extracted and used as "rubble", not blocks you can build a house from or carve a statue out of).
* Ore rubble should be smeltable (because ditto, and if you are melting it, it doesn't matter what sized pieces it is in)
* Gem rubble should be convertable into gems (because the gems would only be a very small part of the rock/rubble).  Conversly, quarrying out a gem tile could give you a "gem-studded block" that could be used as a building material to make more valuable buildings.
* Rubble could be used as catapault ammo for a scatter-gun effect (less powerful than normal rocks, but can hit multiple targets over a small area).

The first three points would also mean you don't have to worry about unskilled miners digging out (and destroying) coal/ore/gems, because you can still use the rubble.

[NW_Kohaku]

now lets say rubble is made on a 1:1 ratio. 2 years into the game the surface is impassible due to monstrous mountains of rubble, invaders cannot reach your fort as you have used the rubble to wall in a large area.

either way rubble has added nothing to the game stone does not have, and won't really change fort design, please present a logical counter argument to this.

Here's the thing I can't understand why you won't acknowledge: That IS adding something to the game.  That is exactly what SHOULD happen.  Having to put the mass you remove somewhere else in the game IS adding depth and value to the game. 

I don't know how many different ways I can say that.  You keep claiming that I'm "ignoring" you, and I keep repeating back to you this same idea with new words, hoping that somehow you'll recognize it if I can put it another way. 

Having to manage the stone is as much a fun project to manage as having to manage sieges or plan out bedrooms.  It will force players to have to think before they mine, because reckless expansion will lead to those massive dumps. 

By the way, though, if you completely wall off the starting surface, they just appear in tiles above.  Also, there should be other ways to dump stone than just on the surface if it starts becoming a problem.

ah, and on another note a few responses in a different threads lead me to believe that some people don't want slower mining on the basis that it simply means more time to do everything, and less time to do the things they want. Now the people with that argument seemed very gamist, but you have to admit we could basically shut out an entire chunk of the playerbase by making mining take longer.

Alright, I'm going to have to define terms here, to be more clear.

People who just want to build large fortresses and have limitless materials to build things, and aren't interested in challenging play or realism or the other things are not "gamists", they're "Construction Sets".  The "Dwarfcraft", where you just want limitless blocks to move around and make

The people who want a hard game, who want to make survival a challenge, and have difficult but gamey mechanics, like having bigger and more powerful sieges and increasing difficulty as the game goes on, sort of like the old 2d had, that's the "gamist" set.

The pure realism at all times to watch a simulation of a medieval world are the "simulationists". 

Of course, I doubt anyone is purely in any of these three camps, so don't feel compelled to make an assertion of how you are not fully in one camp or another. 

I feel that the things so many people are claiming are "good game" features are actually rather terrible game features - if you have no hunger or sieges or sleeping and just move blocks around, that's construction setism, and while that's great and all for the people who enjoy it (hell, I enjoy it at times, too), saying that none of the other players can have their fun because any addition to the game that actually makes it a better game instead of just a lego set is just detrimental. 

Rubble takes nothing away from the construction setters, I don't see why people keep claiming it will.  They can just turn it off as much as they turn off food and sleep and sieges.  The people having things taken away from them are the people who want actual gameplay challenges if rubble is kept out.

but if 75% of the stone I dug had to be moved into the exact same amount of space it came out of, my surface world would look like a wasteland after only a year or two do to my general tendency to do economy en masse. probably something along the lines of.... 1/5 to 1/3 material return may just turn out better... gotta think game over simulation sometimes man.

Actually, this is the exact reason we should have 1:1 rubble. 

You shouldn't be able to do an economy en masse.  Forcing you not to just be able to strip-mine for materials because it's going to be a problem to find a place for all that rubble, and as such, forcing you to reconsider your gaming strategy to find only what you need when you are going to need it soon is exactly the gameplay mechanic that this game needs.

Being able to vaporize mountains and collect all their riches without effort completely degrades one of the core mechanics of the game - mining - into nothing more than a "free stuff" button.  Any proper game should make you work for your resources.  In any RPG or the like, higher-level and more powerful equipment becomes more valuable specifically because it takes some effort to get it.  Giving you more steel straight off the bat of the game than you will ever need kills all the gameplay. 

Because of the realism changes in this game we had, we aren't going to be going back to the gameplay of the 2d days where iron was hidden behind a barrier that took time and planning to overcome, and which exposed us to greater risk.  We aren't going to get to a game again where we had to make do with copper or bronze until we could make iron and steel.  We can, however, make it so that you can't just have instant access to every mineral in the entire map because you can just perform an overnight mountaintop removal project, and the few materials you can get hold of easily are thus more precious, and your decisions as to what to make with your limited steel are thus more important, the way that decisions of what to do with the cotton candy are more important because it's such a limited resource. 

[NW_Kohaku]

If you check out the model I've presented on page 1, you could see how that could be easily remedied. Two designations - one that is quite fast, but produces rubble (or whatever you want to call it...), which is faster to remove but much less useful (no furniture, no blocks for smooth walls/whatever requires blocks atm anyway, but yes small crafts, yes smelting and yes building it into a rough wall), and another one, much, much slower, which produces blocks, usable in all manners.


I'd love to hear your opinion on my standpoint here, Kohaku.

If there's something to clear out either way, but one way is definitely rubble, but the mining itself is faster, then it becomes a matter of whether or not the mining itself is the significant portion of the time spent mining, or if the rubble collection takes an overshadowing portion of the time spent mining.

If rubble moving and disposal is a bigger concern to the point where people don't care about stone, I don't think that people would use the mine-through mode very often, anyway.

Of course, if rubble stacks and is more easily disposed than a stone block, so that it does save FPS, there would be more reason to use it. 

Also, if we go by making rubble a different kind of material than a boulder when it comes to handling (making the useful stone boulders harder to handle), then we could have that "ores are special ore rubble, but normal stones that turn into rubble after mining are just generic rubble".  In that way, there would be no "ore boulder" or "gem boulder", just ore and gem rubble of their designated types, and then the untyped rubble that is made for stacking and has no ore purposes.

Most of the people (not you, obviously, but others) who want the mine-through mode are the ones who want to have no rubble at all, and want to just have a "blitz through the whole layer of stone to vaporize a mountain overnight with no materials left behind" button.  I guess if there is a "rubble-off" option that would give them exactly that if your idea were implemented, that would still make those people happy, but I doubt they'd be happy with actually having to remove rubble one way or another.

[NW_Kohaku]

This thread reminds me of a really old thread where a new player was complaining his fortresses kept failing because everyone was too busy hauling stone outside. He asked how other players managed to stay on top of stockpiling their stones before we kindly reminded him that clearing stone out of the fortress was not mandatory. I believe he posted screenshots of massive stone stockpiles directly outside his fortress (It might have been the 2d version, I don't remember).

If rubble does get implemented, I have a feeling most players are going to find some silly way to deal with it as though it's not even there. I'm already picturing myself using channels instead of the mining designation to build my fort. Channel out the wall, let the rubble drop into the z-level below, then floor over it. Fort expansion time is now based on construction time rather than moving rubble. Worlds with wide open caverns will become popular. Just dig a garbage chute down to the first cavern and dump all your rubble there!

I can see the interesting challengest that will come with managing rubble, as well as the fun new fort designs, but I can also see how it would turn parts of the game into a complete snore-fest as you wait for rubble to be cleared out. I can already see myself becoming frustrated with my miners as they spend half a season walking to my mining shaft just to mine out a single tile, then walk all the way back to idle while Urist McCripple makes the same tedious journey just to put that single bit of rubble in a minecart.

But, hey, ultimately I play Dwarf Fortress for the way it stimulates my imagination, and if cool stories can be had as a direct result of adding rubble, then I'm all for it.

Well, I have no doubt that some ways to get rid of rubble permanently will arise, whether it is magma sea dumping or clever applications of atom-smashing that avoid the rubble forming walls that stop atom-smashing bridges from coming down. 

However, I would hope that if we have channeling like that, it would create appropriate amounts of rubble for both tiles that are removed, so that such an easy and obvious exploit was not available.

And actually, because I refuse to use the "just hide freak tons of stone" method in my own fortresses, I've already learned to use very compact fortresses. 

I take advantage of soil layers for my storage space, but other than that, I don't leave any stone in anything but stockpiles, and generally manage to keep my fortresses very compact (vertical sprawl to cut down on those annoying and wasteful hallways). 

I generally don't even have to dump the stone out on the lawn, except in the first year.  I just find ways to turn it all into doors and chairs and tables and crafts I can throw into bins and heft off on the next caravan. 

It's a rather fun challenge. 

I still believe that people are just overly panicking about something that they will enjoy once they're actually playing with it, and adapting the tricks to overcoming the challenges the rubble imposes.  People complain when they heard about the early .31 era overabundance of minerals being removed in .31.19, and there was that scarcity of minerals, but we grew used to it, and there's a worldgen option, as well.  People complained about losing the 1-bar breastplates, but most of us had been playing with 3-bar breastplates before, so we weren't phased.  It's not like we don't have gob-smacking amounts of iron and steel already.  People are going to complain about having a change, but they'll love it after they grow used to it, and be afraid of the next change or a change back.

[Arkenstone]

You shouldn't be able to do an economy en masse.  Forcing you not to just be able to strip-mine for materials because it's going to be a problem to find a place for all that rubble, and as such, forcing you to reconsider your gaming strategy to find only what you need when you are going to need it soon is exactly the gameplay mechanic that this game needs.

Being able to vaporize mountains and collect all their riches without effort completely degrades one of the core mechanics of the game - mining - into nothing more than a "free stuff" button.  Any proper game should make you work for your resources.  In any RPG or the like, higher-level and more powerful equipment becomes more valuable specifically because it takes some effort to get it.  Giving you more steel straight off the bat of the game than you will ever need kills all the gameplay. 

Because of the realism changes in this game we had, we aren't going to be going back to the gameplay of the 2d days where iron was hidden behind a barrier that took time and planning to overcome, and which exposed us to greater risk.  We aren't going to get to a game again where we had to make do with copper or bronze until we could make iron and steel.  We can, however, make it so that you can't just have instant access to every mineral in the entire map because you can just perform an overnight mountaintop removal project, and the few materials you can get hold of easily are thus more precious, and your decisions as to what to make with your limited steel are thus more important, the way that decisions of what to do with the cotton candy are more important because it's such a limited resource.

And now I believe I have found the heart of your argument:

You shouldn't be able to do an economy en masse.

The only thing I can say is that seems to be the heart of the fun for many people.  Changing this would only appeal to those with strong 'simulationist', and possibly 'gamist' views.  Anyone who likes building big things at all will have that part of the fun truncated for them, unless they really valued the challenge or the realism more.

[NW_Kohaku]

And now I believe I have found the heart of your argument:

You shouldn't be able to do an economy en masse.

The only thing I can say is that seems to be the heart of the fun for many people.  Changing this would only appeal to those with strong 'simulationist', and possibly 'gamist' views.  Anyone who likes building big things at all will have that part of the fun truncated for them, unless they really valued the challenge or the realism more.

Yes, that's what I've been saying in different forms, trying to find something that "clicks". 

The enjoyment of the game comes not from having the power to do things, but comes from being able to do things in spite of your limitations.  It is the overcoming of your limitations that give games their meaning and fun. 

Water management is an inherently more interesting and fun (and Fun) use of mining than simply digging hallways because hallways are simple and boring - water is something you have much less direct control over, but just as much indirect control if you sit, stop, and think about how to handle the water.  You can actually do more with water and pressure plates than almost anything else in the game - all in spite of never directly being capable of moving water directly, but instead having to rely upon your ability to move stone, open floodgates, or build pumps. 

Meanwhile, digging out hallways is something so routine and boring that most people refuse to even consider it something that ever could be fun or interesting.

If mining itself becomes challenging, whether by cave-in or need to manage negative consequences of mining, it will make every related aspect of the game a better game.  Rubble isn't enough, but it's a start.  If we can have ventilation, mine explosions, lighting, and cave-ins, we'd be going much further into making even mining something that takes actual planning, and everything up the line in that relies upon mining becomes something not so easily assumed to be easily completed, making a more fun game overall as you have to triage your needs with the limited mineral and secure underground space resources you have access to.

And again, I'm all for an init option, just as those megaproject people who want absolutely nothing but building can turn off eating and sleep and sieges and [SPEED:0] and every other aspect of the game that actually makes it a game.  It doesn't take anything away from them.