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[FearfulJesuit]

This post was originally made in the topic Minecarts: Have they changed the game for the better? in Dwarf Mode Discussion. What was originally intended to be a couple of lines re-iterating what others said blossomed into a couple of ideas about how to fix the perceived problems. Have a go.

I honestly think that [minecarts] are a wonderful concept that needs to be improved. I really can't help but reiterate a previously made point: that minecarts are simply so time-consuming to set up that mining is a pain no matter how you go about it. Most of my forts use a lot of wheelbarrows.

I feel like the best way this could be improved would be with some better designations, and perhaps with combining a couple of jobs. Right now, getting minecarts around requires you to fool around with stockpiles; making tracks isn't much better. It would be less realistic, but more fun (lowercase) and more game-like if miners could dig out minecart tracks the same way they dug out staircases or hallways, with no need for engravers. Likewise, you could have a special designated "dig" job that would be exactly like regular digging, except that you would be able to say "alright, now I've designated us to dig out this 20x20 area; any and all iron ore, coal or flux need to go in that minecart." Then you would link the dig designation to the minecart, tell it which ores, and tell the minecart how full it would need to be before being sent off. At the other end, it would just dump into a quantum stockpile in the magma forge area, the normal way, with a stop. Or it could link to a stockpile. Alternatively, or in addition, I think it would be a good idea to treat minecart stops like stockpiles in that one could assign them wheelbarrows. As a downside, the stops might be bigger, but as noted it's time-consuming to constantly expand minecart tracks if you're working in a large quarry. Wheelbarrows assigned to the track stop won't stop that problem per se, but they will mitigate it, because ore can be carried efficiently from further away to the minecart.

To be fair, neither of these proposals will do very much to help non-mining uses of minecarts. However, it's clear that Toady intended them as a mining tool first and foremost, and in light of that, we need to think about how to make mining with minecarts a better experience.

I stand by all of these points, though I'd be absolutely fine with engraving tracks and carving hallways remaining seperate jobs. But I really think wheelbarrows attached to track stops would make a lot of sense. The track stop would look like this:

Code: [Select]

X‖
X≡
X‖

or

Code: [Select]

=≡=
XXX

where X is a designated wheelbarrow storage space.

Anyways, that's my two cents, and I'd be interested to see what people think of it.