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[zkenyon]

I've been thinking about how I would try to improve mining realism, and encourage the use of mine carts.

because I think you lose a lot of the potential difficulty/ interesting problems to solve in your fort by equipping your miners with matter destroyers.

simple rule, Any tile containing a mining product can not be traversed by someone/thing carrying a mining product.

would anyone hate the game if they had to work around this constraint?

[NW_Kohaku]

I suggest you read this thread that was an argument over the concept of rubble produced from mining and required clearing away.

Short answer: I'd like to see rubble, and have a method of packing rubble/mullock back into a gravel wall tile or force players to dispose of such things off-map somehow.  It would mean slowing down the extremely rapid expansion players currently enjoy/abuse, and yes, force players to deal more with logistics if they want to expand their fortress quickly. 

Also, yes, some people would hate it.

[zkenyon]

thanks, didn't think to look for "rubble" in previous posts.

The mining/hauling mechanic does not have to change dramatically to include this rule. And your dwarves still haul stone out of your fortress at a reasonable rate, but there is some emphasis on clearing hallways before you can access valuable stone.

solutions involve digging wider shafts, making efficient use of minecarts, dropping stone into caverns, and all sorts of clever stuff I can't think of at the moment.

anyway, I just want to gauge the feelings here, because realistic mining problems are something I would very much like to see.

[Manveru Taurënér]

This is probably my most wanted feature to be honest, but it remains to be seen if we'll get anything similar what with the huge animosity a lot of people seem to hold against the idea. Just like you mentioned this would make mining a lot more interesting and actually mean something in terms of gameplay instead of as of now marking tiles to magically disappear. Not to mention the myriad of things we could do with rubble, especially when the army arc comes around and defensive constructions becomes all that much more important. And who doesn't want to be able to bury their enemies alive without relying on cave-ins?

[assasin]

Maybe if there was an improvement to fortress organisation where you can assign crews to follow the miners and remove the rubble at a similar rate to how the miners work.

The thing is that to me gameplay comes first, not having things be annoying comes second, and somewhere down the line, not far, but still down, would be realism. This is annoying and it doesnt add much to gameplay, so I'm not really sure.

[NW_Kohaku]

And who doesn't want to be able to bury their enemies alive without relying on cave-ins?

Or obsidian-casting.

Come to think of it, barring some sort of "saving throw" against it, this could be an easy way to set up purposeful burials like that.  It would be reasonable to give supposedly hard monsters like megabeasts some sort of skill check to displace themselves upwards to avoid getting buried.

Maybe if there was an improvement to fortress organisation where you can assign crews to follow the miners and remove the rubble at a similar rate to how the miners work.

The thing is that to me gameplay comes first, not having things be annoying comes second, and somewhere down the line, not far, but still down, would be realism. This is annoying and it doesnt add much to gameplay, so I'm not really sure.

If you read the thread on rubble, it's not just realism, it adds a great deal to gameplay to have players not exploit the capacity to vaporize whole mountains of rock in minutes. 

The longer that mining takes, the harder the game becomes, and the more that the way you mine (long, narrow tunnels versus wide areas) matters, and how well you set up logistics matters, the more that it impacts gameplay decisions before you just arbitrarily slap down a quickfort design and go get a sandwich before coming back in 5 minutes and seeing a whole fortress fully excavated.  Throwing sand in the gears of mining is the first step to making mining an actually strategic game element.

[Manveru Taurënér]

People also really need to try and think a bit more creatively tbh. Just because something sounds annoying at first impression doesn't mean it can't be made not to be annoying. There's nothing saying you have to have half your dwarves haul off a wheelbarrow off rubble per tile back and forth ad infinitum, obviously a balance would have to be found and struck in between what's a realistic amount to get out per load and what's enough so as to not slow it down too much. When starting to dig I'd say it shouldn't be much slower than now at all, since you wouldn't have to move the rubble more than a few tiles. The biggest change and benefit to the whole system would be that the deeper you dig the slower it gets, making the act of reaching the "fun stuff" down below a small achievement in itself, since you'd pretty much need to either devote a large amount of manpower and time or set up an efficient minecart system to get there. Reaching magma for example should in my opinion involve a teensy bit more than simply designating an up/down staircase x amounts of z-levels down then wait a few seconds for your miner to get there.

Having to wait for haulers to move over and clear stuff out before continuing mining isn't really an unsolveable issue either. One could like you mentioned assasin set up some kind of hauling crew system that goes along with the miners and clears it out as it appears. Or you could make it a mining job and simply designate more miners (ie having a miner dig then start hauling the rubble off as the next guy takes over, rinse and repeat).

People need to start seeing SOLUTIONS and OPPORTUNITIES instead of problems ^^

[zkenyon]

OP here: I want to be clear, There are very real computational barriers to making mining more realistic by adding rubble and physically realistic mining products. Tracking rubble, and pathfinding through rubble is not really in the spirit of the game. Additionally Toady himself has said repeatedly that he doesn't want to commit to defining the size of a tile which I understand as the choice of someone writing a game.

So I was suggesting a very specific mechanic. Mining products are all standing up, no two can occupy the same square without falling.

This is a very simple substitute for volume. It does not require taking spoonfuls of rubble away from your dig site. everything about the game would be the same except the order in which your dwarves haul stone, and maybe stonefall traps.

so

The realism added is like, a whole physical law. it's a good compromise between the minutia of adding and managing gravel managing rubble and the utter ridiculousness of a dwarf just mining by himself to HFS and bringing back what he found.

The whole point of having an AI do the hauling for you is so that the game can feel realistic, without feeling tedious. It stands to reason that a barrier to adding more realism, is the inability to add corresponding AI.

so I'm curious where this rule could break the AI, and what might be possible solutions in that case, because I think it's worth hashing out a little

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, Toady did involve tile size when putting minecarts in the game.  He said tiles were 2 meters by 2 meters by 3 meters tall. 

I'm not sure what you mean by what's not in the spirit of the game, either.

Or, for that matter, what you mean by "standing up" or "falling".

Besides which, the rubble concept seems almost identical to what you were talking about in the OP - each tile mined creates two rubbles (or one rubble and one boulder/ore/gem), one in the tile mined, and one in the miner's tile.  Two rubbles can't occupy the same tile without turning back into a rubble wall.  Mining cannot take place while standing on a rubble-filled tile. 

That means you can't just mine straight down to HFS all in one go, just as you say - rubble hauling has to take place after each tile mined, and yes, that means having some sort of auto-designation to clear away rubble to a pre-designated rubble dumping site to make it non-micromanagey.

Hypothetically, when you get down to the magma sea, you can just set your mine carts to dump into that, but getting there would actually be much harder than just digging straight down, since making it take much longer would mean that you'd starve first if you ignored everything else and just started digging. 

Otherwise, you find ways to either dump rubble off a cliff to form a rubble pile (that converts into walls when stacked so as to prevent FPS drop, and pre-designated dumping areas help ensure that this is automatically done, preserving FPS impact for the whole suggestion to a minimal level) to get rid of it, or else do something like order your engineers to fire it by catapult off the map or something. 

[zkenyon]

you mine, you get a boulder. that's it, no rubble. no extra stuff to track.

The only thing you can't do, is haul a boulder over another boulder. You can crawl around them just fine.

if a dwarf wants to dig right to the magma sea and then come back, that would be totally fine. but he can't bring back his loot without clearing the passage.

another thing, to help the hauling AI, two carried stones may occupy the same square.

[GreatWyrmGold]

On one hand, mining needs work. Lots of it. It's a central part of DF, what with the D's making F's, but as it is it's too simple/easy. On the other hand, it it's too hard/complex, proper fortresses will be stifled.

Something like this could be done, but at least one and ideally both of the following would happen as well:
1. Tag-team Mining. A miner, an engraver, and possibly a loader take a pick and a minecart (plus whatever tools engravers need at this point) and head to the mining site. The dwarves and minecart all share a somewhat squashed tile next to the mined tile. When the tile is dug, it has a track carved into it and any stone within it is moved to the minecart. Then, the dwarves move the minecart and start all over. Once the minecart is full, the team will break up and a hauler (or the loader) empties the minecart in the appropriate stockpile(s). Of course, this would need to be a special designation, likely one designated like carving tracks currently is. It's something that should probably be done eventually, anyways.
2. Excavation. One can designate to dig without getting stone. A bit hacky, and suggested a lot before, but in this case it would be a simple, acceptable way to deal with the problems.

[NW_Kohaku]

On the other hand, it it's too hard/complex, proper fortresses will be stifled.

But that's the point - Mining needs to be stifled.  Mining is too easy.  It needs to be less easy to dig down to the magma sea while it's still the first month of the game. 

In the original 2d version of DF, the game had barriers like the cave river, the chasm, and the magma river, which all were stumbling blocks that also presented ramping up of the challenge of the game.  You needed to be prepared for the threats they posed (in the form of more monsters that would be difficult to block, and would require military dwarves to handle) and to construct bridges across those roadblocks to advance. 

Now, the only thing even remotely like that are aquifers.

We have three caverns in the game right now, but there's no real reason why, since you can easily bypass caverns, so there's little real sense of danger in them, or sense that getting there is any form of achievement.

Likewise, easy mining makes a joke of sieges, since I can easily move mountains to build zig-zagging bridges to cross into my fortress in open view of marksdwarves who have all the time in the world to shoot at goblins as they fall off into dodge traps. 

If, however, players are forced into making little more than holes in the rock and dirt before they start getting their first sieges, and maybe making wooden pallisades for defense because above ground construction is (rightfully) faster than excavation, then sieges as a whole become more challenging.

The game needs to have mining much slower to make all the other challenges of the game actually challenging.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Well, perhaps that was phrased poorly...

Mining shouldn't be too easy, but likewise it shouldn't be too hard. That's what I was saying. Above all, it should be easy on the CPU and not require too much micromanagement to dig a tunnel.

[NW_Kohaku]

you mine, you get a boulder. that's it, no rubble. no extra stuff to track.

The only thing you can't do, is haul a boulder over another boulder. You can crawl around them just fine.

if a dwarf wants to dig right to the magma sea and then come back, that would be totally fine. but he can't bring back his loot without clearing the passage.

another thing, to help the hauling AI, two carried stones may occupy the same square.

That doesn't really accomplish the stated goals of the thread, then.

(I'm presuming you're talking about just making it impossible to carry a stone past a stone that isn't carried, in which case, this doesn't actually stop anything but stone-hauling, anyway.)

What's to stop players from digging down to the magma sea and setting up magma forges down there instead of going for pump stacks?  (Or, for that matter, setting up basically your entire fortress in the deeps?)

This suggestion, at its basic level you're suggesting, would still involve plenty of AI problems to work into the game without actually accomplishing the core goal of providing players with any actual motivation to care about things like minecarts. 

Especially with how little boulders are produced currently, there's little excuse for players not to quantum-dump anything they need or atom-smash or magma-dump anything they do need. (And building an atom-smasher and clearing away boulders from main living quarters is what I tend to do right after tapping the magma sea.)

Since we already have floods of free labor, the only reason anyone would still have boulders lying around in the current versions of the game is just because they haven't bothered mass-marking boulders for dumping or having masons/stonecrafters to work down the junk.

If you want to slow mining down, you have to aim at the source of the problem.

[Babylon]

The OP suggestion sounds to me like it would interfere with pathfinding without making things any more fun.