With the huge amount of stone being mined in mountainous terrains I keep getting a lot more stones then what I know what to do with and this is from simply carving out the workshops and living places for my dwarves. Not only do the stones look ugly in the halls forcing me to assign hauling jobs to dump them outside (that new feature is a godsend compared to the previous version btw), but having to handle them all wouldn't do good to the game memory vise either.
What I propose is to separate the current "Mine" designation into "Mine" and "Dig", with dig being the default fast method of carving out rooms without leaving much stone behind, and mine as a slower method used to extract the needed stones and ores from the rock. Each stone would have a base difficulty (I think they already do, I've been getting microcline from almost every tile I dug out), it would be used when digging so softer rocks would have maybe a 0-30% chance to produce a stone, while harder rocks would leave more up to 100%, forcing the player to deal with these kind of stones anyway. If the roll is unsuccessful then the stone crumbles to rock dust (more on that later). The idea is to quickly carve out rooms when you already have an abundant supply of the stones held within. Mining would take the base chance and add a 20-50% chance to it depending on the mining skill, leaving more stones behind from the types needed. Since the game pauses automatically when a new vein of valuable stone is discovered the player can re-designate the area to mine and won't lose the rare stones/ores. A different color could be used, perhaps dark green instead of the brown we have now to differentiate between the two tasks.
EDIT: Digging would be as fast as mining is now, and mining should be much slower. I think mining is too fast even by dwarven standards. Additionally, carving stairs and ramps into the stone shouldn't produce stones at all, since it is used up in the carving itself, and behave similar to digging, although slower. I think digging channels should be the same since the miner has no direct access to the rock to mine carefully.
The mining job preference could also be broken up into mining and digging, but they would both use the mining skill. This way you could have only your most experienced miners work on ore veins, and set the novices to work only on digging common stone. I realize not everyone would like the way this adds more micromanagement but with using just the mining designation and leaving job preferences on the default (new miners should start with mining and digging both enabled) the player could play the same way they do now.
I mentioned rock dust since I wouldn't like stone to just magically vanish when unsuccessfully mined. Dust would be normally useless and work in a way similar to how mud, blood and vomit does now. When a tile doesn't produce a stone (if the miner wasn't skilled enough or if he was just digging away carelessly) the floor of the now open tile would contain rock dust. It could be dragged around when stepped on, and produce unhappy thoughts to dwarves based on personality - an organized dwarf would have thoughts like "Had to endure a dusty environment lately", so cleaning the main halls and rooms would be a priority. Dwarves would need to take time out of their schedules to clean but I think this would be less of a hassle then hauling all the stone to a stockpile obscuring traffic, which can get quite bad on a larger, more populated fortress. Of course I realize this would also need a way to tell the dwarves which part of the fortress to keep clean, so they are not constantly running into the mines to clean up after the miners working there..
Thoughts?
PS I'm sorry if this wall of text is hard to read, English is not my first language 
[ November 09, 2007: Message edited by: DragonHealer ]
[ November 09, 2007: Message edited by: DragonHealer ]
Author
Topic: Digging vs Mining - a new designation to help with clutt (Read 4183 times)