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[DarthCloakedDwarf]

b-C-f

Simply build floors out of stones right where they lay. It is fast with decent mason, it gets rid of stone with no hauling needed, it makes everything prettier, it requires no setup.

And best thing: should you discover you DO need those stones afterall, you can remove flooring and recover them.

Only problem is that now your decent mason is tied up doing tasks that take forever AND grant zero experience.

[Pilsu]

That's an issue of furniture crafting and building not being separated in the labor list

Conservation of mass is important. Even novice miners shouldn't just make rock puff into thin air

[groo]

Plus you then can't engrave the ground. Or use it for growing tower caps. Or etc.

And no gravel. This shouldn't produce a by product; the whole point is to destruct the objects completely so that they don't chug your game. As has been said, unskilled miners destroy stones wholly by accident while they're mining. Doing it deliberately should therefore be simple enough, yeah?

Basic game functionality is way more important than "conservation of mass"; when and if millions of rocks don't slow everything down to a crawl, maybe at that point I'd give a damn about my computer game obeying the laws of physics flawlessly, but until then I just want to be able to play the thing.

[Morrigi]

Plus you then can't engrave the ground. Or use it for growing tower caps. Or etc.

And no gravel. This shouldn't produce a by product; the whole point is to destruct the objects completely so that they don't chug your game. As has been said, unskilled miners destroy stones wholly by accident while they're mining. Doing it deliberately should therefore be simple enough, yeah?

Basic game functionality is way more important than "conservation of mass"; when and if millions of rocks don't slow everything down to a crawl, maybe at that point I'd give a damn about my computer game obeying the laws of physics flawlessly, but until then I just want to be able to play the thing.

This.

[Draco18s]

Simply build floors out of stones right where they lay.

Not only the above issues, but that the stones are still tracked by the game and your stocks menu will still lag to hell.

[Omegastick]

I think that it's a good idea to have some way of destroying stones, but not just esginating them to be destroyed and then someone comes along a destroys them. I think it should involve taking them to a spot and then maybe walling off the spot, erasiing them from the game's memory. Possibly dumping them into a pit and then dumping magma on them.

[groo]

That's what we already do. And it doesn't work, because the amount of hauling required to move the output from large mining projects takes forever.

[Derakon]

Basic game functionality is way more important than "conservation of mass"

Toady has showed, time and again, that he doesn't agree with this stance. "Quick fixes" that have to be ripped out later when the proper fix shows up, never get implemented in the first place; he'll just wait until he has time to do the proper fix directly.

Incidentally, many people consider it a bug that unskilled miners can dig out walls without generating any items that need to be dealt with.

[groo]

Okay; how about all the slag that gets quietly discarded from the game whenever you melt the reusable part of a forged item in a smelter? Or on the other side of the coin, the fact that subterranean farming produces a wholly arbitrary amount of plant from a stone floor you poured an inch of water over once and which requires no other input from the environment whatsoever? Or the way cave spiders produce endless amounts of web without ever needing to consume anything in order to do so?

Conservation of mass would be fine if the game didn't generate object after object after object out of absolutely nothing as the game progresses. But that's exactly what it does, so we need some way of clearing all these thousands of objects out of our site, lest they slow the whole process down so much that it becomes unplayable. That's the best argument I can provide. I just don't see why conservation of mass is being held up as some kind of sacrosanct thing in a game that clearly doesn't obey it at all. If it did we wouldn't be having the slowdown issues we have that are begging for ways to destruct things.

[PhilbertFlange]

That's what we already do. And it doesn't work, because the amount of hauling required to move the output from large mining projects takes forever.

Agreed. Any sort of workshop, building, location, etc... that is required would be unnecessary, as dumping under an atom smasher serves this purpose already.

To save time and FPS it has to be a method that is more pathing-efficient than current dumping methods. It also must result in the stones being removed from being tracked by the game.

I would be supportive of dump zones being left as untracked (i.e. saved to a file somewhere in the DF folder) and only tracked again when the ENTIRE dump zone is reclaimed, restoring all items in that location.

[nutzy]

b-C-f

Simply build floors out of stones right where they lay. It is fast with decent mason, it gets rid of stone with no hauling needed, it makes everything prettier, it requires no setup.

And best thing: should you discover you DO need those stones afterall, you can remove flooring and recover them.

Only problem is that now your decent mason is tied up doing tasks that take forever AND grant zero experience.

Also, if you use more than one mason, you end up with lots of suspended floor tile jobs that are tedious to unsuspend

[o_O[WTFace]]

I see nothing wrong with making a designation for "I don't want this to exist anymore" and there's no reason it should only apply to raw stones.

This.  Mass dumping stone out of exploratory mining shafts causes just awful lag as 100 dwarves all shove into the same 1 width hallways at the same time. 

[TauQuebb]

Conservation of mass requires that for a dorf to hollow out a square, that square of material must be dumped out on the surface before the next can be attempted. With the current hauling system, this would be geologically slow, hauling say, 8 rocks per square.

However, if the hauling system was upgraded, usage of mine carts for example, would make such realism possible. External spoil heaps could be implemented, where the rocks are tipped over and each square that becomes say, a stack of 5 rocks, can change to a rough wall of loose aggregate, and thus remove said stones from the stock menu. The upshot of this is we could do more fun stuff, such as artificial islands in water.

I would enjoy watching a dwarf mining wile another follows behind with a mine cart pulled by a mule, filling it and carting it away for dumping each time. Although mining at the start would be slower, i enjoy building temporary surface shacks anyway.

[groo]

I like the idea of rock objects being able to be transformed back into untracked wall, though I think there's an elegance in the simplicity of the mining system as it is now which I'd probably be weeping for when I was trying to mine out three square embark tiles' worth of space.

[irmo]

This is a dwarf fortress.
This is a dwarf fortress.

It seems like the thing to do with all the "waste stone" is haul it out to the surface and build it onto the outside of the mountain. Done correctly, this can give you much more usable indoor space than just what you dig out of the mountain, as well as walls, aqueducts, roads, monuments, etc.

You have two processes, mining and construction, which both produce indoor space. Mining also produces stone, while construction consumes it. If you were committed to being "stone-neutral", you could manage them so that every stone that comes out of the mines gets built into a structure. The problem is that mining is absurdly fast and hassle-free, while construction is still sort of clunky, so keeping these in balance is tedious and slow. Therefore nobody does it, and all of the stone produced by mining becomes waste, and then dealing with the waste is tedious also and people request the ability to just make it go poof.

What we need to fix this is (1) to slow down mining (reduce the speed, but maybe also add hazards, obstacles, etc. so that it's less predictable) and (2) to improve hauling, because it won't be practical to build waste stone into surface structures until there's a way to actually get it to the surface. I suggest that any magic stone disintegration capability wait until those are in so we can see if it's still needed.