I know this has been discussed at length but I have rarely seen anyone put forward the following opinion:
When you mine in real life you cut out the stone/earth/mineral from the mining area, this is generally the easiest part. The big problem with real life mining is the logistical effort of removing all that material from the mine. In the real world you cant mine any further until it is gone. More experienced miners do not mine out more material than inexperienced miners, they just mine out more useable material.
If the nature of stone in the game is changed substantially, here are my suggestions, they are not designed to make things easier for whining momma's boys who complain about stones everywhere making things "look untidy". They are designed to make it more realistic and therefore MORE difficult to deal with stone in your fortress.
1) Dwarves are unable to move through squares with stone in them and therefore mining a one tile wide passageway would require moving each individual stone before mining the next one. (Remember these stones are the size of a dwarfs height squared)
2) When an unskilled miner digs and does not get usable rock (it is assumed that a skilled miner cuts out large square multi purpose blocks whereas a less skilled miner might crack, shatter, or otherwise damage the rock so as to make the pieces unusable) it should drop an item called slag, which comes in all the relevant types ie. granite slag, diorite slag etc. This would have all the same properties as normal rock but would not be able to be used to build or craft. This slag would still be impassable and need to be removed to a stockpile. Slag would be unnecessary for ores as they are melted down anyway, but slag should be dropped as a percentage chance on all smelt ore actions, clogging up the smelters and requiring more hauling.
as 1 and 2 result in dealing with stone becoming exponentially more difficult, the rest of my ideas will focus on trying to fix this just a little bit.
3) Although stone would remain unstackable in the game sense it should be stackable in the more obvious sense that you should be able to build ramps next to a full stone stockpile and stack more stone directly on top of the rest on the next z-level extending it vertically rather than having to have giant sprawling fields of stone.
4) Tracks should be able to be laid between two stockpiles, one small and one large, with the large one having a designation like 'wagon only' so that haulers dont try and walk all the way there with one stone. The tracks could have small 1 tile wagons (think Indiana Jones) that can hold something like 10 rocks. at the mining end you would have 2 or 3 haulers hauling rock directly from the face to the small stockpile. Then you would have one hauler who would be on wagon duty, he would arrive at the small stockpile, load the wagon with stones, and then drive them all to the other end, and unload the stones in a larger, out of the way stockpile for storage. The tracks could be made from stone wood or metal but the wagons would move fastest over metal.
5) If slag and rock are dumped in the same place the could form new ground which would bury other items in the dump zone and if on flat ground create a hill, or if in a pit or depression, fill it. Being able to bury things could make for fun treasure hunt scenarios and also burying people alive, not to mention simply being able to reshape the landscape more freely. This would also hopefully help with the slowdown issues..
6) These suggestions should all be part of a STONE: ON, ORE: ON option in the init which when turned off would remove all stone drops altogether for slower computers. A list could be kept as to what has been found by mining and all jobs that require that type should be from then on assumed to have a plentiful supply. I understand that turning this off would remove a lot of the fun and realism from mining but it would also enable people with slower computers to play better. A lot of people don't even have the processor power to cope with the current stone setup let alone what I am proposing here.
That is all. I realise that implementing these is a massive task and was not seriously expecting this to be done. I just want to propose an alternative view on stone, as it seems that everyone wants a world where stone just evaporates at will, rather than deal with the real logistics of hollowing out an entire mountain. IT ISN'T MEANT TO BE EASY.
Author
Topic: The "Stone Problem" Solution. (Read 3036 times)