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[moody_dorf]

It will be useful for stockpiles, especially for the large ones.
Since less experienced miners leave less stones than more experienced ones, I think it will be rational if every miner could leave as many stones as unexperienced one, or no stones at all, if he's ordered to do so.

If Toady will add this feature, then there also must be a way to choose which stones must be omitted, and which ones should be leaved (for instance, precious gems and metal ores might be set to be leaved).

[Tuxman]

I second this.

This would be a blessing to FPS. And instead of normal ground, it could leave behind pebbles? Maybe? Still should be smooth-able.

I can just imagine the usefulness...

[Cotes]

No.

I mean honestly, mining already gives tons of break from realism, so your dwarves consistently atomizing solid rock even more so than they do now might go a bit too far.

And if all the excess rock is an issue for you, just mass dump it into the magma sea or a atom smasher. It's not like your gazillion idlers have anything better to do.

[Shurhaian]

And skilled dwarves extracting solid, workable stone from every single tile they dig out is somehow realistic?

The impression I got was that unskilled miners pulverize the stone to such a degree that it's useless, but the debris can still be imagined to be there. There just isn't currently a viable means of dealing with it. Maybe in the future, when there are mine carts, digging out stone will generate debris which will then need to be dealt with, but with each tile having an infinite capacity(so long as the dwarves aren't deliberately placing an item there), that would currently be nothing more than clutter. Once A) tiles have more sensible volume and B) piles of gravel, sand, etc work more sensibly, then dwarves may need to cart out the rubble and dump it onto a stone pile - which, who knows, might be used to make some sort of cement, depending on the rock(or it could just go right in the tailings pit).

For now, wanting a way to get rid of the rock that doesn't require those extra steps is not unreasonable.

It could also be that dwarves who are quarrying stone don't speed up to nearly the degree that they do now, but get (most of) the full benefit of reliably extracting useable rock; whereas dwarves who are tunneling are sped up more by higher skill, but leave little if any (useful) stone in their wake.

[NW_Kohaku]

OK, I've seen several of these threads before, but you'll have to wait for Footkerchief for one of the really giant lists of previous examples...

THIS thread is demonstrative of a thread that recieved quite a lot of attention that argues for what you are asking for (So there should be plenty of arguments for and against it):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=3298.0

THIS thread is demonstrative of the sort of thing Cotes is talking about, where it is actually argued that Mining is too easy, and that there needs to be more "shoveling" involved in removing stone and mullock from fortresses:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=24932.0

And oh, hey, there's THIS thread, where I argue something similar to the last, where we actually have to deal with excess stone large enough to fill whole tiles as something that can block off entire tiles, and force dwarves to actually manage their stone:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=61215.0

[Cotes]

I just feel that choosing at will to pulverize all stone instantly makes something that already borders on being far too easy even easier.

I mean, you are fucking chewing through solid stone, easily all the way to the earth's mantle. How little logistics do you want that to take? There is absolutely no need to make this any easier. Zero, nil, nadda.

[NW_Kohaku]

I just feel that choosing at will to pulverize all stone instantly makes something that already borders on being far too easy even easier.

I mean, you are fucking chewing through solid stone, easily all the way to the earth's mantle. How little logistics do you want that to take? There is absolutely no need to make this any easier. Zero, nil, nadda.

To argue this in a different route:

Currently, the game utterly ignores most aspects of the Conservation of Matter and Energy (which is one of my personal pet peeves, and part of why I started the Volume and Mass thread), and in some ways the game can really be altered by this decision:

Currently, you pretty much vaporize stone.  Legendary miners can dig nigh-instantly through solid rock, and produce a single stone leftover for their work.

Consider, on the other hand, how anthills are dug.  Every piece of dirt that an ant digs away must then be transported out the other end of the anthill.  The entire reason it's an anthill is because those ants dump that dirt in the first open space they find - right outside their front door.

We're talking about a major change in the way that players must consider their fortress-design - building above-ground as a way to get rid of stone becomes fairly attractive when you're actually FORCED to get rid of stone, rather than simply let it litter all your hallways when you mass-designate whole mountains to be plowed into oblivion because darnit, there might be some more coal in there!  (Not that Mountain-Top Removal doesn't exist in real life, but dwarves don't have to live with any of the consequences of those actions...)

I've been in a lot of arguments about difficulty and complexity lately, (Although, frankly, this one isn't complex at all - rock takes up space is pretty darn simple.) but I've been arguing for this difficulty in making things because the game fundamentally is based upon having dwarves who can manufacture useful products out of raw materials... and these raw materials are, for the most part, infinite in number, and as such, inconsequential to the player. 

I do think that more player actions should have positive or negative consequences tied to them so that one has to actually stop and consider what they do, rather than mass-designate or assume that stone or food or glass or whatever are infinite.

[Shurhaian]

@NW_Kohaku: I agree that there should be effort involved in extracting the rubble. However, I feel that the current system doesn't have a way to represent that accurately, or handle it well outside of another equally ludicrous method, namely the quantum dumping zone.

If there were a more sensible way to dump things, I would be entirely in favour of mining leaving, possibly useful stone, but also some quantity of rubble(less of it if there's useable rock, but still some). If, for instance, a particular dump could be marked as being for stone rubble, a different one for kitchen trash, and another for miscellaneous junk, that would be a start.

If these actually built up piles, they would need a little thought - which, in this case, I think would be a good thing.

Another possibility that could take some of the busy-work out of the current system would be to have a designation that automatically flags the generated stone for dumping, but I'd rather see it rendered useless in the process.

(Semi-ninja'd. It seems I can pretty much say "what he said" to Kohaku's latest.)

[EvilMoogle]

When Toady was talking about cave-in problems with dirt I personally though there should be a designation for "build tunnel" vs. "mine(/quarry)"

The former would need wood (or other materials?) for every so many squares and would represent reinforced tunnels, leaving little waste behind.  The latter would be to extract materials from raw stone walls, would be much slower, and would generate stone/gems/ore/etc.

This could be linked to a similar system as the stone status screen to say "don't tunnel through veins/economic rocks/etc"

Granted the point about it being logistically easy I'd personally prefer to see it handled by leaving a "waste" behind similar to sand tracks/blood tracks that would need to be cleaned up.  If there were a desire for more realism there you could have the "clean" process generate a hauling job as well. 

But for the sake of computer resources it would be nice to have a way to at least dump waste off the map.

[Cotes]

Granted the point about it being logistically easy I'd personally prefer to see it handled by leaving a "waste" behind similar to sand tracks/blood tracks that would need to be cleaned up.  If there were a desire for more realism there you could have the "clean" process generate a hauling job as well. 

But for the sake of computer resources it would be nice to have a way to at least dump waste off the map.

Since there are multiple ways to get rid excess stone, your point is invalid. There's no real difference between having waste stones and some other kind of waste material other than the method of removal maybe.

[NW_Kohaku]

Part of the point of Volume and Mass is that it involves actually having tiles that can "fill up".  That way, enough gravel can actually impede movement, and give you a reason to want to move dirt and mullock and rubble around.  (If someone needs through, they could start pushing objects from one tile into another until they make enough room, but it would at least slow them down.)  If the "quantum dump" can actually fill up eventually, it creates, basically, the anthill - the dump tiles get filled, and you have to climb up on top of the dump pile to dump more dirt outside.

Of course, we still have, as Cotes points out, plenty of exploit-ish ways of removing stone, although I think "official" ways of removing waste products, like compressing them into solid "walls" of rubble in the anthill fashion, or just throwing them "out of sight, out of mind computer memory" off the edge of the map to some off-screen dump site.  ("Dump off-map" should be a feature.)

[TomiTapio]

Even the Time in fortress land is distorted, as shown by the day-long hauling, inability to haul two socks at once, and maybe-monthly eating & sleeping.

Everything is symbolic movement unless it's combat. And in combat it might take an hour to advance 20 tiles (20 x 2.5 meters / 55 yards)
One can say the missing time is spent on rubble-hauling and general nose-picking.

[Shurhaian]

Does dumping into magma and subsequent melting actually remove the items from memory, as it stands? It's probably the most realistically-plausible of the current dumping options, if you allow for magma flows as DF has them to begin with, but I thought the melted items still existed. Do they conglomerate into a single lump of "molten microcline" or whatever?

(And, of course, in the case of magma-safe rocks, you have no option but to atom-smash or mod in a stone-wasting reaction if you want them out of memory.)

[Cotes]

Well, first of all stone doesn't actually have that much impact on FPS from what I've gathered.

But magma sea doesn't just melt objects, it obliterates them. Or rather the semi-molten rock underneath does (And I believe molten pools of rock also disappear eventually.)

[NW_Kohaku]

Does dumping into magma and subsequent melting actually remove the items from memory, as it stands? It's probably the most realistically-plausible of the current dumping options, if you allow for magma flows as DF has them to begin with, but I thought the melted items still existed. Do they conglomerate into a single lump of "molten microcline" or whatever?

(And, of course, in the case of magma-safe rocks, you have no option but to atom-smash or mod in a stone-wasting reaction if you want them out of memory.)

Generally speaking, yes it does. 

At least, it turns rock into liquids (except, of course, for the magma-safe stones), and on the season change, those liquids get swept away by the game's garbage collection routines, like the blood and vomit at least theoretically should.  The game is somewhat buggy about this, however, and sometimes, not every last stone is completely removed from memory once melted.

Semi-Molten Rock, I can't say I've done experiments on, so you'll have to take someone else's word on it.

Bottomless/eerie glowing pits, seem to just outright delete objects from memory.  Same with Atom Smashers.  The game forgets they were ever there.