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[RiderofDark]

I haven't played 31.19 as yet, so I'm unfamiliar with what changes have been made so far.

Basically, destroy the rocks to get the ores they contain. This also gives the benefit of removing the excessive quantities (tens of thousands of units) of stone that we can get. Veins and pockets would essentially be higher concentrations of whatever ores that particular layer (can) contain.

[Neowulf]

Toady has mentioned rock crusher machines as a possible mechanics addition. Maybe the idea is the now scarce veins produce ore boulders (guaranteed metal), while a rock crusher can extract a small amount of ore from crushed rocks, eventually producing enough for a bar's worth of ore.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'd still like to have a "useless slag has to be removed from the map, and you can just set something to go into a specific dumping spot" function, though.

We face two problems, really:

One, we have too many useless rocks we just want to get rid of.  They clog up the game with their stats and can greatly slow play.

Two, we realistically don't have enough useless waste material from mining that we need to get rid of.

These both require a real solution in terms of having a garbage dump that allows you to permanently remove useless materials from the game.  Right now, we have atom smashers and custom reactions that vaporize large quantities of stone, but we need to have a real feature, and not an exploit.

(And yes, we've had this discussion, many, many, many times before, by the way.)

[idgarad]

I'd still like to have a "useless slag has to be removed from the map, and you can just set something to go into a specific dumping spot" function, though.

We face two problems, really:

One, we have too many useless rocks we just want to get rid of.  They clog up the game with their stats and can greatly slow play.

Two, we realistically don't have enough useless waste material from mining that we need to get rid of.

These both require a real solution in terms of having a garbage dump that allows you to permanently remove useless materials from the game.  Right now, we have atom smashers and custom reactions that vaporize large quantities of stone, but we need to have a real feature, and not an exploit.

(And yes, we've had this discussion, many, many, many times before, by the way.)

I suggest the following:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=77447.msg1985259#msg1985259

[QuakeIV]

Or the formation of tiles of gravel/useless slag.

Would be useful/awesome to merge items and tiles of material.

[Solace]

I suppose if you want something "just gone", you could literally dump it outside the map? At the very least, the game wouldn't have to keep track of a hundred thousand units of rubble. Or on the flipside, actually pack a certain amount of rubble into a square, and have the game treat it as an undug square again.

[catoblepas]

Piles of rubble would definitely be an improvement. Personally, I would not be adverse to two digging options: 'mine' which destroys rock, reducing it to rubble, which could act something like an unpressurized liquid, but only add 1 per tile mined, and 'quarry' which would produce stone blocks which would act like the normal 'rocks' and would eliminate the need for a distinction between 'rocks' and 'blocks' as it is right now. Perhaps a full 7/7 tile of rubble could block movement, but it could be cleared with buckets. I don't know what kind of uses rubble would have for sure, but I was thinking that perhaps it could be used to make roads, or buckets of it could be processed into crafts. This might slow down mining, but combined with some adjustments to the amount of wood trees drop, and it might counteract the ridiculous speed in which dwarves fly through the mountainside, and might make early game surface settlements a worthwhile investment. Just throwing some ideas out there.

[Waparius]

I suppose if you want something "just gone", you could literally dump it outside the map? At the very least, the game wouldn't have to keep track of a hundred thousand units of rubble. Or on the flipside, actually pack a certain amount of rubble into a square, and have the game treat it as an undug square again.

That would be a really good addition actually, especially when it becomes possible to setup areas outside the fortress/send dorfs off the map.

I picture the ability to get some kind of local-area map screen up in which you can designate a given square as a garbage dump; then you can send off a party of peasants with a wagon to dump the slag over out of sight.

...and that would be a great place for kobolds to start living if you don't send a couple of militia to guard it every season...

[G-Flex]

They clog up the game with their stats and can greatly slow play.

"With their stats"? I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean the material properties, I fail to see how that causes a problem for anyone, and I'd rather have that mostly-ignorable diversity for reasons of verisimilitude if nothing else, especially since it's not like it causes actual problems.

As far as rocks cluttering the map, yeah, it would be nice to do something about that.

[NW_Kohaku]

"With their stats"? I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean the material properties, I fail to see how that causes a problem for anyone, and I'd rather have that mostly-ignorable diversity for reasons of verisimilitude if nothing else, especially since it's not like it causes actual problems.

As far as rocks cluttering the map, yeah, it would be nice to do something about that.

Ok, not the stats per-se, but items in general cause problems due to certain calculations that iterate through all the items every frame, like temperature.

Having tens of thousands of stones in your fortress can add an awful lot of lag - just look at Undergrotto.

[G-Flex]

Oh, right. Part of that is obviously the game being inefficient (sort of like how lots of designations slow down FPS by spawning a job for each one, each probably polling dwarves constantly to see who can do it), but having a way to "destroy" things would be nice too.

[Sirdrake]

Toady has mentioned rock crusher machines as a possible mechanics addition. Maybe the idea is the now scarce veins produce ore boulders (guaranteed metal), while a rock crusher can extract a small amount of ore from crushed rocks, eventually producing enough for a bar's worth of ore.

If ypu look in the mod forum u will find that people have made rock grinders already an example is deon he has a rock grinder in his genesis mod

[AdeleneDawner]

Personally, I would not be adverse to two digging options: 'mine' which destroys rock, reducing it to rubble, which could act something like an unpressurized liquid, but only add 1 per tile mined, and 'quarry' which would produce stone blocks which would act like the normal 'rocks' and would eliminate the need for a distinction between 'rocks' and 'blocks' as it is right now.

This sounds a bit like an idea I had, which might be useful in this context:

It's already possible for dwarves to mine rock and destroy it at the same time: Give some untrained miners picks and let them go to town, and they'll fail to give you a stone for the square they mined out about 40-50% of the time. They get better at leaving stone behind as they get more skilled, but what if instead they got better at determining whether they left stone behind or not?

Basically I'd like to see two different 'dig' designations - one where an untrained miner gives you a stone 50% of the time and it increases toward 100% as they approach legendary, and another where an untrained miner gives you a stone 50% of the time and it decreases toward 0% as they approach legendary. This should be relatively trivial to code, but the latter would need to be babysat until Toady implements a 'stop digging when you find a new type of stone/gem/ore' feature.