The Mining is good!

This is a counter thread to the sass I see the mining getting in some other areas of the board.

It's solid as is. You can easily place blocks if you need to and it's not tediously one little square at a time.

The mining speed is solid when you don't have any lag. If anything it's surprisingly fast.

I have found treasure at an okay rate under ground so far (though half for me has been crappy(thing) weapons).

You should have to make your way back to the surface. To do otherwise should, at least require a high level piece of technology.

If you're bored of digging I honestly think that's more on you, not the given mechanics.

The only suggestion I have about digging is maybe a bit more manageable crumbing materials. Some light crumble/collapse is logical but a whole landslide is a bit much I think. Unless you use an explosive on some gravel or something I suppose.

 

the falling mechanic I think is my favourite part of this game oddly. It just seems - fun. although its not fully reasonable it also is to some degree.
I actually find the time to mine instant or forever. Ive stopped mining deeper since I can just cut the entire screen of butter tiles before a could break a single "hard" block.

 

I think the mining is fine overall, the only thing I would suggest is increasing the speed of the matter manipulator a bit and adding an automatic starter quest for building a pick and an axe. After you have some tools it's completely reasonable imo.

 

i have a diamond pickaxe and everytime you try and mine cobblestone underground becomes really tedious,

also all dungeon walls block takes wayyyyy too long to mine, and there the best stuff to build a base out of.

 

In general, yeah. Mining is solid. Speed scales nicely between material levels. I think the ore distribution needs some work, but it's beta and the devs are aware of the issue.

I also agree with this. I feel like the speed difference between soft materials and hard materials is too great. That is, mining some types of stone (that comprise entire layers of the underground) takes far too long to the point that it's boring and tedious.

 

I like how mining works, e.g. you can break six blocks at once. Really cool concept and I love it, BUT.......but.....mining anything that isn't dirt takes way too long. I have a Platinum Pickaxe and it still takes forever to mine most non-dirt blocks(except snow, gravel, sand.)

 

Mining is good indeed. It felt slow (And still slow when you get down to magmarock, but that is basically obsidian) at first what with Terraria experience, but its nice to be able to dig a chunk at a time or a piece. As suggested elsewhere, it would be nice as well to have the precise pick to be slightly faster than a 3x3.

Though I actually kept a lowish tier pick for surface running. One click through dirt is sometimes too dangerous lol.

 

I think after the mining was recently patched it felt a lot more manageable to me. Before it was just painstaking, but it's a good balance now. Ore seemed really rare, but if you go down far enough it gets more common. Maybe an early quest line could point you to this fact.

Though I also think there needs to be more naturally occurring caves that go far deeper than the current ones do. I don't really like building massive elevator shafts, as that's what I felt like was the only thing I did in Terraria. xB

 

The only thing mining needs is a way to search for things other than s tumbling upon them, a better way for mass-mining (e.g. crafting bombs), and a better way to go back to travel within planets (e.g. a map and teleport beacons).

For example, to scan, develop technology until you reach a point when you can craft a ship upgrade that adds 'Planetary sensors".
Go to ship, go to the console (where techs and 3D printer are), choose "Scan", pick the thing you want to search for (life forms, populations, a particular ore, a particular plant, etc) once you chose that, whenever you get close enough to that thing you chose, you'll see a 'ping wave' coming from the closest one found.

 

I may be way off base, but it seems like smaller planets have more ores. I think this because the planet is smaller, they're more closely lumped together, while on larger planets they're more spread out.. The solution would be to have larger ore veins on larger planets.

 

At first I didn't like it, but now I love it, but I just wish that the surface caves would be deeper

 

The only ores I've found overwhelming in my journeys so far are Coal and Copper.

But coal is relatively common in reality and it's a consumable for ship fuel and such. Plus for whatever reason you need it for making steel.

 

More than likely its for the carbon in the coal.

 

i just wish that when you mined a single block, it increased the speed of the process. Right now i only will take the time to mine a 3x3 square that has at least 5 ore. this means i'm contantly leaving ore that i would have been able to get otherwise

 

mining speed is fine. causing avalanches mining sand/gravel is my favorite so far. rewards need to increase more as depth increases. i've gone to the center of the earth and back up (took a while), didn't see much increase in minerals/rewards. discovering things underground should be increased as well with depth (structures, creatures, dungeons, treasure). it was pretty much uneventful to the bottom (lava) as far as "special finds" goes.

 

I'm enjoying the Mining mechanics as well. Though as mentioned, incrased speed for mining single blocks would be a nice touch too.

However I do feel that placing blocks is too easy when exploiting the terrain, either by blocking mobs in, making your own platforms when under ground. It just feels too easy. It's great when you're trying to build your house, but too easy for everything else.

 

True, making steel can be a hard thing. Most refining processes for Iron reduce impurities to the point of having near pure Iron, this is often referred to as Pig Iron. To make steel, Carbon and other impurities have to be added back into the iron.

 

In regard to digging deeper being more rewarding I agree it should be, however, that's going to be tough to balance.

Is the core of a level 1 planet more rewarding than the surface of a level 5? Or the surface of a tier 2 planet? Hard to say for now.

 

Actually, you have this backwards - and it's a mistake quite a few other games have made that, as someone who has studied metallurgy, it bugs me immensely. So for anyone who's interested I'd like to clarify.

When iron ore is first smelted, traditionally it is cooked in a furnace with coal. (Nowadays they generally use arc furnaces that use bigass carbon electrodes and a buttload of electricity, but the same principle). This does introduce large amounts of carbon into the iron, but what is produced is not steel at this point, it's pig iron. This can be further refined to produce cast iron, which has less impurities but is still about 4% carbon, despite it's name. The carbon is good for cast iron, it makes the metal pour and cast a lot easier, plus it increases corrosion resistance and is good for machine parts. But if we want steel, we need to actually lower the carbon content a great deal more: this is done using a Bessemer converter; basically a furnace that blasts pure oxygen up through the molten iron to burn off the excess carbon as CO2. Once the carbon gets down below 1.7% this results in high-carbon steel, this is temperable and used for tools and weapons. If we keep going until the cabon is less that 0.3%, we get mild steel, good for welding, and used in general construction.

If you're interested I'd highly recommend looking up some videos of arc furnaces and Bessemer converters in action on YouTube, It's pretty awesome seeing iron being melted down. Wikipedia has a bunch of good info too.


Admittedly it's a much simpler mechanic for games to just do iron+coal=steel.
But I hope this has been interesting and educational to you all

 

I actually didnt know that the amount of carbon determined the "name" or strength of the metal or that carbon was used in general.
However the adding Oxygen to remove the carbon as CO2 is flat out genius.