So been talking to some people about this and I think we found a pretty decent initial step for something like automated mining. Now I know this game is not at all about automation and we all hate it. However there are people that do traveling and such, so something like mining automation would be really useful to them so they don’t “fall behind.”
So this is the idea: no more than a single plot size will be automatically mined. When the machine is first activated a number of things will happen. 1) the area is beaconed, 2) no one (not even the owner) can mine in this area, 3) the mining machine cannot be “harvested” until it is finished mining the entire plot (this means you cannot take the resources it has mined out or remove the mining machine). So where are the drawbacks? So it will take 1 hour (this is debatable, but we agree 1 hour is the least amount of time it should take), without perks it will only function when the player is offline. It will require to have a mining tool placed into it to determine the strength of the mining machine, this tool will take durability damage at the hours end (the amount can vary with tool quality and player mining perks). Make it so the machine cannot expend the tool, however if the tool would break in the next hit, and there are blocks still in the plot, the machine stops. Some kind of notification would obviously be needed to let the player know. Also any block that the machine cannot break due to the tool placed in, will be left alone. So the player can come in and remove that block themselves when they remove the mining machine. As for powering the machine, we aren’t sure how power is generated or its values yet. But atm we are thinking 1 power to 1 second of use so around 3600 power, however this should vary with the availability of power to the player. So yes, this will need a generator.
Furthermore, to prevent people form abusing this. We are thinking that no more than 2 mining machines can be placed by a single character, and no more than 5 mining machines per account can be placed down.
Thoughts? Devs, you like the idea?
Addendum:
So more discussion going on. So it was thought to add some qualifiers to this machine. Maybe it has to be researched by a player or by a guild. With a guild it would obviously take less time than with a sole player. Maybe also make a tier 2 that would be only accessible to the guilds and it takes 2 plots. And a max of 3 guild mining machines can be used.
It’s certainly an interesting idea. I do have one major reservation.
With the current beacon system, you can’t place beacons above or below existing beacons, unless they both yours and directly linked. I feel like that needs rethinking anyway, but especially so if an automated plot harvester were to be implemented that essentially beacons plots.
Other musings:
Maybe allow for stacks of tools. I say this, because I’m pretty sure a full plot will take more than a single tool to harvest.
Maybe allow for multiple different stacks of tools, so that a player can place in maybe axes and shovels, but not hammers. That would chop trees and dig earth, but leave stones alone.
Maybe instead of a set values, the duration & power consumption should be based on the number of blocks the machine can harvest based on it’s current tools. So mining a full plot of stone/ores would take significantly longer than dropping a harvester in a tree and only supplying it with axes.
Further thoughts: Interesting though the idea is, I don’t actually think this will help to prevent people falling behind, as you put it. If I set up 3 of these machines and go away for a couple of days, I will come back to find three machines worth of harvested materials when I eventually come back. However, the person who doesn’t go away for a week has access to these machines every time they complete their harvesting (on top of what they are already doing in game while actively playing more), essentially giving them extra scope to stay/get further ahead of less active people.
If the goal were REALLY to help people not fall behind, the running time should be considerably longer (1 week +), and instead of mining the resources present in the plot it is deployed in, it should slowly generate resources based on the content of the plot. So a plot with 50% metamorphic rock, 25% igneous rock and 25% dirt (just nice numbers to do maths with) supplied only with hammers, would slowly generate resources that end up being 66% metamorphic rock and 33% igneous rock. Although this would obviously be a system open to gaming (floating a beacon i the sky somewhere and placing a single, valuable resource next to it), so more thought would have to go into making it a ‘fair’ way to gather resources.
I think these are all awesome ideas. I can imagine if it was guild based, maybe the game would one day have planets that are just super abundant in resources but harsh as hell (toxic storms/high level aggressive wildlife) and guilds would venture to those planets to set up risky mining colonies (like in Sim City where there are industrial/commercial/residential sectors, no one would really want to live there).
And with the current skill system and more weapons etc, some characters could train up to be mercenaries etc that get hired by the guilds to protect the colony of harvesters, or some do repairs, or a team to pick up the harvested resources and bring it back to the guild. There would be need for a more diverse variety of skillsets while promoting even more interplanetary travel and combat. Ugh the potential of this game man…
The beacon plot created by the mining machine cannot be built in at all. The reason behind making it a beacon style thing is so that it cannot regen. So if you put it down hoping to leave and get days and days worth of regen, you wont. You only get whatever was there the day you put it down and then there is just a hole there until you remove the machine and the regen cycle for the plot ends.
if it takes more than 1 tool or not is irrelevant. (it shouldn’t take more than 1 tool though, I don’t think). If the tool is going to break, like I said it will just stop. So the player can deal with that issue there.
This is actually something I was thinking about while I slept (yes, I do that). Maybe the machine will enter a specific mode given the tool. If you put a shovel it will only take terrain style blocks, an axe will take trees, and hammers will take rock style blocks. The thought of adding more than 1 slot did occur to me, but I think that should be a perkable thing. Maybe a mining perk will be that any tool will be equally effective at quality. So an iron axe will be just as good for dirt and rock as it is for wood. But adding more than 1 slot would mean making a multi-purpose machine off the bat, and I feel that defeats its purpose.
This just increased the complexity quotient like a million fold. Because you are saying it needs to detect everything inside, determine its “mining value” and then determine if it falls within the acceptable parameters.
Totally agreed, which is why I was also thinking of cool down timers, or an exhaust timer. Massive drilling systems need time to be inspected, and cool down after they perform jobs. Sometimes they are on for a week to be off for a week. The whole point of this is to give a certain level of passive gathering to benefit people with less active times. The fall behind aspect isn’t so much against other people, but the aspect of: if I leave for a few days, that is a few days that my build is just standing there doing nothing. A few days of resources that I am not getting. I know there is no real penalty for being away a few days, but some players might feel as there is because their more active friends already have their houses built, and they barely have the materials.
This would effectively make any form of automation useless. I do agree it should take some time longer than the player, but you are talking roughly 168 times longer than our estimate. And our estimate is already like 3-4 times that of a player. I agree tool quality should factor into time, buy anything more than 12 hours is ineffective.
If it has anything to do with durability, while I can’t speak for hammers of Titanium or Gem quality (not having used them), anything Gold or below would certainly break in less than 512 blocks, which is the size of a one-plot beacon. Stone/iron/copper would probably break several times over.
Personally, I think something like automated mining might be too resource intensive for a voxel based MMO, as the server itself would need to keep any chunk with an active mining machine held in memory. It would need to do this as the mining machine would be physically affecting the world itself (unlike the crafting timers we have, as they simply initiate a timestamp reference via a GUI) to continually update the world over a period of time so that, at any given point in time, a player visiting that chunk will be able to see where and what the machine has mined. This is all additional computation that the server itself would need to perform… across however many players initiate said automated mining process.
Personally I think this would have a detrimental affect to the overall server performance, especially if it ever got to the point of 50-100 people all mining at the same time… that’s 50-100 chunks in memory all being updated by the server.
On a personal preference level, I feel the same as @Marrash in that automated mining would not offer any real benefit to people that can’t play as much as others, if all players have access to the do automated mining. Also, any cool down you apply to help counteract the frequency in which an automated mine can operate, will need to be applied to all players. This just allows players to gather resources more quickly, which is yet another mechanic that would need to be balanced.
I’m of the mind that, being a community based game, if players dislike mining in general (which automated mining would seem to favour those players more) they should instead be exploring and finding other players who can supply the materials they want within the game.
I don’t think mining atomation would be a good idea, it would considerably hinder player activity in my opinion, I think there are other contraptions that could be put in place, like transportation, moving doors/gates, light sensors, and things that would make the game even more fun than it already is.
This is my humble opinion, no pun intended
I think travelling should give you other advantages which are in the form of stuff you can trade … for example there could be rare animals that have rare fur, special lone chests or crystals that are so scarce that a non-scouting player only rarely see one, special energies you can harvest with a tool on cool sites which are then dried out and spawn on another place (prefabs could work for that), or stuff you find and bring to another special location which then transforms them to a special ingredience …
Which such stuff you can make some coin and buy the mats you need … it’s a MMO, don’t forget that
