Suggestion: Improve Mining - Most importantly with stateful resource hot spots

[Snarfbuckle]

The thing that takes up a lot of time is how many chunks of X is required for 1 tonne of Y.

Even with collector drones it takes a heck of a load of time to get any valuable volumes and on smaller ships or with limited internals it's even harder to have limpets and cargo space at the same time in any efficient manner.

- Allow the quality of the rings affect how many "chunks" we need for each tonne (more pure minerals the richer the site)
- Allow limpets to function as ammunition and each rating E-A allows for 5 limpets of that type instead of having all limpets be generic and take up cargo space)

I mean really, what kind of hardware do we have in a 1A 1.3 tonnes of limpet controller? 0.1 tonne of receiver and antenna and a small black box with hardware and an additional 1.2 tonne of useless filling.

 

[NeilF]

I wouldn't mind the following :

So far, we only have small/medium Asteroids in the Resource Belts (which noone uses due to having way too few Asteroids) and Rings, which we have to manually fire Lasers onto from <500m Range.

- add Planetary Prospecting and Mining, small-scale upto Large-scale operations
-> reason to go down there for commercial purposes

- add a few large and huge Asteroids (more fragments) into Asteroid Rings

- add Deep-Space "gold mines" containing Alpha Rare Elements or high quantity of Painite/Low Temp Diamonds etc.
-> gives a reason for Deep Space Prospecting

- drastically increase amount of Asteroids in Resource Belt Clusters (there used to be 80+ km large Clusters)
-> gives them a purpose, as noone enters these to mine those all the same ~5-7 Asteroids

- add various different means of and approaches to Mining (appears they already have such an idea), as manually firing Mining lasers from <500m onto an Asteroid doesn't need to be the only way to do it (IMHO equals small-scale Mining)
-> includes small changes such as Engineering Mining Lasers (Efficient, LongRange, Overcharged)
-> but also add more Mining tools, i.e. Utility "Prospecting Scanner" for Minerals ("honk" or auto-scan, Class 0E-0A w/ 2-4km Range, i.e. to scan for Player-Set ores "Scan Target has Platinum YES/NO?")
-> how about Mining Burst Lasers?
-> how about planting Explosives onto Asteroids to mine?

- add Laser Range Finder to Prospector Controller (is distant Asteroid visually on my nose still within Prospector Range?)

- add rare Gemstones (remember those could be purchases/sold in amounts of Grams in the original ELITE)

- permit construction of basic space-borne or Planet-side Forward Operating Bases to support large-scale Mining Operations (i.e. after you discovered a sweet spot after a long search and want to exploit it, making it a longer-term operation)
(NPCs/Factions already have that, although those are fully developed and full-scale Asteroid Bases/Stations or Planetary Mining Installations upto huge constructions as seen at some Engineer locations; Players likely wouldn't need that huge size)

RE some of these points...

"Add Planetary Prospecting and Mining" - Yes, this seems to make sense. Make it a variation of what can be done in rings.

"how about planting Explosives onto Asteroids to mine?" - FD's artwork does suggest more destructive types of mining. In my OP it suggests it would be nice to be able to be more technical if you wish about extracting ore from a specific asteroids. Maybe mining a specific spot on an asteroid or planting explosives at a rich area of individual asteroids to obtain a better yield?

"permit construction of basic space-borne or Planet-side Forward Operating Bases to support large-scale Mining Operations (i.e. after you discovered a sweet spot after a long search and want to exploit it, making it a longer-term operation)" - Two things here:-

1. IMHO a sweet spot must be stateful. If a sweet spot is simply another never ending resource it's just pointless IMHO. It needs to offer a finite amout of resource, and then is gone forever (to give it true worth and importance).
2. I mentioned in my OP (& #17) about using a Squadron's Fleet Carrier as a means to open up "operations" such you can even sell what you're mining (to CMDRs and NPCs), if you don't wish to transport your material back in person.

Ideally, if mining in itself can be made more interesting, great! But I truly do see stateful hot spots as being an important step into giving exploration, mining and trading a much needed step in an important direction. Currently there's no need to explore and mine anywhere other than the well known locations with infinite resources the game offers. While these should remain, the game should also offer more lucrative richer hot spots to discover and mine, but which are stateful and once are mined to 0% are (basically) gone forever. These are where I can imagine CMDRs/Squadrons building temporary locations of activity and there ideally being small bubbles of gameplay, while the resource lasts...

 

[NeilF]

The thing that takes up a lot of time is how many chunks of X is required for 1 tonne of Y.

Even with collector drones it takes a heck of a load of time to get any valuable volumes and on smaller ships or with limited internals it's even harder to have limpets and cargo space at the same time in any efficient manner.

- Allow the quality of the rings affect how many "chunks" we need for each tonne (more pure minerals the richer the site)
- Allow limpets to function as ammunition and each rating E-A allows for 5 limpets of that type instead of having all limpets be generic and take up cargo space)

I mean really, what kind of hardware do we have in a 1A 1.3 tonnes of limpet controller? 0.1 tonne of receiver and antenna and a small black box with hardware and an additional 1.2 tonne of useless filling.

There are the suggestions to:-
1) Bundle cargo, such that likewise, when extracting ore, it could sometimes be more than 1 fragment in a single "blob"? Maybe better mining techniques could be more likely to generate larger fragments of the ore, so your limpet can than return more than 1 single fragments worth at a time?
2) Allow limpets to pick up more than one thing at a time.

More here - https://goo.gl/MGoUbc

 

[Rowander]

Great ideas in the thread, it would be awesome if they would get implemented one day. The problem is... are they feasible? Is it currently possible for the stellar forge and FDs servers to create and store in its database everything that is required for this to run?

Just to add perspective: if you add 300 hot spots to each minable planet in the galaxy, and each hot spot has a range of variable fields, like coordinates, composition, quantity, current status... that's at least 1500 new entries in the database, per planet. It would be one hell of an increase for the global database of the stellar forge.

I don't even remotely know how ED works, and if what I'm saying has any sense at all in their implementation, but surely persistent places must be stored somewhere in a database, and adding all this may be (or not) a bit too much.

Having said that, I think persistent locations in planets (and game mechanics to interact with them in a meaningful way, like mining) are among the most needed features in the game.

 

[NeilF]

Great ideas in the thread, it would be awesome if they would get implemented one day. The problem is... are they feasible? Is it currently possible for the stellar forge and FDs servers to create and store in its database everything that is required for this to run?

Just to add perspective: if you add 300 hot spots to each minable planet in the galaxy, and each hot spot has a range of variable fields, like coordinates, composition, quantity, current status... that's at least 1500 new entries in the database, per planet. It would be one hell of an increase for the global database of the stellar forge.

I don't even remotely know how ED works, and if what I'm saying has any sense at all in their implementation, but surely persistent places must be stored somewhere in a database, and adding all this may be (or not) a bit too much.

Having said that, I think persistent locations in planets (and game mechanics to interact with them in a meaningful way, like mining) are among the most needed features in the game.

Good points...


First, I envisage most systems would NOT have stateful hot spots. ie: They should be fairly rare!

And consider years in the future where there's now 10,000 hot spots that have been discovered and not mined until gone... What information about them is there? System, planet, specific location, type, quantity, last mined date (see below), maybe half a dozen other flags/values. Let's suggest this amounts to 512bytes? All that information is using up about 5meg! That's all!

And if a lot of hot spots have been located over months/years, such that FD unfortunately want to reduce the number on its database, I'd suggest during the weekly BGS run, remove the hot spots that haven't been mined (visited) for the longest period...


There's also the argument that FD could periodically kick the mechanics such that hot spots can spawn in previously explored locations. eg: So we don't risk ending up with the entire bubble and 200ly around it being mined empty.

Likewise, FD could spawn hot spots in areas to invoke mission/CGs too. As I've mentioned before consider some hot spots being discoved in some neighbouring systems for some CG. An OPEN only version of this might also make for some interesting PvP gameplay.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

How about a mining DRILL and require a belly mount? Combined with Geoscanner for proper surface mining.

- Use surface scanner to see the metal density of the ground.
- After finding a good spot we land.
- We now use the Geoscanner to check viability.
- Engage drill

Now we get a mini-game replacing our radar. We must now keep the drill in the center like flying an interdiction with difficulty based on material hardness and richness of the find.

Similar to the old classic Oil Imperium.

- We control drill speed (faster is more difficult but we get deeper quicker)
- High speed will damage the drillhead more.
- High speed also fill the hopper faster.
- Certain materials are at different depths depending on planet type.

Finally we things that needs replacement.

- Drillheads (Counts as ammo)
- Drilling rods (old school drill)

We also have dangers where we could hit gas pockets, cause small earthquakes or hit a sinkhole.

 

[Rowander]

Clever implementation NeiF, I like it. Limiting hotspots to some planet types, and respawning/cleaning them once in a while, should be doable. It could even be limited to the planets inside the bubble + some hundred LY further... less realistic but a lot less overhead.

This definetly would be a great addition. Coupled with a system to bookmark positions in planets, and some fun way to extract metals, it would make for a very entertaining minig career.

The lucky posibility of "hitting the jackpot" somewhere out in space is a welcome addition too.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I mean really, what kind of hardware do we have in a 1A 1.3 tonnes of limpet controller? 0.1 tonne of receiver and antenna and a small black box with hardware and an additional 1.2 tonne of useless filling.

Take a look at the class 7 limpet controller. It controls just 4 times as many limpets as a class 1, yet it takes up 64 times as much space.

 

[NeilF]

Watch this video from FIVE years ago (@2m:35s) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFECllA71qc&t=2m35s

Doesn't what David suggest regards mining sound like stateful/finite resources ("gold reserve")?

So once again, the mining improvements this year needs "stateful hot spots" IMHO!

 

[nexxo]

I suspect that the new planet modelling has a lot of geology simulation in it, which may translate into stateful resources and geological resource scans and maps. Fingers crossed.

 

[Diagbar]

Sounds cool!

 

[NeilF]

Sounds cool!

As I've said before, I believe if the mining update at the end of this year does not implement stateful elements along the lines of this proposal, or something similar, I think that will be a truly wasted opportunity and potentially vapid outcome.

I really do see it as that black and white...

 

[Cavindar]

Definitely like this idea and will move mining in the right direction.

 

[John Xenir]

I love your ideas and wholeheartedly support it.

I would also add:
1) industry simulation - so that mining's driving factor is industry's demand for production materials (and which is non-existing at the moment); not mining existing for the sole of gameplay variety/checking mining box on the list of activities;
2) meaningful large-scale mining operation support as currently specializing as driller/drone-barge-and-freighter/prospector are useless because, for example, profit can't be shared between involved players.

I love how you focus more on the mechanics themselves, this has a much better chance of implementation that what I would love to see in the "let's mine together as a company" way.

PS: I still wonder how 34th century industry is capable of building 10km-long stations without large-scale industrial operations.
It seems hiring hundreds of billions of pilots to roam around the planets in SRVs, collecting stuff one chunk at a time, is the future means of dealing with unemployment hence the absence of actual large-scale operations. I guess economically, it makes no difference either.

 

[LillyThorne]

I agree with the Neil and John.

I'm not a game designer but I think Neil will be disappointed because Frontier isn't going that deep. 400M star systems with heat maps--gigs of data. New asteroids fields I can see. Instances. Small and tidy. Mostly a client side issue with a small kb output mostly recording cargo and whatever "ammo" was used.

I wish there was going to be a visceral mix of Eve and Space engineers in a deep mining and industry expansion, but I don't think that is going to happen.

 

[Frenotx]

All good stuff. Adding heat maps alone would go a long way towards making things interesting, and I love the idea of gold rushes.

I agree with the Neil and John.

I'm not a game designer but I think Neil will be disappointed because Frontier isn't going that deep. 400M star systems with heat maps--gigs of data. New asteroids fields I can see. Instances. Small and tidy. Mostly a client side issue with a small kb output mostly recording cargo and whatever "ammo" was used.

I wish there was going to be a visceral mix of Eve and Space engineers in a deep mining and industry expansion, but I don't think that is going to happen.

That's not how procedural generation works. The various data for most planets isn't stored anywhere- just the code that consistently causes it to appear.

 

[NeilF]

I agree with the Neil and John.

I'm not a game designer but I think Neil will be disappointed because Frontier isn't going that deep. 400M star systems with heat maps--gigs of data. New asteroids fields I can see. Instances. Small and tidy. Mostly a client side issue with a small kb output mostly recording cargo and whatever "ammo" was used.

I wish there was going to be a visceral mix of Eve and Space engineers in a deep mining and industry expansion, but I don't think that is going to happen.

In the kind of mechanics mentioned in the OP, the heat maps (ie: density of materials across surfaces & rings) would be procedural. Infact the underlined first heading is "Procedural Distribution Maps" As such the distribution would be created using what ever FD best decides to input into the formula, everything from basic planet make up, to techtonic plate locations, to altitude, to points of interest such as craters. As such I'd imagine little/no stored data anywhere.

Now as regards the improved mining mechanics themselves, hopefully these will be fun and interesting too. There's an image of an asteroid exploding in some FD concept art, so we can only hope the mechanics are as interesting as being able to at times explode asteroids to get to richer materials inside when required.

Surface mining would be interesting, but I'd rather other areas improved first.


And as regards the all important stateful resource hot spots, I really cannot see these using up much storage, data or bandwidth either. It's simply a matter of the code to implement them.... And the will and desire to implement them. They would bring a lot of interesting/meaningful mechanics to the game which (as mentioned in the OP) and could be leveraged in numerous ways.


So, I'll repeat again, if the mining update in Q4 does not include some form of stateful assets in some shape or form, it will be a huge huge missed opportunity IMHO!

 

[NitroNic]

I am sure that only a single shipkit needs more memory than a heatmap overlay.Because the heatmap is just an overlay, which is determined by the terran and fundamental planet composition.
At the end this means that the calculation of this "overlay" can be done easily on your own PC. The only thing Frontier has to do is write a formula for it. So that this calculation can take place. If you have written this formula you can also adjust the spawn conditions so that the heatmap and the spawning match. You are calkolating your own map for every Planet you look at. But because everyone has the same starting parameters, it is the same for everyone