Hello everyone,
Today it’s my turn to write our FOUNDRY Friday blog post and I will cover the underground mining rework in detail. Our previous posts were more on the technical side, so this one will be about gameplay and presenting what’s coming once we release the game in Early Access on Steam.
Why the rework?
Before I cover the new system I want to talk about the old version of underground mining and why I wanted this change and what I felt needs improvement. Previously we had what we called world layers, different voxel blocks depending on the depth. Regarding depth, they had a bit of a noise-based variation but roughly they were locked in place and filled the world along all cardinal directions. So wherever you dug down, you found the same voxel types (ores) at the same depths.
Some of those voxel layers could be mined with a rail mining depot, a machine that horizontally digs endlessly in one direction, excavating everything in its path. So the workflow for mining ore was to dig down at the right depth level and place as many rail miners as you needed. As they were digging forever, every railminer was an infinite source of ore.
Here are the key problems I identified:
- Infinite ore without cost: Finite ore sources always felt wrong to me as it means you need to dismantle everything once the ore is gone, however having them be infinite isn’t right either, it is too simplistic.
- No exploration for ore: All you had to do was remember the according depth level per ore and then dig down with an elevator. Ore was always guaranteed to be there. In a world where you can dig and explore, this feels like wasted potential.
- Unwieldy system: The overall system felt cumbersome, we had different rail miner items to assign per depot, they needed a constant supply of new tracks, once they dug far enough they might block large areas of the world and many more not so ideal features. I just felt that this isn’t as polished as it could be.
The new Underground Mining
In the new system we have ore veins randomly generated throughout the world. An ore vein is a large vertical shape made out of indestructible blocks. They range from the surface till far down into the ground.
To find such an ore vein, you can use our new ore scanning tool. Using the tool will start a scan ping which expands through the world, notifying you about all ore veins in the vicinity. This tool is also able to track regular ore patches for your drone miners. This part is still work in progress but we plan to let you configure what you’re looking for, at the moment it scans for everything near you.
Once you have located an ore vein, you need to dig to the mineable parts, they are also highlighted by the scanner. The amount of mineable parts is randomized, so some ore veins have more yield while others have less.
Additionally we introduced a new concept, called ”Mining hardness”. At the start of the game you can only dig down until you hit a certain rock layer which is too hard to mine. By progressing through research you will be able to dig down further, allowing you to access more mineable parts per ore vein.
Once you excavated a mineable part, you can place a machine very similar to our original rail mining depot. It will expand rails and start digging into the ore vein. On its way into the vein all the blocks will yield a large amount of ore. For me it was important to keep the digging process, and let the machine drill into the vein, showing some visual voxel changes and progress.
After a certain distance it will hit what we call the ore vein core. Those blocks are indestructible again and don’t yield ore the same way as the previous ones, however your mining depots can continue mining as long as an extra item, a so-called mining fluid, is supplied. While in reality almost exclusively used for shale gas extraction, we are trying to emulate a process called “fracking”, extraction of resources by cracking up rock formation by pressure. The mining fluid isn’t supplied by the mining depot itself, but by a large unique (per vein) building that can be placed on top of the ore vein, the Fracking Tower. The Fracking Tower is a modular building and making it larger allows it to support a larger amount of mining depots.
Some ore veins are under water, causing the fracking tower to look like an oil rig.
Given its size and potential difficulty to place it on rough terrain we tried to make sure to take some actions making it easier. Most notably the struts are automatically built once the building is placed down, but I’m skipping the details for this post.
Conclusion
Let’s have a look at the identified issues before and how they are solved:
- Infinite ore without cost: Now you get the best of both worlds, they are finite at first and easy to use, and with some additional effort (building the Fracking Tower and supplying it with mining fluid) you can convert it into an infinite source of ore.
- No exploration for ore: You need to explore the world and use your scanner to find ore veins, once you locate a vein the scanner helps you find the mineable parts. This requires a bit of exploration and digging up the right spots, but it’s straight-forward enough to not be frustrating. It requires more digging than before, to compensate we made sure that explosives are available before accessing the first ore vein.
- Unwieldy system: The rail mining depot has been greatly simplified, gone are the rail miner items and the need to supply tracks. You need to supply a mining fluid once you hit the core, but instead of requiring to lay pipes far into the underground we made this more accessible with the Fracking Tower on top. We made sure all info texts make the system easy to understand and debug in case of issues, also we disallow invalid placement of any of the related buildings.
I’m sure it will need a little more polishing but looking at the points above I’m very confident that the new system is an improvement and I can’t wait to hear your thoughts and in-game-feedback once it’s on the experimental branch.
That’s it for today's FOUNDRY Friday post. See you in two weeks!
-mrmcduck