"we need to go deeper" into Planetary crust.

not asking or suggesting.

but wondering if its possible for voxel ores to be spawned deep down in a planets crust?
I know well at the moment dark patches and nodes are the only means of getting ore on a planet's surface.

but i enjoy the thought of having to dig really really deep down into a planets surface to find ore.
or even just to live as a engineering dwarf or ant....no sunlight for me!
but sadly the only way of getting ore deep underground is to go to the surface world and have your eyes burned out by natural sunlight.
or use a gravel ore separator mod which is often humorously overpowered give you a small piece of each ore including ice.

i'm only asking because I was playing a lovely classic game called "motherload" an rpg type mining game. link to it at the bottom
you mine ore then sell it and with the cash buy fuel and get better parts
dig deeper and repeat with better ore and better parts then get equipment to keep yourself in mars crust for longer.

http://www.xgenstudios.com/game.php?keyword=motherload

 

Digging ultra deep to get uranium/platnum seems cool. Work hard get good power as the payoff.

 

Did you know that when you dig deep enough you have to fight satan?

 

I think part of the problem, or atleast a problem I have with this suggestion, is the vast majority of individuals are just going to hold right click with a flying drill and get access to these deposits with no real extra effort or engineering.

Additionally while I would like this to encourage people to set up more static mines that could operate for a while, realistically after like 10 minutes you'll have more ore than you'd ever realistically need.

I don't know of you saw it in the Discord, but my excavator with a bucket, despite being a horribly inefficient way to mine in SE, still routinely pulled up like 50 to 60 tonnes of ore per scoop. I had barely scratched into the surface and I already had my own machines weight in stone (which we'll call ore for arguments sake)

Something to do with ore processing would have to change to make this suggestion a little more viable and not abusable.

I know it probably wouldn't work well, but my thought on the matter would be to make it so that the deeper you go, the "richer" the raw ore is. So for example you may find iron ore near the surface, but it'd only refine at a 20% return rate, as you get deeper you'd get closer to what it is now. If you could combine this with "harder" stone voxels the deeper you get, you'd perhaps get a better risk vs reward system. Flying would become less favourable simply because if you have to fly for extended periods to root around in the depths, it'll get costly either via energy or high hydrogen cost.

 

I think going very deep should be rewarded like going to space is rewarded too.

Large rare metal veins would approppriate i think

 

On top of that....using surface based piston rigs got a lot more dangerous recently. I had rigs reliably drilling down below 100m with stacked pistons, but recent changes to drill damage and increased wobbliness of pistons, I now have to slap a load of thrusters on the end or have the drills explode like small bombs.

Lets be honest .... there is a lack of actual engineering in space engineers, and I would welcome ANYTHING that encouraged it. I would like to see less ore in space and more reasons to exploit planets, but I do agree....the big deposits of ores should be deeper. Leave small patches for early game exploitation, but make it worthwhile to dig deeper.

Potentially increase the weight of raw ore to make flying a small ship into the earth less rewarding... but also make mined tunnels less 'bumpy' so you could actually drive on them without serious bother. Really should be able to drive along a tunnel you drilled out without needing to 'line' it with blocks to make a roadway.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the point of asteroid mining is that the ore would be more accessible than on a planet's surface, where gravity would tend to pull heavy ores towards the core, and the secondary and tertiary effects of gravity would tend to bury it.

I.e., it should make less sense to mine planets than to mine asteroids, assuming you've got access to asteroids.

 

But it doesnt make sense game-developement vise to pour (tens?)of thousands into developing planets if anyone doesnt use them.

There also is very little reason to go to planets currently which is being worked on.

 

I agree, the problem is that 1) mining for real on a planet is too hard due to Clang and 2) right-click drilling makes mining trivially easy. We do it in space because it's so damn easy.

Maybe if uranium was really really scarce in space there'd be a reason to fight Clang and his wolf-spider hordes for it on a planet.

 

Planets, as they exist now, offer an interesting challenge, of getting to and from them, and of developing vehicles that are better suited to them. Judging by the videos I've watched, people *are* using them, as they exist now. That's not to say they can't be improved.

As far as what I know, what I was saying is reasonably well-founded speculation, but more importantly, this is a familiar trope in science fiction: maintaining life in space is very difficult, but justified by the abundance of exploitable mineral resources. The TV series and novels, The Expanse, is a good example of the use of this trope. And I think it's strongly implicit in Space Engineers.

Put more valuable mineral resources in planets, and you've inverted this trope -- and, in fact, you've inverted the entire premise of Space Engineers. You'd go from having little need to land on planets, to having no need to leave planets.

Realistically, the material advantage of planets would be that it's much easier to sustain life on the surface of a planet; the most straightforward and least disruptive way to represent that would be to implement a food/hunger system, and make it easier to produce food on the surface of a planet than off it. The idea of adding food to Space Engineers has been a longstanding controversy, and I don't like it much, myself.

The solution I'd prefer, is to add interesting stuff to find to planets: settlements, wrecks and ruins, more alien life. The reasons for settlements on planets could be left implied, rather than require game mechanics for justifications. Make planets more interesting places to visit, even though you spacefarers may not want to live there.

Literally, the last thing I want in this game, is to make the surface of planets an annoying barrier to the terribly interesting ore buried beneath them.

 

The idea of having to dig deeper into the crust of the planet you're on is a good idea, i'll give you that. But how will it be balanced? The crust of a planet is huge and it goes really far down. You can't have a uranium deposit or Ferous deposit thats Kilometers long. It would unbalance the gave hugely. Will the ores randomly spawn? Will it be defined by an algorithm? Will it be defined by what type of planet it is? Just a thought I guess

 

For a while I imagined how SE would play if it had more ores, mixed ores, rich/poor ore variants, and ores at widely varying depths (up to ~1Km). I decided that for deep ores to be fun, SE would need to add caves that a small miner/prospector ship could navigate. Otherwise the limited range of ore detectors would necessitate prospecting the old fashioned way.

 

I've considered having ice be more scarce, but really it's pretty abundant out in space. Even food wouldn't be much of an issue, most of us have a mothership, just plop a hydroponics block down (Darth Biomech's got the models ready to go) and we're farming in space. It would just be an extension of the oxygen farm, another block to pipe into our conveyors.

I've always thought that heat would be a far more interesting mechanic to play with, as it's not a tertiary health bar, and it's an explicit engineering challenge. Everyone knows space is cold, but few seem to consider the implications of vacuum on heat transfer. There's not a lot of places to put it, and everything just keeps generating it. It would mean for instance, that all your heavy industrial equipment will inevitably overheat in space unless you can sink the heat into something, say an asteroid, giving fixed bases more value. And a planet with an atmosphere would be the best way of all to just not care too much about waste heat. If asteroid mining was lucrative, but challenging, while planetary mining was average and fairly simple, the balance would work out better.

There's a mod that came out a few days ago that does dynamic planetary instalation spawns. I haven't played with it yet as I'm not sure how it gets along with EEM, but that would be a great way to explore the alternative concept.

 

I think one solution could be to make tools use manufactured charges for specific functions. Empyrion makes players work harder to dig. They also have voxel protection mechanics around bases.

Even simpler though is to nerf the jetpack. Just reel in output as a function of atmospheric density, or a combination of atmosphere and gravity. On the Earthlike, it should output about >10N-s/kg of engineer mass. This implies that the engineer can jump off a cliff without accelerating downwards, only falling at a fixed rate so long as he has jump jet fuel. If the engineer gets to the moon or a low gravity planet, then letting him fly around like superman is an hard earned privilege.

I can't think of a realistic geological basis for changing ores at depth. The planets do suggest orogenic or uplift processes, though no extant volcanism. Alternate suggestions include meteoric impact or crustal contraction due to planetary cooling, but that runs awry of interpretation of erosive features on planets with atmosphere. Of course, no precipitation has been observed..

 

At -6666 ft, IIRC.

 

I bought myself a copy of Planet Nomads.....

The problems I have with working on/with planets:

1) Wheels do not work well. Stopping on a slope is all but impossible, and driving up a slope with any steepness just doesn't happen
2) Mine ground, and it uses a lower detail model for collisions which makes mining and then driving over what you mined is nasty, and there is no way to fill stuff in again.
3) It's too easy to build flying machines......
4) It's an empty world. Nothing there....nothing happening....nothing moving. Except those bugs and stupid wolves.

 

They would have to drastically extend the range of the ore detector in order to pull that one off. And the added digging would add much more loading in the term of voxel information. But I do like the idea of really having to mine deep down to get certain things.

 

Add a ground-penetrating radar block. Only works in contact with voxels. Pings the location and distance, but not content, of ore lodes in a wide area. Then you dig an exploratory shaft and take a closer look. If it's something good, start a mining operation.

 

Here's a link to making your own custom planets.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=566387835

Section 6.3 talks about minimum (start) and maximum ore depths.

You should be able to change the planetary definition (do it as a mod) and generate a planet with custom ore depths.

The issue with burying your ores deep is that you and any other players are going to generate a lot more planetary voxel data when digging up a planet. For deep mines, players will probably set up a staging area underground to dump/refine ore before taking it a long way to the surface. This will increase load/save times and occupy more memory. If you reset your planet (copying over the virgin world and replacing the chewed up planet, you'll have to worry about underground bases having nothing to attach to and falling to the center (which can completely lag a game if there are multiple bases heading to the center and grinding on each other.

 

haha yes
so pack plenty of plastic explosives and repair nanites
basically pack a full array of consumables to battle Satan then ....heh nataS
--- Automerge ---

that could be one easy way of getting down there.
but then you still gotta get all the way back up.

so you'll be needing a craft that can at least fly back up carrying what it mined.
possibly one that can fly strongly in each direction for full 360 mining.
it'll be needing enough power and hopefully long enough power to get back up.

 

Its still likely an insignificant investment to travel deeper down, realistically engineering a solution with current mechanics for ore that is say 1km underground, is not even remotely viable. Currently either the infrastructure or rig capable of digging to a max depth (approx 100m) is almost at an upper limit, 10 stacked pistons, is getting sketchy, similarly things like my excavator probably can't be made a huge amount larger, I could include a piston extension system, but it's still probably going to only get maybe down to 200m at best.

Basically unless we have a reason to justify infrastructure, or the stability to use big machines, having deeper ores just means a longer time to fly down in the hole.

This is why I added those additional thoughts at the end of the response. Denser/richer ores the deeper you go could help justify it. But ultimately as long as flying is super cheap in almost every aspect, we'll never be able to ultimately justify the deeper ores

 

then like motherload we add a risk factor.

voxel gas and voxel magma or something.
Drilling into magma will seriously damage a drill if not destory it all together.
Drilling into voxel gas may cause an explosion if the drill creates a spark. [could be fun to create a disposable drill bot to purposely explode it.]

-maybe denser rock slowly damages a drill bit as it works so you'll have to bring down extra steel plating or parts for repairs.
-maybe temperatures rise the deeper you go....no oxygen isn't always a concern.
-maybe even cave ins could become a thing so drilling straight up can become lethal so don't lose the original hole you dug down in

all of that sounds delightfully difficult and most likely impossiable to code so changes are deep voxel will remain just stone.
but oh well it was a fun thought.

i would just enjoy a reason to live deep underground with an ability to find ores without using a gravel separator

 

If there would be Voxel magma, you should be able to put Ice or if they add water, put water on it and make stone.

 

Basically everything on that list makes very little difference to whether the drill Is on a fixed rig, or on a flying craft.

Things like caveins would actually probably have the opposite of intended affect, why would I chance losing a big chunk of my mining rigs when I can always safely mine with a flying vehicle? Also I'm sure clang wouldn't appreciate a whole bunch of blocks suddenly being encased in voxels.

I mean, you could add some kind of prohibitively heavy cooling modules to drill more effectively, or less of a chance of heat damage. But end of the day, what's an extra thruster or two to compensate for the extra mass added?

Unless something major changes to make flying craft near impossible to mine with, AND make it so that clang won't strike down any type of non flying miner, you never truely get an appreciable benefit to digging deep enough for those deposits.

 

The idea of having a mining rig and to drill is fascinating. It's probably the most realistic yet inefficient way to mine ore, considering most rigs aren't mobile because of logistical or game mechanics (Klang).

But deeper ore deposits makes a lot of sense. In fact, it would make game play on planets that much more interesting. However, it would require some time put into the design of a planets RGB composition (Photoshop layers that control ore placement). I think someone like @Doctor Octoganapus reworking the XML data of a planet as well as the RGB layer controlling ores. I mention DocOct because he's one of the leading innovators in planet design. Having large ore deposits below the surface outside of ore detector range would bring some additional challenge to finding materials on planets. I would have very small deposits of ore near the surface. But the large ones should be well buried. I believe you can turn off the surface discoloration but I'm not sure if it's possible for each ore reference (RGB color). But even if it's not, a deep ore patch means that it's not efficient to go after it with hand tools.

I'm curious about the playability of the planet if set up in this manner.

 

The placement of ore isn't what I have issue with, I would love reworked spawns with varying degrees of difficulty to get at it.

What I have an issue with is that adding depth of ore is only really going to deter people from trying to use any method that isn't flying, again I'll use 1km as an example. Thats 100 pistons stacked, Or some kind of system that can extend so far down, work its way down the hole, and repeat till you hit it. While it would be super cool, it's not terribly practical, and the likelihood of it succeeding without clang destroying it is unfortunately low.

Other things would have to be done to somewhat discourage flying miners in order to make it reasonable to expect someone to use a wheeled, or even a static mining rig. Otherwise it's just a waste of time and resources, with your enemies gaining a huge resource lead because they took the easy, very low risk method.

 

to be fair my 100m mobile rig only needed a couple of settings altered. i think they tweeked the rate drills cut at and voxel deformation rate so it having to cut slower.

re the wheels issue. when you see any really heavy equipment it tends to have chocked wheels anyway and is it really that hard to toss down a couple of wire frames to hold a wheels or 2 in place?

 

My example assumes atleast a kilometer deep ore, would you be confident making that rig go to 10x the depth? I know my reasonable survival drill tend to be fairly bare bones, affording such a massive piston stack probably would be worth the cost.

We typically lack the precision to level out are equipment properly, even putting blocks down isn't always going to work, I have vehicles heavy enough they literally just crush through light armor and sometimes even voxels.

Plus my statement of why would you bother still stands:

I can get hundreds of tonnes of ore out of a relatively small deposit. I have no need or want to set up any amount of mobile logistics to go mining. Why drag around a big bulky mining rig, when I can be just as, of not more efficient with a little flying miner? Unless something changes, this idea will only hurt ground based mining

 

i would go a different route for those depths using detachable sections and a smaller piston chain that detaches from the head, goes up, puts another section in and then goes back down for another cut just how oil and gas rigs work. yes then you need to develop some way to easily stack and move the parts but with design and planning its more a case of making it repeatable than anything else.
infact i already have an idea for the initial design. cheers i have wanted a project. * see below



whilst we cant level things perfectly at the moment i have had no issue with my stuff when parked with breaks on mining even on a 45 degree slope as long as i have a couple of blocks in voxels. maybe its the scale i choose to work to with wheeled stuff or i simply dont go mad and make things over weighted.




as to why.
the challenge, personal preferences. design, remember we dont all play for PVP. i for one simply play to build. role playing and world building, sheer bloody mindedness to make the damm thing work.

why build anything other than a bare bones slab in space with a refinery reactor and drill? and 6 pistons with a gyro? because of the above.

*
now the project isnt going to be a single vehicle. its actually going to be several. one is of course the main rig itself which i will have as an articulated vehicle that should be able to carry all of the parts i need, 20X pole parts and a drill head and something to move the pole parts around with and put them in place. now the down part is easy as pie. the return side is harder so i need to also have a way to hold the main system when i remove a pipe at the top

 

Its ironic, but you and I share this opinion, I'm honestly happy sitting in the mud playing with my machines, but I spend a good amount of time on the forums, and I know people have been asking to make planets more engaging, or more reasons to stay. I want this game to be the best it can be, and that means voicing my concerns about this particular idea.

I'm all for personal challenge, hence is why I built a custom suspension for my latest hybrid grid truck.

I think there is an appreciable difference between the cost of building something pretty, and something functional. A station in space, doesn't need to have a big physics driven boom to mine asteroids. If you want to stabilize a stack of pistons, you're going to need several sets, realistically a stack in each corner would probably suffice, but the cost of even a single stack of pistons, some rotors, wheels, and any other parts needed are more expensive than just building a little flying miner.

Like you said: not everyone plays pvp, but not everyone is willing to deal with having to design machines and rigs to go mining either, the more difficult you make that mining, the less likely the average user will take any route that isn't the path of least resistance.

I actually did some brief experiments with these type of designs, it wasn't super successful because I didn't include a sub system that held the old pipe where it was at so my pipe ended up being super crooked and misaligned which made for dragging it up a rather dangerous task.
--- Automerge ---

Its ironic, but you and I share this opinion, I'm honestly happy sitting in the mud playing with my machines, but I spend a good amount of time on the forums, and I know people have been asking to make planets more engaging, or more reasons to stay. I want this game to be the best it can be, and that means voicing my concerns about this particular idea.

I'm all for personal challenge, hence is why I built a custom suspension for my latest hybrid grid truck.

I think there is an appreciable difference between the cost of building something pretty, and something functional. A station in space, doesn't need to have a big physics driven boom to mine asteroids. If you want to stabilize a stack of pistons, you're going to need several sets, realistically a stack in each corner would probably suffice, but the cost of even a single stack of pistons, some rotors, wheels, and any other parts needed are more expensive than just building a little flying miner.

Like you said: not everyone plays pvp, but not everyone is willing to deal with having to design machines and rigs to go mining either, the more difficult you make that mining, the less likely the average user will take any route that isn't the path of least resistance.

I actually did some brief experiments with these type of designs, it wasn't super successful because I didn't include a sub system that held the old pipe where it was at so my pipe ended up being super crooked and misaligned which made for dragging it up a rather dangerous task.