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So mining seems to have a problem right now. It is generally extremely lethal to anything, particularly non IPCs. The bloaters can hit you once and you're fucked, a reaver comes along and your day's over, let alone the eels. It is extremely dangerous with extremely little reward, and you can only really safely perform Mining as an IPC. If a carp bites you as a non IPC guess what you're bleeding, gotta trek ALL the way back to your shuttle or else you might get brain damage and die. Even as an IPC, the damage will add up over time. This also applies to the derelicts, varying depending on how bad they are: some aren't too hostile, others have basically no loot or lore importance but are occupied by an entire shoal of Carp.

I'm mostly making this to see if anyone has any ideas for making Mining better or less hostile. It used to be a great place for new players to learn how to EVA and basic robustness, but now it's basically the most inhospitable job on or off the ship.

 

Edited by restricted
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The solution could be to make mining trips larger and involve more people so they can escort the miners and kill enemies, Baystation style, the problem then is babysitting some poor miner who just wants to grill mine by himself surrounded by twelve security officers. Maybe give mining more guns? Arm the miners. Escalate the war against critters. Give the miners tactical nuclear ordnance.

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I remember complaining about this multiple times. Science teams get hit even harder since they generally don't come with any ranged weapons/tools (so no way to kill most creatures before they actually reach you) and come with a paper-thin void-suit with a 3-tile light. Most importantly, though, the largest issue was the increased lethality, not really due to the new fauna or site, but due to the fact that we can't get quick rescue.

On the Aurora you were still on the same stellar object. You could still limp your way back to the airlock and get picked up there. Hell, a rescuer could still pick you up outside at times. Now you have to head back to your shuttle, fly back to the Horizon, dock, then get picked up, and try to not die on your way there. If the Horizon isn't literally above you, that whole process can take up to ten minutes at worse, two at best. Two is still more than enough to bleed out for instance.

 

To this, add the fact that hauls are generally not worth it. Not counting this week since I'm on RD trial, but since April when the NBT dropped, I have found exactly 5 anomalies. I have taken part in dozens and dozens of round on the Horizon, and I got 5 anomalies. It's not rare, I've seen, for miners to arrive on rocks and find nothing the basic materials to make steel and nothing else. I get that the in-lore phoron scarcity is a thing, but we don't have a scarcity for other materials, do we?

 

One solution would be indeed to upgrade our EVA workers' equipment. I've been working on the science end of that issue here, but Mining could definitely need some extra gear. Pest guns, for instance. Why not having an emergency tool to be sent back to the Horizon? Like a Fulton-Teleporter device, which has the miner be teleported back to the Aurora, once he stands on the mining pod's fulton-teleporter-pad, but turns comatose for a bit afterward, still giving them a chance to survive, and not changing the fact that the trip outside is failed (since the mining pod now remains down there without a pilot).

Really there are a lot of solutions out there.

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Having played mining quite a bit, yeah, the bleeding is the real kicker here. Gecko's teleportation idea could be viable for especially bad cases, but in the meantime, chemicals like coagzolug could stop the worst bleeding long enough to get back to the Horizon. Maybe a dex plus autoinjector too, to bring up the oxygenation. The dark and dangerous nature of mining has made it a consistently tense experience that I absolutely adore, but a guaranteed death on the way back home is an anticlimactic ending.

Edited by ImmortalRedshirt
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I personally play mining and I have a few points to make on it as it is now;

1. Mining is stagnated. To gather any significant amount of resources takes more time, a lot more time than it did back on Aurora Station since all you had to do was EVA and go there. Now there is flying to an away site with a shuttle that isn't the fastest, admittedly. Factor in that you have to get ready for a longer haul with less access to resources, especially if you're going with three people, and the time it takes to get a good haul lands you getting back at around close to transfer time. Now, this is mitigated by having more miners but it wont subtract from travel time, bickering, and any other complications. The earliest I have personally seen a haul come back was around 40 minutes in to a round because an asteroid was just next to the horizons start point, and there were three miners that didn't have to prepare for a long journey. 

 

2. Reliance. Mining can lean towards chemistry or the warehouse for many of its supplies, including medical supplies. Perhaps if it started more kitted out, an extra medkit or injector pack in the shuttle would greatly decrease reliance on other departments. That being said, relying on other departments isn't a bad thing but when time is a luxury, or a job slot not being filled, it can lead to problems. 

 

3. Lethality. What restricted said is true, often I can see other miners getting injured and the only thing I can do is spam inap into their veins while I drag them back to the shuttle. Encountering even one hostile mob on a dig can be extremely hazardous and especially if you don't have anyone covering you (most of the times you wont) the KA will hit you. If you're a good shot you might get one or two hits with a KA before the hostile mob is right ontop of you, so you have to rely on melee weapons which the mining team has very scant amount of. To mitigate this I often use the forcing tool on the shuttle which is pretty good, I also might print a hatchet from the ops lathe which is also decent. Adding on to that, I think minings firepower OR situational awareness should be increased, perhaps more detailed scan reports to indicate exactly what mob inhabits a site, or a scanning device akin to the CM tracker to find mobs, maybe even adding that as an option to the ore scanner. Firepower could be the glaive from TG which our unathi miners would adore, or bayonet attachments for the KAs, or giving the KA an option for a one tile attack only. 

In short, I think a buff is in order.

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We could add in an alt-fire mode for kinetic accelerators similar to how disruptors function, with their stun/lethal settings. A baseline mode which is your regular kinetic blast for clearing rocks, while the alt-mode is a flat 20(?) damage xenofauna gun beam. That way miners have a reliable and rechargeable defense while they're outside that can't be abused to kill anything other than expedition critters. As an added bonus you won't clip the edge of AOE blasts anymore and frag yourself when you're trying to kill gnats.

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2 hours ago, Sheeplets said:

We could add in an alt-fire mode for kinetic accelerators similar to how disruptors function, with their stun/lethal settings. A baseline mode which is your regular kinetic blast for clearing rocks, while the alt-mode is a flat 20(?) damage xenofauna gun beam. That way miners have a reliable and rechargeable defense while they're outside that can't be abused to kill anything other than expedition critters. As an added bonus you won't clip the edge of AOE blasts anymore and frag yourself when you're trying to kill gnats.

The default KA works fine for xenofauna honestly, it's just the lethality of a bleed which you cannot tend without making a near full RTB that really hampers non IPC miner's performance.

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For the blood loss, we'd be in a good place if we either modify Coagzulog or create a variant of it that can completely staunch bleeding short of an arterial. Unless I'm missing something with bicaridine and butazoline, we don't have any way except bandages to fix normal bleeding. Coag just slows it. The anti-bleed juice needs to be in auto-injectors, and the auto-injectors need to be on the shuttle medicine cabinet

Additionally, I feel like mining's equipment starts off way too sparse. They don't even get lanterns, which really makes a difference in catching Xenofauna before they get the first hit in.

Edited by Boggle08
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3 hours ago, restricted said:

The default KA works fine for xenofauna honestly, it's just the lethality of a bleed which you cannot tend without making a near full RTB that really hampers non IPC miner's performance.

I'd like to see you kill a spectral eel with an default accelerator without killing yourself in the process.

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On 16/07/2022 at 16:37, Zulu0009 said:

The solution could be to make mining trips larger and involve more people so they can escort the miners and kill enemies, Baystation style, the problem then is babysitting some poor miner who just wants to grill mine by himself surrounded by twelve security officers. Maybe give mining more guns? Arm the miners. Escalate the war against critters. Give the miners tactical nuclear ordnance.

That's not really something that's common. Mining was never consistently "escorted" on bay, that would defeat the purpose of the job and annoy people. They didn't have any KAs too, but what they did have were better medical supplies in order to survive dangers if they found them. It wouldn't always be enough, but they also aren't facing the same asteroid generation and mobs due to there being more than just asteroids to visit.

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On 16/07/2022 at 15:37, Zulu0009 said:

The solution could be to make mining trips larger and involve more people so they can escort the miners and kill enemies, Baystation style, the problem then is babysitting some poor miner who just wants to grill mine by himself surrounded by twelve security officers. Maybe give mining more guns? Arm the miners. Escalate the war against critters. Give the miners tactical nuclear ordnance.

As a semi-minermain I would prefer not to have mining have escorts. More medical supplies so miners don't die in transit would honestly be the best. Give some coag, maybe an inhaler of pneumalin, etc, etc.
The Intrepid takes long enough to launch when everyone is pre-prepped I find, having to make sure command knows and every other person on the station knows that the mining vessel is going and with who and what would be a heck I am not fond of.
Usually people will reach out to security if they aren't feeling confident in their ability to safely go to a place and come back anyway. Though accompanying a miner can be pretty damn boring for sec if the characters aren't friends/will have fun interaction. I've had shifts when NBT was first launched where sec was forced along with me and I could tell the other person was NOT having fun even with me trying to engage them.

Edited by EJJ
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  • 2 weeks later...

Right so after dying to a reaver I now have the power of salt to compel me to complain further. The asteroid should not have anything that will guarantee your death from a single hit just randomly roaming. If I get an arterial I am dead. There is no stopping that. This gives a disproportionate amount of power to IPCs and stuff. If we want to balance Mining either make it so they can't just one hit any non synthetic miner or give them an ion gun effect so IPCs can experience the same amount of fun as the miners who can bleed.

In other thoughts, Mining rewards are low and grindy. This was fine when mining on the Aurora because RTB was quick and easy, but with the Horizon going to the asteroid can be a ten or fifteen minute trip and if the horizon doesn't follow you you might have to make that trip right on back. This means that you'll get a palsely reward for mining and be well and removed from the events of the round for the majority of the shift just to get a decent haul. The amount of rocks provided should be buffed, just to give miners any incentive to visit the asteroid at all. Since ICly we're here for phoron, and the rocks verifiably don't have phoron, there's not even a real incentive to actually Mine and not just derelict hunt anyways.

 

Also since we can only feasibly make single trips a lot of the time the Mining Vendor with the point buy system? Worthless. Just remove it and give me the teleport stuff for my ore box and my mining satchel, I literally don't need anything else from there unless I'm trying to crack the sky with drills.

Edited by restricted
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Honestly? I think that a big buff to miner survivability, would be the ability to give pressure to your wounds while moving. As it stands, you can only really apply pressure to a bleeding wound, while you're standing still, which I can imagine only being useful while cycling in an airlock for those few seconds, or doing med RP

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I think some of the biggest issues I have with mining can be summed up in three points:
- Even with the spawns as they are, it is completely possible to have a spawn where no viable asteroids/exoplanets/derelicts are nearby. If the Horizon can't be moved or an engineer can't add more CO2 to our canister then you're fucked.

- Going to a derelict can net you with stuff you really don't need for your job. Coming back with 20k guns for security is cool, but most of the derelicts don't have any resources that sci/machinist uses. I've had rounds as machinist where miners go to a derelict and don't bring anything I can use so I end up treating my entire round as if I was off-duty and not really doing anything.

- Because of how mining is, you can get a run where a miner lands, walks outside and immediately gets munched and either dies in transit or gets told by a doctor/decides IC not to go out on a second try. This might cause the other miner(s) to not want to go as well.

I see really two fixes, though I am sure there are more:

- Rocks need more materials. Up drop rates, up spawn rates, whatever. Due to how mining works now and the overhead in transport a lot of the time, especially during med/lowpop. Miners can spend an hour mining and return with only enough for really one department.

- We are the Aurora, are we really shipping off every haul we get? Phoron is what we want, Phoron is what we need. Phoron is what we breathe. If we need gold, silver, uranium, diamond, etc, etc in projects aboard the ship then it would make sense to have some stored. Simply, give machinist and science some basic materials in their own departments to work with. Put it in a locked crate that needs the proper access, whatever. Just ten, fifteen in a stack would let us be able to build a lot more things after we finish prepping. Many of the actually broken items still need Phoron to be produced.

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I feel like with the NBT mining was made significantly cooler, whilst simultaneously being enormously less efficient; this came at a huge detriment to science and machinists. As it stands, even with mining being the popular role that it is, the chance of actually being supplied in any meaningful amount of time as someone who needs mining's materials is really, really low. And even when it does happen, it's always slower than it was on the Aurora. I don't know the stats, but I personally have felt way less desire to play science since the changes. I wouldn't be surprised if others felt the same. 

I don't know how to make mining more or less fun, but it definitely needs to be changed in some way to give a faster return, so that materials are more accessible to the rest of the crew. Whether that's EJJ's suggestions or something else, I'm not sure, but I feel that some sort of change is strongly needed.

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I tell you this, if you gave us better starting gear, and extra thrust capability on the shuttle by say adding two more engines, we'd be in business. When you run the pod you can get her places fast but it'll always take time to get mats and if you don't have 3 miners it'll take a bit. Since we have the big sled it'd warrant having more engines to push more with it. I also think if we started with 1 or 2 drill droppers that aren't in the OMs locker we'd be able to close the gap on mat shortages that occur for the whole round. 

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I haven't played mining at all in NBT, though I've explored a couple of away sites and asteroids while locally testing stuff. I really don't care for the combat focus it has now, when it used to be a very chill and no-stress job where mobs were a rarity caused by bad events at most and you could use easily use the large drills to supplement your resource income. These mobs just slow things down for the departments that need the resources, quite often gravely injured or cripple any organic miners and otherwise make mining feel far more dangerous than it has any right to be. If they were just confined to derelicts and similar pre-made 'not designed for mining' away sites to add a sense of danger to the unknown, I likely wouldn't be bothered by them.

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