From the creator of the lathe tax- Rock and no ores torture (Codenut)

[The Wrench]

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/ ... omment-box
I don’t like this PR

[Fikou]

didnt ask

[Jacquerel]

I am reticent about losing the ability to just hit rocks while dodging monsters but we'll see if there's an answer about that

[Capsandi]

I do, tho i think its passing up the opportunity to fix mining's biggest problem which is that the act of mining is decentralized on a massive z level and so theres no hope in hell of catching a miner doing their job. Though maybe, in a follow up pr the vein spawning area would be shrunk to surround the mining station somewhat. That way if i had to steal some crap from a miner i could do so just by doing a quick loop around the station and beating them until horizontal instead of hoping they have a gps with their name instead of endlessly chasing after COMO1 after COMO1.

[LEDDDriver]

Oh yes i can't wait for crystallizer and gold/uranium solidification botany to become meta because this is obviously a brilliant idea;

add: Added ore vents. Scanning them with mining scanners shows what minerals they contain. Scan again to fight off a horde of beasts so the ore vent will produce mineral boulders!

Surely it will make things better.

[Turbonerd]

It would be really cool if engineers would start building sentries or whatever as a coordination to assist miners. Engineer gaming!

Would be a little sad for rock smashing to go. I wanted to add rocket launchers for clarke to dig ore.

[dirk_mcblade]

Atmos can make diamonds?

[Jacquerel]

As a side note I believe (if im remembering rigjt) that if the rest of Arcane's economy tweaks go through it includes removing the lathe tax

[The Wrench]

I’m very skeptical of the idea that scarcity is a good thing or something we want to happen on shifts. Not being able to do your job because someone else didn’t do their job is shitty. At the very least make it so we can order all the materials in cargo so engineers don’t have to suffer because we don’t have the materials.

[Capsandi]

every1 is so fukken entitled to evarything now a days, back in my day there was no ore silo. I had to beat noob cargo techs on route to sci for just a few sheets of plasma. Then I got my shit kicked in by security who actually put players in the timeout box instead of this catch & release bullshit wherein they just check you for valids

[LEDDDriver]

Atmos can make diamonds?

Yes shiftstart too with a simple burn can on meta/ice, since they have a prebuilt crystallizer.

[warbluke]

Holy shit this is going to make robo even more ass to play when there's no miners.
At this point I think I'll just go steal the silver from medbay surgery beds every time I play lowpop robo. And the crystals from the teleporter, and the gold from the vault.

[datorangebottle]

I'm so conflicted.
I like the idea of DRG mining gameplay.
I also like the comfy rock smashing gameplay that /tg/ has been steadily moving away from.
I also think the boulder refining looks clunky and slow as hell, especially when multiple miners are trying to use it.
I also dislike the idea of needing to upgrade mining equipment; typically that means it just won't get done.

[RedBaronFlyer]

Already see some issues that I’m going to list because I’m too lazy to write paragraphs.

- miners are going to be even harder to recover then they are already. I swear some miners run as deep into lava land and die just to watch a conga line of mediborgs and paramedics run through and obstacle course of hostile mobs to get their bodies.

- non-miners mining is going to suck more

- cargo is probably going to get bitched at even more for not spending 70% of their budget mass shipping in iron, glass, and plastic for roboticists to waste on EORG prep.

[Arcanemusic]

Re: Tremendous amount of feedback.

It's clear there's a large number of things that have gone un-addressed in this rework this far (albeit there are a few that are and people just didn't read the PR that carefully).

Is it because I am a rat bastard man? Is it because I am evil and fucked up and want to ruin mining because miners were sitting back and having TOO EASY of a time in my 2d space sandbox? Is this my revenge for that time that we closed making coal and ore and I've been seething ever since at the chance to get vengeance?

Nah it's that mining is fucking huge and there's a lot of good feedback hitting things I just didn't think about yet. I know some people aren't sold on this yet, and all I ask is people have an open mind. Hell, there's still a good chance it gets closed because headcoders want to take the department into a different direction. Who knows! We'll find out.

Thanks for the outpouring of feedback gang, positive and negative. I'll see about getting some lists together and figuring out what's feasible or not with the original design direction or if I fucked up and the mineral economy is fucked forever

[Chocodemon]

is it not possible to have both types of mining?

[MooCow12]

Holy shit this is going to make robo even more ass to play when there's no miners.
At this point I think I'll just go steal the silver from medbay surgery beds every time I play lowpop robo. And the crystals from the teleporter, and the gold from the vault.

I already steal the bs crystals from the command`s teleporters.

As long as any job can do the prospecting and defense of the ore sites then its completely fine. (In other words, a plasmaman engie who doesnt have access to lethal weapons should still be able to get ore somehow)


Public mining is sometimes the only thing that prevents a station from being entirely unable to get matts and softlocked on everything without anyone being able to do anything reasonable about it at all (well xenobio can help but by the time that happens shuttle will be called and round will be over)

[CMDR_Gungnir]

I’m very skeptical of the idea that scarcity is a good thing or something we want to happen on shifts. Not being able to do your job because someone else didn’t do their job is shitty. At the very least make it so we can order all the materials in cargo so engineers don’t have to suffer because we don’t have the materials.

"Sorry Robotics, you can't do your job because we didn't find those vents/someone else decided to use all the silver and gold."

"Sorry (other job), you can't do your job because Robotics decided to build 6 gygaxes and print 30 posibrains."

Scarcity is fucking stupid because there's no way to actually stop someone from doing something. There's literally no way to ration things, you just have to hope that other people aren't going to be cunts (spoiler: they're going to be cunts)

[The Wrench]

I completely agree. I’m glad that arcane is being such a class act about this. It’s refreshing to see a maintainer not throw a temper tantrum when their work isn’t praised.

[dirk_mcblade]

What about the gulag

[Scriptis]

Re: Re: Tremendous amount of feedback.

love u arcane don't let the goobers goob all over you

i believe in industry(tm) expansion(tm)

don't forget to add departmental ore budgets

[Capsandi]

Scarcity is fucking stupid because there's no way to actually stop someone from doing something. There's literally no way to ration things, you just have to hope that other people aren't going to be cunts (spoiler: they're going to be cunts)

Thats why in the past we had a whole department dedicated to supplying other departments with materials. The ore silo is incompatible with material scarcity. A lack of material scarcity is incompatible with the past XX years of "just put it in the protolathe lol" design. Take ur pick.

[warbluke]

Thats why in the past we had a whole department dedicated to supplying other departments with materials. The ore silo is incompatible with material scarcity. A lack of material scarcity is incompatible with the past XX years of "just put it in the protolathe lol" design. Take ur pick.

I'd be up for removing the ore silo, or even just adding departmental silos. I miss the days of dragging a mats crate back to robo from the ORM.

[dirk_mcblade]

We have a machine that teleports resources into every protolathe but we still need pipes to move gas. Hm.

[MooCow12]

Material scarcity should be the work of antags who are smart enough to realize that they have their own unique abstract resource pool to scale into the round with (tc/knowledge/etc) and can safely deny the crew their own scaling.

If an antag wants resource scarcity all they have to do is walk to a single silo connected device and siphon all of the materials from it then throw it into space, ive done it before its not hard.



The only reason this strategy isnt viable is because it just....gets shuttle called because people rightfully do not want to play when all of their job content is suddenly unobtainable and they have nothing to do.

[c4g]

We have a machine that teleports resources into every protolathe but we still need pipes to move gas. Hm.

we have a bluespace gas network for the gas vendors nobody uses, but maybe theres issues scaling it up or something

[CMDR_Gungnir]

Scarcity is fucking stupid because there's no way to actually stop someone from doing something. There's literally no way to ration things, you just have to hope that other people aren't going to be cunts (spoiler: they're going to be cunts)

Thats why in the past we had a whole department dedicated to supplying other departments with materials. The ore silo is incompatible with material scarcity. A lack of material scarcity is incompatible with the past XX years of "just put it in the protolathe lol" design. Take ur pick.

The problem is it just kinda doesn't work too well with the modern way of the game, I imagine. Things are a lot faster these days that people just wouldn't tolerate that.

Which is why I'm really afraid of this mining change. I really don't think it's a good idea, and people'll just get fed up with never having any materials and stop playing because they can't do anything.

[conrad]

This is an excellent chance to buff out mining outcome so miners can have their minigames and single player experiences and the station can maybe not run out of everything every round.

Win-win.

[EmpressMaia]

It would be really cool if engineers would start building sentries or whatever as a coordination to assist miners. Engineer gaming!

Would be a little sad for rock smashing to go. I wanted to add rocket launchers for clarke to dig ore.

Turrets can only hold energy weapons and fauna dont take much laser damage

[zergking]

But what about the Ashies?

[GPeckman]

It would be really cool if engineers would start building sentries or whatever as a coordination to assist miners. Engineer gaming!

Would be a little sad for rock smashing to go. I wanted to add rocket launchers for clarke to dig ore.

Turrets can only hold energy weapons and fauna dont take much laser damage

I'd have to double check but I'm 90% sure PKAs are considered energy weapons too.

[chocolate_bickie]

Scarcity is fucking stupid because there's no way to actually stop someone from doing something. There's literally no way to ration things, you just have to hope that other people aren't going to be cunts (spoiler: they're going to be cunts)

Thats why in the past we had a whole department dedicated to supplying other departments with materials. The ore silo is incompatible with material scarcity. A lack of material scarcity is incompatible with the past XX years of "just put it in the protolathe lol" design. Take ur pick.

The problem is it just kinda doesn't work too well with the modern way of the game, I imagine. Things are a lot faster these days that people just wouldn't tolerate that.

Which is why I'm really afraid of this mining change. I really don't think it's a good idea, and people'll just get fed up with never having any materials and stop playing because they can't do anything.

People won't stop playing, they didn't after cobby chem, they didn't after combat mode.

This will push more players away from material intensive jobs though, since few people want to engage with the sweaty powergaming to actually do their job.

Much like cobby chem all the dirty fucking casuals will be bullied out of their role until they build a spreadsheet with the optimal timing and setup required to do their job before the hour mark.

Exactly like chemistry atm.

[dendydoom]

it's almost like the people making the code and designing the mechanics are totally detached from the people running the rounds and dictating rules around gameplay and roleplay

[Turbonerd]

It would be really cool if engineers would start building sentries or whatever as a coordination to assist miners. Engineer gaming!

Would be a little sad for rock smashing to go. I wanted to add rocket launchers for clarke to dig ore.

Turrets can only hold energy weapons and fauna dont take much laser damage

I was thinkign about implementing a new sentry gun, like a pneumatic cannon sentry engineers could build to launch anything they want at fauna.

[chocolate_bickie]

Sorry, I feel like I dunked on cobby chem alot in my last comment and I want to clarify this is a more general issue.

Alot of the games systems have been given more complexity, often with the goal of breaking some gameplay loop the coding team dislikes.

Complexity is good, but there needs to be an entry point for each job, so that players can learn mechanics without getting dunked on by mechanics only explained on the wiki/github.

For this pr for example I would suggest that the entry point be normal mining tools can be used on these veins, but instead of spawning a wave upon succesful extraction they spawn maybe 1-3 random mobs.

This builds the expectation in new players minds that mining = incoming fight. It would also act as 'training' for waves, helping you learn about different mobs attack patterns. Finally it would provide a 'safer' method for ashwalkers/golems/crew to mine that is still not risk free.

tldr; wyci

[Jacquerel]

why did you mention "combat mode" in a post about making the game more complex

[chocolate_bickie]

why did you mention "combat mode" in a post about making the game more complex

Combat mode was used as an example for Gungnir after they said this game change would stop people from playing SS13. My point was that previous large-scale changes to mechanics and departments have always been called out as the death of TG, but never are.

I then went into my rant about complexity.

[MooCow12]

Depth and complexity are welcoming but deleting the skill floor and not rewarding some level of success from doing the bare minimum is harsh

A friend of mine tried to play the game a couple months ago and told me they ended up quitting because they couldnt make anything as a newbie chemist

Its why i think ghost roles need more love, at the very least we should give new players somewhere with training wheels to practice learning stuff along with some hand holding that the wiki doesnt provide

the chaos of the game also impacts peoples ability to aquire skills and knowledge that last alot longer than a single round

[RedBaronFlyer]

Depth and complexity are welcoming but deleting the skill floor and not rewarding some level of success from doing the bare minimum is harsh

A friend of mine tried to play the game a couple months ago and told me they ended up quitting because they couldnt make anything as a newbie chemist

Its why i think ghost roles need more love, at the very least we should give new players somewhere with training wheels to practice learning stuff along with some hand holding that the wiki doesnt provide

the chaos of the game also impacts peoples ability to aquire skills and knowledge that last alot longer than a single round

Doesn’t help that there’s no basic test map on the TG code base, if I want to try something in an isolated environment I either have to set up the SM every time or speed run whatever I was going to do before the power dies. (By the way this punishes new engineers a shitload since the power dies even faster in multiplayer.)

[Kendrickorium]

i feel like if i started mining right now, i would really like this

i feel like if i had been a miner for the past few years i wouldnt like this

neat change, nice job arcane

[Jacquerel]

Doesn’t help that there’s no basic test map on the TG code base, if I want to try something in an isolated environment I either have to set up the SM every time or speed run whatever I was going to do before the power dies. (By the way this punishes new engineers a shitload since the power dies even faster in multiplayer.)

There absolutely is a basic test map it's called Runtimestation
Doesn't have an SM though.

[Turbonerd]

Doesn’t help that there’s no basic test map on the TG code base, if I want to try something in an isolated environment I either have to set up the SM every time or speed run whatever I was going to do before the power dies. (By the way this punishes new engineers a shitload since the power dies even faster in multiplayer.)

There absolutely is a basic test map it's called Runtimestation
Doesn't have an SM though.

It has RTGs that generate enough power for runtime station. You can also varedit one of them if you need more power for whatever reason.

[Jacquerel]

It has RTGs that generate enough power for runtime station. You can also varedit one of them if you need more power for whatever reason.

Oh yeah I only mentioned because you might want to fuck with the SM on a solo instance, but generally you don't and it bypasses that entirely by having essentially infinite power.

[Cobby]

can we ban gay chat like im about to start being homophobic and i like dudes.

[Capsandi]

When you see rainbow chat you think gay chat, but when i see rainbow chat I think back to the future year 2007 in which the common solution to making anything on the web more epic was the rainbow gradient.

[MooCow12]

For a long long time the rainbow was a Christian symbol about how god would never flood the world again and in the span of a decade that was replaced with the idea of men fucking

[Jacquerel]

For a long long time the rainbow was a Christian symbol about how god would never flood the world again and in the span of a decade that was replaced with the idea of men fucking

hopefully the next few decades will see similar cultural improvements

[CMDR_Gungnir]

Scarcity is fucking stupid because there's no way to actually stop someone from doing something. There's literally no way to ration things, you just have to hope that other people aren't going to be cunts (spoiler: they're going to be cunts)

Thats why in the past we had a whole department dedicated to supplying other departments with materials. The ore silo is incompatible with material scarcity. A lack of material scarcity is incompatible with the past XX years of "just put it in the protolathe lol" design. Take ur pick.

The problem is it just kinda doesn't work too well with the modern way of the game, I imagine. Things are a lot faster these days that people just wouldn't tolerate that.

Which is why I'm really afraid of this mining change. I really don't think it's a good idea, and people'll just get fed up with never having any materials and stop playing because they can't do anything.

People won't stop playing, they didn't after cobby chem, they didn't after combat mode.

This will push more players away from material intensive jobs though, since few people want to engage with the sweaty powergaming to actually do their job.

Much like cobby chem all the dirty fucking casuals will be bullied out of their role until they build a spreadsheet with the optimal timing and setup required to do their job before the hour mark.

Exactly like chemistry atm.

You misunderstand.

People are going to quit because they want to play the game and do their job but they can't because """scarcity""" and oops all of the metal was wasted already before they got the chance to do something! Antags can creaty scarcity in-round by pulling all the metal into sheets and throwing it into space.

Do you know what happens? The shuttle is called because nobody wants to deal with it. Now imagine that's EVERY round. Nobody wants to deal with it, and it's the natural state, so they stop playing.

It's very different from cobbychem because that was a single job that you could still do things in, it just slowed you down (using buffers and low heats) until you got the spreadsheet.

And I don't know what combat mode has to do with "cannot do anything".

[Jacquerel]

i think that if we dont want there to sometimes not be a thing, on a normal round, or else we believe that the round is unplayable then we shouldnt have an economy based on that thing
and i refer here to both materials and credits

[Cobby]

let me know when you'd like my rent I assume im way behind since i didnt even know i was using this space until your post. If youd like to have a productive conversation about medical/chem im happy to indulge, but harboring this amount of disdain for a feature years after is a bit much.

Not sure how cobbychem "bullied casuals out of their role", chem has always been a very wiki intensive job. Changing the chem effects or what have you doesnt touch that problem. Now Fermichem certainly progresses that issue where you need to know both the recipe AND ideal pH, but im not sure how cobbychem did that anymore than trekchems or goofchems.

it's almost like the people making the code and designing the mechanics are totally detached from the people running the rounds and dictating rules around gameplay and roleplay

its no different than players thinking admins are putting their hands in the cookie jar when they shouldnt be.

This might be true in the sense that people who played heavily in say 2015 or even the timeframe of 2018ish want to recreate the experience they fell in love with which becomes much harder to do when new players come in with a different expectation or personal enjoyment of the game. Especially true when people come from say a murderbone video or a sseth video where the gamey parts are highlighted instead of the more immersive rp-centric style people i'd argue used to be accustomed to, so to curb that you have to make mechanical changes that curb the behavior (such as nerfs or downsides to originally powerful aspects of the game). SUPER Especially true is that the community is big enough now where you the individual dont have to care about how you behave towards other players in the game because the community isnt as tightknitted/small as it used to be, so theres no love lost if you abuse a feature and consequently little love lost if someone ends up patching it despite it being a classic.

Also obligatory you are able to contribute to the game in ways you think it would be improved. It may require selling but thats no different than wanting to push a policy change.