Prepping for the re-release of player mines

[Jirato]

You may notice a few devlog entries concerning player mines as I prepare to get these ready for use again. Just wanted to add a quick note here to talk about some things.

A lot of systems in CLOK use an accelerated time system because, hey, this is a game and we're here to have fun. We don't want the players to have to spend days, weeks, or months on something just because it'd take that long in real life. However, sometimes we go a little too far in the opposite direction and accelerate things which should be significant accomplishments to the point that they are trivial. The same type of time acceleration can also in turn make things uneccessarily more difficult for the player, such as what should more or less be a long-term near permanent structure requiring daily maintenance and upkeep.

So with that in mind, I've made some significant changes to the creation and maintenance of mines. The entry points now take roughly 10 times longer to dig out. However, keep in mind this is a one time thing. Once you've dug out your mine shaft, you have it permanently and the entrance never degrades or goes away.

Likewise I've adjusted the interior of the mine to degrade much more slowly (4 ticks a day rather than 24 ticks a day). I feel this will encourage the use of things like hangable lanterns on mine supports, which were frequently overlooked before since mine supports needed to be replaced so frequently. It also allows for future opportunity of more long-term mine additions (don't get too excited, but I have been entertaining the idea of adding minecart tracks to assist in moving ore from the inside of the mine to the entrance, and also because minecarts are cool. But that's all distant future stuff at present).

Like anything though, these times and adjustments will be monitored and could be tweaked several times over the course of the game's life. Nothing's set in stone, and I'm always listening to and evaluating feedback.

[Kiyaani]

Thanks for the hard work! I look forward to seeing how this goes.

[Edoras]

I didn't have a player mine before the change, but after digging out the entrance, I then dug out the first room to the point where it changed from its starting appearance as "a small hole" to "a narrow tunnel." I broke through to another room, and experienced the same.

After they change their appearance to being "a narrow tunnel" I noticed that I could keep digging, and spend energy and RT, but even if I spent multiple hours digging, it didn't seem to help much.

Am I wasting time continuing to dig after converting a room to "a narrow tunnel?"

[merin]

Same question here!

[Jirato]

There should be two more stages after narrow tunnel, I think. I'll double check that the change I made to slow down the initial build didn't break the interior digging. probably won't be able to look at the code until tonight though, work is pretty busy right now.

[Edoras]

Thanks!

[Jirato]

This has been fixed. The four existing player mine rooms in-game that have been affected by this bug have been reset to the second tier of digging "Rough Mine Shaft" as well. This will allow mounts to enter them, though please note there is one additional tier of completion after this.

[merin]

Thank you for this and all the other hard work you do, Jirato.

[merin]

So, while digging, we were able to expand a room from small whole to tunnel, but unfortunately we weren’t able to expand it further. We put supports in and it still didn’t want to be dug out to the mineshaft. Unfortunately, still seems broken. ☹

[Edoras]

My existing rooms were able to be upgraded! I have not yet expanded again since, so maybe there's a bug with newly created rooms as per merin's post. But thank you!

[Jirato]

So, while digging, we were able to expand a room from small whole to tunnel, but unfortunately we weren’t able to expand it further. We put supports in and it still didn’t want to be dug out to the mineshaft. Unfortunately, still seems broken. ☹

Can you share what tool you were using to dig with?

Mine progress is measured in a number from 0 to 250. I went to your mine and checked out your new rooms. They were somehow in the 240-250 range even though they were still listed as a "Narrow Tunnel". Yet when I reset the mine progress to 100 and dug until it was at 175,, it properly upgraded to a rough mine shaft. If for some reason you're gaining more than 5 progress per dig attempt, it would be possible to "skip" that upgrade I suppose. It's all old Landion code. Not that I'm saying anything bad about him, he's a cool guy, but it's not exactly written to handle every possible scenario.

I'll have to rewrite a nice little chunk of it this weekend to record exactly what stage of development the mine room is in rather than just relying on if progress is in a certain range, since it seems you're somehow skipping over that range. So rather than "If progress is between 175 and 180, make all the changes to make it stage 2" it should be "If stage is 1 and progress is over 175, make it stage 2".

[preiman]

we were using picks, a good chunk of the work was done by people who didn't own the mine, if that makes a difference.

[merin]

Yep. Was using an exquisite steel pickaxe :).

I can get on and show it to you when you need.