Make sluices work permanently in one place?

[topster 2]

Just started up TFC again today, had fond memories of playing it a year ago. Still having fun. I noticed though that sluices can now permanently overwork an area so that they will never again find ore in the are they are placed.

 

I see the rationale here, tbut I want to explain why I think sluices should work indefinitely:

 

- Permanent overwork disincentivizes players from using sluices at all. A sluice farm is very time-consuming to build and having to move a whole farm every few minecraft days means players will only ever use one or two, if even that.

 

- Gold pans are now more efficient than sluices. Whereas with a sluice farm you must dig several channels of specific dimensions and then toss gravel or sand into them, with a gold pan you can pile up a ton of gravel, sift through it all, and when an area is overworked all you need to do is pick your gravel back up, move a few chunks over, and repeat the process. Yes this will not get you any ore besides copper, gold and platinum, but copper is more than useful enough to use until the player is ready to start mining ores out of the ground. Weheras before sluices used to be a sensible graduation for players after panning gold and before underground mining, sluices now are a tedious, unecessary step.

 

- It makes no sense realistically for sluices to work only temporarily. If I'm taking gravel from somewhere else and throwing it into a sluice, why would it matter if the area around the sluice were overworked? Aren't I looking for minerals inside the gravel? I understand that it would be silly to mark the gravel with the minerals in the chunk it came from and have, say, gravel from an area with magnetite produce magnetite from a sluice in a copper area, but a permanently-working sluice that works how it used to would be realistic enough, in my opinion.

 

Thanks for reading

[VaiN 2]

I agree whole-heartedly. Sadly I doubt it matters. There are plenty of arguments about other features as well. But there are reasons for why it is the way it is.

 

I'd just like to be able to configure these things myself is all. If we could get values exposed in the config for panning and sluicing thresholds that would be awesome.

[Bunsan 323]

A recent topic on sluices that may be informative.

http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/7567-why-does-sluicing-work-that-way/?hl=sluice

[EstebanLB 183]

The sluice is a prospecting tool, you are not supossed to use it to get free ore, just samples to know what ore you have in a determined area. However, the gold pan IS indeed to get smaller ore pieces so you can craft your first tools.

That's why the gold pan can be crafted in the stone age and the sluice only in the metal age, when you can already craft a saw and a pickaxe for the setup

[VaiN 2]

A sluice probably shouldn't be a prospecting tool. Nor does that make much sense within the mechanics of this mod. It should be used to extract ore, that's exactly what a sluice is for (and it's not "free" either way). By the time you can craft a sluice you can also craft a propick which is far faster for prospecting even with low skills.

 

A gold pan is a prospecting tool. It's primary purpose is to check if there's anything of value in a small area, then you would use a sluice to extract it.  It's about as backwards as it can be right now. It doesn't really make sense to be able to make a gold pan or a sluice in the stone age, and so I understand we need something to start with. I'm just pointing out that the logic is a bit skewed.

 

If believability is the goal, it would be more believable the other way around. But again, it wouldn't matter what everyone thinks if we could configure it how we like.

[snaketokill 24]

that's a valid point but why not make (for example) basalt gravel in a sluice give you basalt ores?

[iPotato13 10]

That would defeat the purpose of using a prospector's pick, a unique feature to TFC.

[Bunsan 323]

Not all veins are close enough to surface to spawn surface stones and certainly not detect with prospecting pick. So the sluice is a great way to determine if a chunk is worth digging way way down in.

[iPotato13 10]

Tis the fun in exploring, in my opinion. 

[topster 2]

I doubt a permanently-working sluice will make prospecting and mining obsolete. It definitely didn't when I played, at least.

 

Sluice farms are necessary to make sluices useful because the chance of getting ore from them are very very small and getting a significant amount of ore takes a very long time. Meanwhile, with clever use of the prospector's pick and mining into the ground, you can get a huge amount of ore very quickly after a vein is found. If the fear is that a permanently-working sluice would be too powerful, I think it's completely unfounded.

[Bunsan 323]

From the topic I linked.

To be honest the idea of gravel giving whatever is relevant to that stone type is appealing. As has been stated above, you would lose the ability to prospect with the sluice but this does honestly seem more believable. That said if I were to do this, I would most certainly alter the amount of metal received from 10 units per item to 1 unit just to balance it more. I would probably also try to figure out some way to make sluice farming less ideal. I'll ponder on it.

Before sluice farms were terribly OP. That was why they were changed. However the mechanics aren't set in stone. Bioxx said he'd think about changing them, so that is about as good as you'll get at this time.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

I doubt a permanently-working sluice will make prospecting and mining obsolete. It definitely didn't when I played, at least.

 

Sluice farms are necessary to make sluices useful because the chance of getting ore from them are very very small and getting a significant amount of ore takes a very long time. Meanwhile, with clever use of the prospector's pick and mining into the ground, you can get a huge amount of ore very quickly after a vein is found. If the fear is that a permanently-working sluice would be too powerful, I think it's completely unfounded.

 

When sluices were permanent, the most OP use of them was often to get nickel. Once a player had found a nickel vein, all they had to do was mine out everything, leaving 1 or 2 ore blocks of the vein left. Then they can plunk down a sluice near that spot, and feed it gravel for infinite nickel.

[Zzapdragon 5]

Why not just make it like goldpan? when an area is over worked with a goldpan you just leave it be for awhile and it replenishes. how about the sluice will still over work but not permanently exaust. Kind of like an upgraded goldpan when you get into the metal age. 

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Why not just make it like goldpan? when an area is over worked with a goldpan you just leave it be for awhile and it replenishes. how about the sluice will still over work but not permanently exaust. Kind of like an upgraded goldpan when you get into the metal age. 

 

Gold pans and sluices go off of the exact same "overworked" flag that is stored in a chunk, and it does not replenish for either of them. If you can goldpan in a chunk, either you have not previously overworked it, that chunk has been manually deleted or reset at some point, or there is a bug.

[Zzapdragon 5]

Gold pans and sluices go off of the exact same "overworked" flag that is stored in a chunk, and it does not replenish for either of them. If you can goldpan in a chunk, either you have not previously overworked it, that chunk has been manually deleted or reset at some point, or there is a bug.

thats wierd because i had a system worked out that every in game year i work a certain few chunks that i marked out with a gold pan and they work fine for me. how long ago did this change?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

thats wierd because i had a system worked out that every in game year i work a certain few chunks that i marked out with a gold pan and they work fine for me. how long ago did this change?

 

It's been the intention that overworking a chunk was permanent ever since overworking a chunk was implemented back in 0.78.4. There was however a bug that wasn't fixed until later in that if a server or world restarted/rebooted, the overworked flag was reset as well.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

thats wierd because i had a system worked out that every in game year i work a certain few chunks that i marked out with a gold pan and they work fine for me. how long ago did this change?

Don't get me wrong please. But why would you need to gold pan for years? Gold pan is useful to get you enough metal for your first pick and prospect pick. Once I have that I never gold pan again. I have actually never used the sluice. 

[LiesTech 11]

And that DJ is why the sluice needs to change. Hopefully to gravel specific, not chunk specific, ore drops with no exhaustion and only retrieving 1 unit at a time with the same chance.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

I honestly don't see how the Dev's could change the sluice to make it better. I am no miner in real life, no experience with ores and stuff. The little I seen from sluices is in movies, so I am probably completely wrong about how a sluice works. Anyhow, I always had the impression that the sluice was used in a mining operation to separate the heavy metals from the sand, dirt and rocks that come together when mining for ores. So people go into a mine and use picks to break the stone and the ores and everything comes out mixed so the sluice is used like to wash out the ores.So to be realistic, should the Dev's implement one more step in obtaining metals?

It would involve the creation of new blocks and another system with very little added to the game but grind.

From the point of view of the game. if I understood Kitty correctly the only way to keep the sluice in one place and bring gravel from other locations would be if it was possible to tag the block of gravel with all the info from where it was harvest and what kind of ores exist there. I think right now there is just no lines in the code for such thing. The whole mod would need to be rewritten since we are using the all the info possible in a block.

[Bunsan 323]

Large scale use of sluices were only seen in large open pit mines where the base material was loose. Since it separates based on the densities of the material in real life it was used to seperate out gold and gems. I don't think other metals are seperatable in sluices, especially since most don't occur in their native form. Even for gold and gems I would assume that you'd have to adjust the flow rate for the particular product you want. So the TFC sluice is far kinder and versatile than real life equivalent.

[Zzapdragon 5]

Don't get me wrong please. But why would you need to gold pan for years? Gold pan is useful to get you enough metal for your first pick and prospect pick. Once I have that I never gold pan again. I have actually never used the sluice. 

Because i'm horrible with the propick and panning was the only easy way for me to get ore. i actually can't play most of the time unless i'm on a server and my friends who are much better at prospecting than me are supplying me ore. 

It's been the intention that overworking a chunk was permanent ever since overworking a chunk was implemented back in 0.78.4. There was however a bug that wasn't fixed until later in that if a server or world restarted/rebooted, the overworked flag was reset as well.

That must have been why then... 

[Zzapdragon 5]

I honestly don't see how the Dev's could change the sluice to make it better. I am no miner in real life, no experience with ores and stuff. The little I seen from sluices is in movies, so I am probably completely wrong about how a sluice works. Anyhow, I always had the impression that the sluice was used in a mining operation to separate the heavy metals from the sand, dirt and rocks that come together when mining for ores. So people go into a mine and use picks to break the stone and the ores and everything comes out mixed so the sluice is used like to wash out the ores.So to be realistic, should the Dev's implement one more step in obtaining metals?

It would involve the creation of new blocks and another system with very little added to the game but grind.

From the point of view of the game. if I understood Kitty correctly the only way to keep the sluice in one place and bring gravel from other locations would be if it was possible to tag the block of gravel with all the info from where it was harvest and what kind of ores exist there. I think right now there is just no lines in the code for such thing. The whole mod would need to be rewritten since we are using the all the info possible in a block.

Aren't there new types of gravel recently? like basalt, gabbro ect.? why not just dump the idea of the sluice scanning and producing metals in an area and just have it pump out the metals and minerals found only in a specific rock type?  for example, you set up your sluice and throw down some dolomite gravel and the sluice will generate bimuthinite, limonite, and magnetite. Now keeping in mind the issue with infinite ores from sluices I'm sure the devs wouldn't want a repeat of that but lowering the probabilities of finding ore may render the sluice useless. Any balance ideas?EDIT: This would also ruin the sluice as a prospecting tool. I'm just throwing this idea out there i'm not particularly hoping it would be implemented.

[Delerium76 3]

I just started this pack yesterday, and from a new player perspective, setting up and using a sluice was a disappointment.  Early game I have found no way to transport water so the only means i had to make a sluice was to create a runoff from a lake.   This was time consuming and a little frustrating due to the dirt/gravel block physics of this mod.  After getting it all set up, I throw gravel in it whenever I pass by and check it's contents.  In the whole time from creation to overworked over the course of a day or two, it generated 1 small ore, period.  I don't see it being useful as a prospecting tool either (and believable factor, it's a little silly), because it's such a cumbersome thing to set up that most people would just rather forget it altogether.  With my experience, after I picked it back up I chucked it in a chest to be forgotten.  What's the point of a tool that doesn't get used?

[Bunsan 323]

In my first 79 world I could not find nickel. However I knew that the third layer of stone in an area near my base was gabbro, hot spring had gabbro. So I set up a few sluices in that area to try and determine if it was worth digging tunnels. Sure enough a few of my sluices got nuggets of nickel. A couple also produced silver that I was lacking anywhere near my base. It still took a lot of digging and an entire steel pro pick, but I eventually found 2 nickel and 1 silver vein. That is how I believe they were intended to be used.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

It took me some time to understand how the propick worked. It took me many tries to finally be able to find ores, I got frustrated and called the dev's some bad names, but thesatisfaction I had when I finally understood how to use it was overwhelming and I had so much joy that I praised the devs to create a tool that soo much mimics what happens in real life when real geologists have to determine if is there any ore in a region and to find it.

In real life when the do soil analyses they find traces of minerals and that's it that analyses is not going to tell where the vein is, the only thing it tells you is that there is something around.

There are so many videos and tutorials talking and teaching how to efficiently use the propick and it is such an important feature of the mod that I cannot excuse any one not willing to spend the time and effort to learn it.

One of the things that i like about TFC is how it was able to create mechanics   that depend on real skills, not just in game numbers. There are people that have more facility to understand and operate the anvil and they will create tools and armor a lot faster then others.Some others have more aesthetic talents and can decorate a house or room in a way that I would never be able to do it. As a game that in many aspects simulate the survival experience, I praise the Dev's for this insight. The way I see we as players have two options, either we learn all the skills and are able to play the game in solo, or we play in multiplayer and then we can dedicate to only one aspect of the game, the one we identify most.