Content: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Background: Slate Blackcurrant Watermelon Strawberry Orange Banana Apple Emerald Chocolate Marble
Pattern: Blank Waves Notes Sharp Wood Rockface Leather Honey Vertical Triangles
Welcome to TerraFirmaCraft Forums

Register now to gain access to all of our features. Once registered and logged in, you will be able to contribute to this site by submitting your own content or replying to existing content. You'll be able to customize your profile, receive reputation points as a reward for submitting content, while also communicating with other members via your own private inbox, plus much more! This message will be removed once you have signed in.

  • Announcements

    • Dries007

      ATTENTION Forum Database Breach   03/04/2019

      There has been a breach of our database. Please make sure you change your password (use a password manager, like Lastpass).
      If you used this password anywhere else, change that too! The passwords themselves are stored hashed, but may old accounts still had old, insecure (by today's standards) hashes from back when they where created. This means they can be "cracked" more easily. Other leaked information includes: email, IP, account name.
      I'm trying my best to find out more and keep everyone up to date. Discord (http://invite.gg/TerraFirmaCraft) is the best option for up to date news and questions. I'm sorry for this, but the damage has been done. All I can do is try to make sure it doesn't happen again.
    • Claycorp

      This forum is now READ ONLY!   01/20/2020

      As of this post and forever into the future this forum has been put into READ ONLY MODE. There will be no new posts! A replacement is coming SoonTM . If you wish to stay up-to-date on whats going on or post your content. Please use the Discord or Sub-Reddit until the new forums are running.

      Any questions or comments can be directed to Claycorp on either platform.
mayaknife

Avoiding The Grind

38 posts in this topic

There's this difference, though... I find branch mining at the diamond level in vanilla to be quite relaxing and non-grindy.  There's just the right mix of repetition broken up with discovery.

 

Digging kilometers of tunnel in the hope of finding something just doesn't have the same effect.  I heartily endorse the idea of surface-level prospecting, visible stone layers, and so forth.

This. My first vanilla branch mining was tedeous, but when I found my first diamonds, I was hopping for joy and made it all worthwhile. Diamonds may have only randomly spawned, but they were common enough that I could just blunder into them with enough patience and pickaxes.

 

In TFC, although I probably lucked out with my first tetrahedrite deposit, which I found pretty handily, I could see how it could have easily turned into an excercise in frustration and a ragequit. There will be surface deposits, ect. on a belivable world. It needs to be easier to "read the rocks," as it were. And don't forget to have rocks to read in the first place.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

My first search for copper was frustrating, mostly out of inexperience.

 

New tiers are worthy as far as everything that you did before can go a bit easier and faster. I like the idea presented in BTW where each step you take brings you additional technology to work things faster. First you use a hand cranked mill, just to substitute the hand crank with gears which help build the windmill. The next step is to create the water wheel, making it a more permanent solution.

 

I imagine new mechanisms and specialized tools that help one find and dig up the ores or obtain other materials. Why not go Leonardo Da Vinci and build strange contraptions that help you with everything? Use the more advanced materials to make them more sturdy and reliable? If everything was going into electronics, things would get out of hand, but why not use gears, leather belts, mechanical and wind power to get things faster?

 

This has been pursued in other topics, so i won't go much further with my ranting :P

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm not against some changes to how stone and ore spawn. The game could genuinely improve with more depth (heh) to how resources spawn and better systems through which they can be located with the right tools and skillsets.

 

That said, removing grind isn't always a process of taking out the tasks which are difficult or time consuming. Removing the grind is often just making those tasks interesting and worthwhile, and giving the player alternatives to that task.

 

The problem as I see it is that once you reach a certain point in TFC, there's nothing left to do but go for steel. And once you are looking for top-tier ore deposits you've explored everything else the game has to offer, for the most part.

 

The game's march of progress is hinged a little too tightly around metal. You should be able to progress in other areas while this hunt is going down. I think less emphasis should be put on developing metal because I suspect some of the grind will polish off once we have other areas to concern ourselves with. Like if weather/temperature becomes a truly relevant game mechanic, or if food spoilage becomes an issue, there will hopefully be other 'projects' to work on to improve the 'standard of living' as it were.

 

People have trouble with copper but on my games we always have far more copper than we need far sooner than I'd like. Iron is another story, but I'm not sure that I mind that. If it were much easier, we'd have stockpiles of iron before we needed it too. It's a delicate balance.

 

So, there's certainly improvements that could be made, but I'm fairly convinced that the bulk of the problem is simply that people reach this point in the tech tree and there's not enough to keep them busy/entertained and that's why the long search for iron gets frustrating and boring.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I agree with you Hyena on one the copper thing. I was frustrated that i lack the skills to mine properly, but i managed to dig up a nice copper vein. Then i found another one and then some tetrahedrite. I could say i have enough copper for a long time and probably will find other deposits soon. I think it's a matter of bridging this first gap, when you jump into unknown territory (mining, farming, exploring) and things get easier when you get the hang of it.

 

Sadly, mining doesn't get easier - you still have to dig through a lot and have luck with finding ores/minerals, doing mostly the same for higher tier ores/minerals.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

what a rock contains can be seen in some cases by looking at it, here in Sweden, an iron rich country, you can see on the surface of rocks if it contains something by the colour it has, I could think that a rock with some rust brown "lines" and "dots" on it could contains some iron, but most likely not worth using. so I don't know how miscoloured a rocked  that contains enough metals to be considered ore would be, but most likely visible.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

what a rock contains can be seen in some cases by looking at it, here in Sweden, an iron rich country, you can see on the surface of rocks if it contains something by the colour it has, I could think that a rock with some rust brown "lines" and "dots" on it could contains some iron, but most likely not worth using. so I don't know how miscoloured a rocked  that contains enough metals to be considered ore would be, but most likely visible.

 

----------------------------------

Concerning the size of the textures and actual size of some rock, i'd find it hard to distinct between a rock having iron or any other material. Take into consideration also that we have many different type of rocks with different visuals. Making them even more diverse would be hell of a confusing...

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

----------------------------------

Concerning the size of the textures and actual size of some rock, i'd find it hard to distinct between a rock having iron or any other material. Take into consideration also that we have many different type of rocks with different visuals. Making them even more diverse would be hell of a confusing...

----------

 

That's something that should be abstracted by the prospecting pick.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

----------------------------------

Concerning the size of the textures and actual size of some rock, i'd find it hard to distinct between a rock having iron or any other material. Take into consideration also that we have many different type of rocks with different visuals. Making them even more diverse would be hell of a confusing...

-------------

I didn't exactly say that it would be exact or a big "X ORE HERE" sign, more sort of "psst, there might be something this way!" and one block is like one cubic meter so it wouldn't be guaranteed that the trace would be visible. (If it would be visible it would depend on some RNG, say 30% of showing and then a 1 in 7 chance that it's visible to you (A block has 6 sides, so if we where to roll a D7 and if it would land on 1-6 it would be visible one the corresponding side, if 7 seven the trace would be "in the middle" and thus not visible, another chance for the trave not to show) And the trace would like just be a coupla dots on the texture of the rock)

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

-------------

I didn't exactly say that it would be exact or a big "X ORE HERE" sign, more sort of "psst, there might be something this way!" and one block is like one cubic meter so it wouldn't be guaranteed that the trace would be visible. (If it would be visible it would depend on some RNG, say 30% of showing and then a 1 in 7 chance that it's visible to you (A block has 6 sides, so if we where to roll a D7 and if it would land on 1-6 it would be visible one the corresponding side, if 7 seven the trace would be "in the middle" and thus not visible, another chance for the trave not to show) And the trace would like just be a coupla dots on the texture of the rock)

 

I think what Ranadiel was trying to say was that the size of the little rocks on the ground are so small it would be hard to see. Not talking about the full cubic meter raw stone block that you might see in an exposed cliff-side.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thanks Kitty, that's what i meant... Sometimes heard to say what i really mean eh...

 

Anyway, it could work in a manner of using the pro-pick on a rock (or stone deep underground) and the information would be present there. Like you use the ProPick with a new function and get something like "There are traces of hematite and bismuntite". I would be all for showing all possible ore and mineral possibilites the rock can have. The difference would be that the range of the pro-pick would be increased to lets say 100x100x100 (or like rocks 50x50x50) and only in the rock type you have tested, showing that there are traces of some minerals and ores, without saying how much of it is there (pointing to location). Pinpointing exactly where it is would be through the standard ProPick functionality.

 

This way you can find traces of some ores in the stone - not big enough to really be ore, but enough to let you know that you're near a hematite, sphalerite, etc.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

-----------------------------

 

uuuhm.

 

Sluices already serve the role of the "high level" of prospecting.

 

Scans a huge area (201 x 201 x not sure how deep/high) and only tells you if there's stuff within that area. Use this to roughly triangulate the location of ores, then use a prospectors pick to find the more specific location.

 

You can't rely on sluices to triangulate the location of ores: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4408-everything-i%E2%80%99ve-learned-from-prospecting-with-a-sluice-in-terrafirmacraft/?hl=sluice

 

You can't rely on gold pans: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4389-has-anyone-had-any-success-using-a-gold-pan/?hl=sluice

 

As for visual indicators, sometimes ores spawn in the wrong rock types: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4584-why-is-native-copper-in-slate-and-kaolinite-in-chert/#entry68461

 

The only tool you can rely on is your propick.

 

I've tried but I haven't been able to find a smarter way to mine.  Right now, it's just a matter of grinding through block after block to get the specific items you need to advance to the steel age.  The best part of TFC is when you're starting out.  Unless you've got some megabuild in mind, the endgame is boring.  Just start up a new world and keep giving yourself challenges to make it harder like not building any shelters while collecting all the fruit tree and crop types.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

A ravine or cliff could be deeper as previously suggested, but could also occur at the dividing line between two types of surface rock.

 

Fossil record?  Don't know what you could use fossils for, but they could tell you what biome it was millions of years ago when the deeper layers were surface layers...

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Eh, Xervir Xervir, you do realize that the thread is from last year, plenty of the suggestions from it we have in one form or the other already, others were already discussed - also elsewhere - and deemed, at the very least, not sufficiently useful for implementation and there really wasn't much of a point of reviving the whole thing without making oneself look silly, I hope?

Well, at least you do know now. I mean, I value your attempt at having a go at discussion, but it's not really the place for it. I'd even suggest closing this thread as there's no need for bump and if someone believes that the same issue is present now, we should get a new, up-to-date with mechanics thread for it.

0

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites