Small adjustments to ores/rocks/sluices?

[AmoebaMan 7]

There are going to be a few parts to this post, so bear with me.

The first thing I'd like to bring up is something that I came across while reading an earlier thread about the merits of causing surface stones to slowly regenerate over time. Dunk shot the idea down for two reasons: one, rocks don't regrow in real life; two, it could be exploited to provide an infinite supply of ores around near-surface deposits of ore. Here are my responses to this:

• Although rocks don't "grow" per se, things like weathering and erosion do expose new stones constantly IRL. Also IRL, stones are found on the surface far more commonly than the average of one per ~20 square meters in TFC.
• Slowly regenerating rocks is something that I get the feeling is needed very sorely in long-running servers, whose spawn areas seem to be picked clean of stones relatively quickly.
• Although I don't support the idea of infinite ore supplies, this is a somewhat pointless argument, as TFC already provides a means to obtain infinite supplies of small ores: sluices.

The fix for this? Regenerated rocks don't drop ores. This may not be realistic, but if infinite small ores are really a problem, this isn't really too difficult of a problem to fix.

Now, what exactly is the problem with sluices? In real life, you can't use a sluice to obtain infinite amounts of ore, so why can you in TFC? The problem is that sluices don't care about where the gravel you've given them comes from - all they care about is where they're sitting. IRL, you would eventually drain your supply of gravel that contained the traces of the ore. In TFC, you can import gravel from wherever in the world you want, and it will all magically acquire ore when you put it in the sluice.

My own solution for this is simple, but regrettably it requires the elimination of sluices altogether. Simply, they can't stay. Their mechanic is fundamentally broken. In lieu of sluices, we should revert to gold pans, albeit in a different manner. Gold pans should be able to be used to prospect gravel/sand in exactly the same way rocks are currently: breaking a block of gravel/sand while holding a pan will have a chance to drop a nearby ore instead of (or with) the gravel itself.

There's one final problem I'd like to discuss, and that's how stones and sluices, and the prospector's pick fundamentally work. Currently, they actually iterate through all nearby blocks and check to see how many contain ores. The consequence of this is that after an ore vein is mined out, the prospector's pick, stones, and sluices will suddenly and magically stop returning ores. Is it at all believable that traces and nuggets of ore would magically vanish from the surrounding rock as soon as the majority of the vein was tapped? No.

Instead, have the world save the location of ore nodes, and check against distances to these when determining what ores are nearby. When the ore vein itself is mined out, the location of the ore node remains stored, and things like gravel and stones won't magically lose awareness of the presence of ore.

[Ardent 21]

A bit of a problem with the gold pan idea, people could still place gravel in ore-rich areas to collect more of it. Maybe rather than run a check for nearby ores at every click, we seed gravel with metadata at worldgen that gives a % chance to yield an ore. Once used with a pan the % drops to zero, regardless of its yield. That way, we can transport gravel anywhere to do the sifting and it will still work just the same; and if the gravel can be right-clicked with the pan in the same way that a hoe or prospector pick works, the landscape doesn't have to be mutilated by the effort.

Maybe we seed raw stone with metadata as well, so we aren't dependent on the ore itself or arbitrary nodes and placed blocks can't be used to detect ores.

For the problem of rocks, maybe dirt and grass that hasn't been placed by a person can also have a % chance to drop a rock as well. Not that hard to believe and rather covert. Otherwise, maybe a mod command can be made available to seed a targeted spot with stones of a various type (or the biome default) in a defined radius.

[AmoebaMan 7]

The problem with metadata is that two items cannot stack unless their metadata is identical. You would essentially be decreasing the stack size of gravel/stone to 1.

[Voulxe 7]

Goldpans cannot be stacked. So when taking gravel with a goldpan somewhere. The goldpan has the metadata with the 'origin' or 'ore' that it has.

Regardless of the location where you wash the gravel.

There will be still the problem of collectng gravel and placing it near an ore-rich area. <yawn> Is it really worth that effort. For example having two players collecting gravel and another two using the goldpans. After a few hours of gameplay I would count to three and would show that finger to the screen.

Using 17+ charcoal, melting 16 coppernuggets, getting 1 copper ingot - that is only worth the time for silly people.

my 5 cents ,-)

[Krski 36]

I would like to see rock piles more common than rocks (i know , now we are having everything piles) if they would be implemented like 5 rocks in each one .Like you said not every one rocks per 20 metters

[VegasGoat 51]

The fix for this? Regenerated rocks don't drop ores. This may not be realistic, but if infinite small ores are really a problem, this isn't really too difficult of a problem to fix.

Dunk responded to this in that other thread. Basically this would result in false negatives, where there could be ore in an area still but the surface rocks wouldn't ever give any, making it seem like there's none. They don't appear to want that happening.

In real life, you can't use a sluice to obtain infinite amounts of ore, so why can you in TFC?

Again from Dunk in that other thread, it's not infinite because there's no way to make new gravel, so it would eventually run out (or not be worth the effort of running 3000 blocks to get more gravel). Especially now that the sluices are fixed to return all types of nearby ore, it takes many stacks of gravel to get enough of a single type of metal for a full ingot.

Gold pans should be able to be used to prospect gravel/sand in exactly the same way rocks are currently: breaking a block of gravel/sand while holding a pan will have a chance to drop a nearby ore instead of (or with) the gravel itself.

Already covered by others, but this is the same problem, you can still import gravel from elsewhere.

Is it at all believable that traces and nuggets of ore would magically vanish from the surrounding rock as soon as the majority of the vein was tapped?

If the propick starts giving false positives it will be completely useless. In this case you're sacrificing a little believability for the sake of gameplay. It still has to be fun. A propick giving false positives is not fun. I don't want to go back to branch mining like in vanilla.

[Ardent 21]

Gravel outside the range of ores doesn't need to be generated with metadata, and using gravel with a goldpan can strip the metadata from it, allowing it to be stacked. Otherwise we could distinguish between pre-generated gravel and player-moved gravel the same way that leaves in vanilla MC are, which renders the issue moot.

[VegasGoat 51]

Yeah, you could have two different gravel types: "natural" and "moved" (different block IDs, breaking natural gravel drops moved gravel). Then gold pans could just work on the natural gravel blocks only, and you could keep sluices but take away the ability to throw gravel on top. You'd only be able to put gravel in the sluice using a gold pan, so when you pick up the gravel you could store some metadata in the filled gold pan and transfer that metadata to the sluice.

That would probably work, assuming the devs see pretty-much-infinite sluices as a problem they want to try and fix.

Still though, unless gravel starts generating in the lower regions (maybe in those underground lakes) it'll be impossible to sluice the higher tier metals at all.

Edit: Also, maybe also allow buckets to carry larger quantities of natural gravel.

[AmoebaMan 7]

That sounds like a plausible solution, and a different item ID isn't even needed if the same system is used that prevents artificial leaves from despawning in Vanilla MC.

[Ardent 21]

It would also probably eliminate the need for extra IDs if we did logs that way as well.