Make sluices work permanently in one place?

[Delerium76 3]

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.    

ok, while I agree with you about all these points, you aren't really talking about the sluice.  To be honest, a sluice isn't a prospecting tool in real life as has been pointed out.  It's used in conjunction with a gold pan for a hobbyist to collect gold and rare gemstones from streams.  The only thing it tells you about location is that gold deposits are "Somewhere" up-stream, which in all honesty could be quite far from that spot, and likewise it relies on your gravel and debris collection to actually come from that spot (which isn't how the sluice works in-game, as you could get your gravel from anywhere.

 

Here's my thoughts.  Most, if not all, lakes in the game have gravel at the bottom. Worldgen could place "special" gravel at these locations (changed to regular gravel if manually picked up), and when attaching a sluice to this lake it would "convert" this special gravel (perhaps in a radius around the sluice) to regular gravel, with ore being the byproduct.  Now, the type of ore could still be indicative of the minerals below the lake, or it could be random.  This would allow us to acquire more minerals from larger bodies of water, but still be based on "using something to get something" instead of getting "something for nothing".

[Bunsan 323]

Well since the trend amoungst those wanting sluices to be changed are discussing how they realistically work then I suggest that they then be made completely realistic. A sluice should only produce tiny gold flecks and the rare gem. Concidering the large dredging operations who function in high gold areas with multiple dredging rigs equipt with modern backhoes would dream of a year in which they produced a single gold ingot (~$560000usd) we should scale it appropriately.

Believability, gameplay/balance and reality need to all be considered.

[Delerium76 3]

Well since the trend amoungst those wanting sluices to be changed are discussing how they realistically work then I suggest that they then be made completely realistic. A sluice should only produce tiny gold flecks and the rare gem. Concidering the large dredging operations who function in high gold areas with multiple dredging rigs equipt with modern backhoes would dream of a year in which they produced a single gold ingot (~$560000usd) we should scale it appropriately.Believability, gameplay/balance and reality need to all be considered.

Your last line is exactly it, but not in the point you seem to be trying to make.  Gameplay/balance would be that the quantity produced in the game be greater than real life (contrary to your first paragraph) simply for the sake of usefulness, otherwise it will never be used, and the believability/reality aspect would be HOW the tool works.

[Bunsan 323]

In the first part I was being facetious.  It was a counterpoint to the points being raised to discount the current functioning of the sluice. The sluice exists in its current form after being abused in its past form.  They came to this mechanic by considering believability, gameplay/balance and reality. The past form, that was removed, resulted much more in what people are requesting which is easily abused and upsets the balance of the game as designed by the devs. The current form is a result of so many people being unhappy that it was removed in the first place.

[Delerium76 3]

In the first part I was being facetious.  It was a counterpoint to the points being raised to discount the current functioning of the sluice. The sluice exists in its current form after being abused in its past form.  They came to this mechanic by considering believability, gameplay/balance and reality. The past form, that was removed, resulted much more in what people are requesting which is easily abused and upsets the balance of the game as designed by the devs. The current form is a result of so many people being unhappy that it was removed in the first place.

oh perhaps you are right there, but I'm not one of those players who ever saw it or used it in it's "abused" form, yet I still find it's functioning a bit understated for the trouble it takes to make it.  I literally tossed mine away after using it once.  Perhaps later I might use one again once to "prospect" and find a rare mineral I can't find, but to be honest, I feel like that prospecting ability should be attached to something other than a "sluice", because intuitively people just won't logically think, "oh I should carry this big thing around me for miles, take a while to set it up at each location, just to see what metals are in the ground below me"  For this purpose the prospecting tool should be more portable.

[Bunsan 323]

The prospecting pick reaches down 13 blocks and surface nuggets indicate ore up to 30 blocks. Sea level is 144 I believe. That is ~10% and 20% respectively. So that leaves a huge amount of area unsampled. The pro pick is an amazing too, but you have to be quite close to the ore to detect it.

Sluices are not hard or expensive to make. Setting them up the first time is annoying, but once you learn how it isn't bad. I'm not claiming the sluices are perfect, but they do fill a hole that is important in SMP. My issue is that for whatever reason some people want it just permanently kick our free nuggets. Even the best scenario of what the devs will give the output will be so small that your time would be better spent finding the vein and digging a few ores.

[Delerium76 3]

The prospecting pick reaches down 13 blocks and surface nuggets indicate ore up to 30 blocks. Sea level is 144 I believe. That is ~10% and 20% respectively. So that leaves a huge amount of area unsampled. The pro pick is an amazing too, but you have to be quite close to the ore to detect it.Sluices are not hard or expensive to make. Setting them up the first time is annoying, but once you learn how it isn't bad. I'm not claiming the sluices are perfect, but they do fill a hole that is important in SMP. My issue is that for whatever reason some people want it just permanently kick our free nuggets. Even the best scenario of what the devs will give the output will be so small that your time would be better spent finding the vein and digging a few ores.

Yet the usability problem still exists due to the fact that until you can make a red steel bucket (pretty far into the game), you can only build a sluice around surface water, and even then as I have mentioned before, it's annoyingly time consuming to build one around a lake or ocean due to the sand/dirt/gravel sliding everywhere as you dig your trenches for the sluice, requiring at least 2 blocks below water level to complete.  Then you have to wait eons for the sluice to even find something (if it even does), and with such a low probability of a return, there's no guarantee that it will spit out a representation of the metals below it before it hits the "exhausted" point, then you are moving on to the next location and waiting again.  None of this even sounds appealing, and to be honest it would probably be faster finding everything by roaming the landscape just searching that "10-20%" that you claim is small.  So yeah, sluice is probably useless to me.