Cavesweeper: Cave-In mechanics explained

[Sevenless]

I added this to the mining section of my guide. But I feel a lot of people playing the game would benefit from the testing I did who are probably past needing to read my guide for everyday stuff. So I wanted to post it for those players.

Cave ins work in a similar fashion to minesweeper. Unstable tiles are randomly seeded throughout the caves, and mining into one will always cause a cave in. The game warns you if an unstable tile is nearby by displaying dust particles floating from the ceiling when you knock out an adjacent tile.



It's a little hard to convey in a static picture, but you get the idea. Now, this dust means one of the 8 tiles surrounding it is marked as unstable. When you're wall prospecting you don't get any warning and can mine straight into these unstable tiles causing a collapse. But when you're mining and/or making tunnels you can start to figure things out. Here's an example of an area I was clearing with coal. Any place you see a coal pile, there was dust from the ceiling. I screwed up and caused a collapse, that's marked by the bat hide.



And unfortunately, science demands sacrifice. I mined out the furthest right unstable tile that I'd marked, and got the painful but expected result.



And there you have it. If you'd prefer to dig support free, assuming there's not too many unstable tiles and you're careful you're more than able to do so if you choose.

[Hervarth]

That is really impressive work.

[Mashadar]

Awesome, thanks for testing this out. I must say, I love these minesweeper mining mechanics.

[Phizuol]

I wanted to upvote or like this post somehow. Quality content right here. Nice work. Cool feature by the devs as well.

[insanechef]

this is a great help, thank you

[Sevenless]

Awesome, thanks for testing this out. I must say, I love these minesweeper mining mechanics.

I'm actually enjoying it too. I like it a lot better than the old system of cave ins.

[Okocim]

and supports seem pretty much useless atm ;p

[Sevenless]

and supports seem pretty much useless atm ;p

With appropriate client mods probably, trying to track all the unstable tiles is really fiddly without client support I found.

If the lower you go the more dense the unstable tiles are, that would both make a lot of sense and imo be a good system.

[lordrio]

So if you hit this unstable node, even if you are zigzaging will still cause a collapse?

[Sevenless]

So if you hit this unstable node, even if you are zigzaging will still cause a collapse?

Zigzagging is now meaningless. Completely different system.

Also re-evaluating "supports being useless". It can be quite a pain mining supportless, you have to be really careful.