Towercap mushroom cave in problem

[zuhurat83]

so i axed down a towercap inside my own cave. it was planted way after the excavation. and when i chopped it down it still caused a cave in. i think this isnt supposed to happen coz it hasnt shielded any caveins in its lifetime.

[animary]

The towercap was the support, destroying it was the same as destroying any support.

[zuhurat83]

i excavated the area around my mine hole and planted a towercap near the ladder. then i cut down the tree and had cavein upon my head. previous cave in happened before the mushroom was there.

[vatas]

To be clear, the way Mine Supports are supposed to work:

1. Support is built/planted and starts with a record that it has prevented zero cave-ins.
2. Whenever it prevents a cave-in, it updates the record (this could be a smile binary/boolian value ie. true/false, havenät seen the code or anything like that.)
3. When a support is destroyed/chopped, it will refer to its record on whether or not to start a massive cave-in.

Best option from devs to eliminate confusion and/or eliminate the bug would be to add an ability to inspect Mine supports and have it say if they are safe or unsafe to be removed.

[Zapt13]

I'm not actually sure if the support checks itself, or if the squares in the newly unsupported area each check themselves. It might not matter that the support wasn't there when the excavation happened, if it was the last support holding up a square that was "unstable" and it was newly unsupported it would still collapse.

The support gets damaged when it prevents a cave-in, and if allowed to be destroyed, then many cave-ins happen at once, right? I don't believe the support remembers which of its protected tiles hurt it, or if a different support later takes ownership of the support of a particular tile because it was built in closer proximity, for example?

[Jenno]

Does the game even care when a tree is planted by a player after world generation?Does it keep track of that?
Natural mine supports might cause cave-ins by default and your situation hasn't been considered when the code was written.

[vatas]

If a Towercap is planted in an open area and it only ever covers cave tiles (not walls) then it should NOT cause any cave-ins when chopped. If it does, then it's not working as intended and that sounds definitely like a bug.

[zuhurat83]

i planted a towercap after excavating around my mine hole. it never absorbed any cave ins but still caused one. how is this not a bug lol

[Zapt13]

It does sound like a bug, no one has said it isn't as far as I can tell. If you are seeking validation from the community, then I think you have it.

On the other hand I'm trying to understand exactly what happened to you so the chance that others can recreate and/or confirm it is better and the poor soul reviewing the code knows around which edge cases to be most vigilant.

Were there other supports in use during the original excavation? Perhaps the TowerCap was used as a replacement for some of the originals and then the originals were taken down? In effect the TowerCap could perhaps become the support for previously disturbed squares if the original support was removed?

[animary]

Towercaps, and other large mushrooms used for support, do not take damage as you mine in their radius; hence they never need repair but also give no indication of mine status, the entire area could be on verge of collapse.