Mine Support Repair = Ugh

[Massa]

snip

Most of the time i mine it is without supports tho

You have managed to make it unequivocally clear you are not a miner and have little to no experience mining.

[VDZ]

I am not saying having to repair stuff is fun, all i am saying is that supports were hugely buffed since last "experiment" with them and we should be actually grateful that we can use them to mine bot-like, instead of asking "MORE! MORE!". My point is - mining is already easy. By agreeing to this small change, players will just ask for another and another change. I'd rly like to see old, nerfed supports back, which would actually force players to plan ahead when mining, instead of just spamming supports and afk-mining.

'Old supports' required zero maintenance. Then there was a change which briefly added absurd maintenance requirements (they cost you more metal than you actually got from mining out the nodes supported by them), which was very quickly fixed by drastically reducing repair costs and increasing support durability. You definitely haven't played with the initial maintenance costs; supports were completely useless and if you ran into a wall of potential cave-in tiles in a node you just had to abandon it.

Minesweeper is a fun mechanic for tunneling to reach places (though for tunneling to increase travel efficiency you really need straight lines), but it should be possible to mine out nodes and the function of mine supports is to make it possible to mine those cave-in tiles. The high maintenance costs made them fail in that function and made them completely worthless (it was better to just minesweeper all the time and not waste metal on supports). And for reference: Those 'old supports' you're so nostalgic for were in the game for a total of 12 days, during 3.5 of which nobody was able to build them (cavein prevention damage was introduced at w11 start, and it took time for people to get their first metal; it was drastically reduced in 'Pushing Millet' on day 12 of w11).

[Zepar72]

Minesweeper is a fun mechanic for tunneling to reach places (though for tunneling to increase travel efficiency you really need straight lines), but it should be possible to mine out nodes and the function of mine supports is to make it possible to mine those cave-in tiles. The high maintenance costs made them fail in that function and made them completely worthless (it was better to just minesweeper all the time and not waste metal on supports). And for reference: Those 'old supports' you're so nostalgic for were in the game for a total of 12 days, during 3.5 of which nobody was able to build them (cavein prevention damage was introduced at w11 start, and it took time for people to get their first metal; it was drastically reduced in 'Pushing Millet' on day 12 of w11).

Yup, those are the ones i were talking about. They made mining more engaging and realistic, as you couldn't magically turn 1 bar of metal in 1 stockpile of ore. Supports turned into expensive tool to a) turn low Q metal into high Q ore, or b) to make straight, nice-looking and more efficent roads. With how supports are now, it's just an undergorund farming. Guess i'm more into mining than farming, but it might just be me.

[MagicManICT]

For the sake of this argument:

up, those are the ones i were talking about. They made mining more engaging and realistic, as you couldn't magically turn 1 bar of metal in 1 stockpile of ore.

Given that one stockpile of ore, early in the game, may not even make one metal bar, the equation is all wrong. Players have to come out on the positive side to continue to want to engage with a mechanic. Note that I'm talking about new players, the ones that aren't already emotionally and intellectually invested into the game. The vets know they just have to find the "better ore" and get better skills to start turning a profit.

That said, Haven is a game. Mining is an abstraction with means of being practical for the players. And FWIW... before the use of structural steel in mining engineering, supports used minimal amounts of metal, mostly nails to hold support timbers in place, sometimes iron (bronze, even copper early on) banding to reinforce weak points in the support timbers. Thus, at best "nuggets" of metal.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

When supports were hugely nerfed, everyone cried and it got reworked, as "not everyone wants to play minesweeper".
Now it's pretty much free to mine undefinied ammount of rock, looking how cheap supports are, people cry as "nobody wants to take nuggets / wood (that actually GROWS underground) with them to repair".
Will the next step be "nobody wants to deal with supports, remove cave-ins"?
After that let's go with "Mining isn't fun, make caves just empty places with ore lying around" ?
Then let's remove the whole coal + smelting stuff, cuz it's a bother too . . Why can't we mine metal bars?

To noone's surprise this is my feelings on the whole subject.
Quit yer whinin' get back to minin'

[Archiplex]

how about this

make it so that when a support is destroyed, it doesn't suddenly trigger caveins everywhere, it just prevents the very last one that was going to trigger before it collapsed; that way people can bash them without issue, and if you're mining under 2 or more supports you don't need to monitor each and every single one for the random ticks

also, make it so that rocks and ore go straight on the ground so that while i'm area mining i can actually fucking stop mining in time without my mouse getting spammed by items which makes it hard for me to click quickly, which in turn potentially means i might break open 2 tiles in a row and break the support.

[Zepar72]

Given that one stockpile of ore, early in the game, may not even make one metal bar, the equation is all wrong. Players have to come out on the positive side to continue to want to engage with a mechanic. Note that I'm talking about new players, the ones that aren't already emotionally and intellectually invested into the game. The vets know they just have to find the "better ore" and get better skills to start turning a profit.

That said, Haven is a game. Mining is an abstraction with means of being practical for the players. And FWIW... before the use of structural steel in mining engineering, supports used minimal amounts of metal, mostly nails to hold support timbers in place, sometimes iron (bronze, even copper early on) banding to reinforce weak points in the support timbers. Thus, at best "nuggets" of metal.

Yea, don't think this is going anywhere, but just to answer to that. The ammount of metal needed to get more metal is actually 0, as supports aren't neccesary to mine, they just make it easier and faster, for the price of metal. So using the "but the poor sprucecaps" argument here doesn't really fit. Especially with the addition of natural supports in caves, even hermits can easily get some metal without investing any, given some time and patience.

Talking real life, not really useful but if you insist, no underground mining operation does what hearlings do - clean all ore and leave nice empty cave. Some parts of the ore are left to support the overhead rocks. Actually that's how ore nodes looked like with the "terrible RIP supports patch" - some parts of the node were left and made natural supports. I guess players felt robbed of that precious few pieces of ore and were really angry about it, if i recall the situation on the forum from that time correctly. Man-made supports IRL are used more for tunneling, or in some cases to support the cave ceiling for some time, after which the ceiling closes or collapses. If that was implemented into the game - all supports decaying with time, people would go ballistic. So i don't think any IRL arguments are of any importance here.

[Massa]

When supports were hugely nerfed, everyone cried and it got reworked, as "not everyone wants to play minesweeper".
Now it's pretty much free to mine undefinied ammount of rock, looking how cheap supports are, people cry as "nobody wants to take nuggets / wood (that actually GROWS underground) with them to repair".
Will the next step be "nobody wants to deal with supports, remove cave-ins"?
After that let's go with "Mining isn't fun, make caves just empty places with ore lying around" ?
Then let's remove the whole coal + smelting stuff, cuz it's a bother too . . Why can't we mine metal bars?

To noone's surprise this is my feelings on the whole subject.
Quit yer whinin' get back to minin'

For success and long term enjoyment of the game, add content and updates to the exact opposite of Lunarius' opinions and wishes.

[Zentetsuken]

My point is - mining is already easy. By agreeing to this small change, players will just ask for another and another change.

this has to be the laziest and least logical inference to back up an opinion I've heard in a long time

players are asking for and getting small tweaks all the time, both in favor of and against tedium

your argument, just like lunarius's is "I just don't like it"


we get it, your opinion has been noted and repeated 10 times, I think you can safely move on

[Zepar72]

this has to be the laziest and least logical inference to back up an opinion I've heard in a long time

players are asking for and getting small tweaks all the time, both in favor of and against tedium

your argument, just like lunarius's is "I just don't like it"


we get it, your opinion has been noted and repeated 10 times, I think you can safely move on

This is pretty much "i don't like it" vs "i like it and if you don't, then shut up". Good arguments on both sides