A possible way to make mining more fun

[sayerulz]

At the moment, mining is really very boring. You point at an asteroid and hold click. Not really much fun. But then I thought about minecraft, and how mining is much more fun in that game. And I wanted to find out why. There is the danger in minecraft caves, but starmade already has pirates, and while mining one is likely not going to be in a very combat-ready ship. So danger, or at least the threat of a dangerous situation arising, is there. So what else is there? The only other aspect I can think of that would seriously set them apart in terms of how fun it is is rarity. Any minecraft player knows that great moment when, after all that digging, they find diamonds and that makes it all feel worth it. Even finding iron is fun. So how to replicate that in starmade? One way is to make ore rarer but more valuable, but that would just mean more time spent shooting beams at asteroids and getting just rock. The way to do it, in my opinion, is to make it so that, in any given asteroid field, most of the asteroids are just rock, and not worth mining. However, SOME asteroids would just have a thin crust of rock, with the inside being all ore. So groupings of asteroids would still have the same amount of ore, but it would be more concentrated. This would, I feel, add the exitement that mining in starmade has been missing, with one taking surface samples of many asteroids and coming up with nothing, then finally striking gold, and finding a huge cache of ore.

 

[CyberTao]

You do realize that asteroids respawn, yes? People would just find the ones that gave the high amount and set up shop near them. Whats more, the higher amounts of rock in the majority of asteroids would just push more people towards planet mining, and annoy people due to increased grind (cause all it's doing is increasing grind).

 

[ltmauve]

I think your idea won't work, simply because asteroids are in known locations. With minecraft, there are huge volumes that can contain a resource cluster. With starmade, not so much, especially compared to the mining rate of a midstream player.

 

[sayerulz]

Asteroids respawning in the same place could be a problem, but the grind increase an encouraging planet mining are not. If you look at my OP, there would still be the same amount of ore in an asteroid cluster. People can just drill a hole one or two blocks down, check if there is ore, and if there is none, move on. If there is, however, people will get a huge amount of resources quickly, and it would likely decrease grind because less time would be spent digging out all of the little ore clusters on normal asteroids, and they could instead just mine out a single ore rich one.

 

[CyberTao]

Something tells me that finding a cluster of 7 rocks, and only 1 of them having any value, would lead to a negative reaction. There is no joy of discovery in a yes or no situation. Like Itam said, we already know where it can be, and rocks are good money makers as well (Shop dependency is a bad thing).

 

[Valiant70]

I like the idea of rarity, but I don't think this is quite the way to do it. I have yet to come up with anything better though.

 

[Gandrac]

My suggestion concerning this topic is that mining should be more rewarding if you actually mine the ore-veins selectively.
To achieve this we would need some material alongside the normal resources that would be dangerous to mine. Maybe it would create a feedback that could damage your ship/shields, maybe you just woke up some asteroid dwelling space creatures, maybe you just sucked up a pirate homing beacon or maybe it would degrade the quality of your already gathered resources. You could still build powerful automated mining-ships with uggly big arrays but it would be less effective and more dangerous to just blindly eat an asteroid or planet. This would also help the realistic scale of the game without making planets bigger and therefore impact the performance.

Wait.. do we have actual ore-veins? Ore-veins are really important for motivation and the felling of success while mining.

 

[Kenshkrix]

Wait.. do we have actual ore-veins? Ore-veins are really important for motivation and the felling of success while mining.

Not as far as I know.

In that line of thought, I'd suggest adding another kind of asteroid instead of changing the current ones. So while there'd still be a lot of asteroids with clusters of ore spread fairly evenly, there could also be asteroids with all their ore contained in a few large veins, simplifying the extraction process.

For newer players or smaller operations it would be nice to find a dense pocket of ore instead of sifting through tons of rock, for established miners they're probably just going to eat the asteroids whole anyways, so it's not a big deal.

 

[Valiant70]

My suggestion concerning this topic is that mining should be more rewarding if you actually mine the ore-veins selectively.
To achieve this we would need some material alongside the normal resources that would be dangerous to mine. Maybe it would create a feedback that could damage your ship/shields, maybe you just woke up some asteroid dwelling space creatures, maybe you just sucked up a pirate homing beacon or maybe it would degrade the quality of your already gathered resources. You could still build powerful automated mining-ships with uggly big arrays but it would be less effective and more dangerous to just blindly eat an asteroid or planet. This would also help the realistic scale of the game without making planets bigger and therefore impact the performance.

Wait.. do we have actual ore-veins? Ore-veins are really important for motivation and the felling of success while mining.

There's a fairly simple way to do that. Add a bonus if salvage beams hit nothing but ore. It would be easiest to get the bonus with a single beam. Perhaps a particular effect or slave (missile slave?) would cause beams to auto-target ore within a 3-meter radius or something.