![[de]](/mwf/flags/de.png "Germany")
Wouldn't that turn the pickaxe from a nice-to-have luxury item into a mandatory item for mining that you would basically have to carry alongside your shovel at all times, taking another inventory space?Wouldn't it have the same outcome if the shovel was changed to dig through coal&firestone only slowly (current pickaxe speed) and the pickaxe kept as a luxury item as it is now?
What combining all mining equipment into a single inventory item then? In the beginning you have a shovel that can only do soft materials. Then you upgrade to the shovel+pickaxe item, which automatically switches to pickaxe mode when you click coal. In some scenarios, you can also upgrade to shovel+diamond pickaxe, which could also mine rock and gold.
I am in favour of such a multi-purpose solution, but this one really requires a cool and clear graphical representation.
I do like the drill sketch, so it would be shovel -> pickaxe -> drill?
But how would you make digging visible with a pickaxe? I thought it would be a one in all tool which can be upgraded.
The combined tool could be a handle with a pickaxe on one end and a shovel on the other end.
Nothing just that pickaxing with a shovel seems strange, but with the tool from Sven's image it looks good of course and we have one tool for everything.
Hm, don't know. I don't like the forced 'represent everything' look. What's wrong with shoveling with the shovel and pickaxing with the pickaxe?
You'd also see the tool in the Clonk's hand if he's not shoveling or pickaxing. In that case, you would have to decide for one.But I guess showing just the last used tool there would be fine, too.
My impression was that the different tools (shovel, pickaxe, drill) with different abilities (dig earth, dig soft material, dig hard material) were different upgrade stages and could easily be different objects. Because I had some kind of upgrade processing in mind e.g. 'produce shovel' -> 'shovel + 5 metal in workshop' -> 'pickaxe' etc.The pickaxe then replaces the shovel in every aspect. Correct me if I got this wrong.
>The pickaxe then replaces the shovel in every aspect. Correct me if I got this wrong.
The pickaxe currently is a lot slower than the shovel and also digging with it is a lot more cumbersome, because you have to aim on the material chunks. Currently, I would favour a shovel over a pickaxe if I was to dig myself a tunnel
Of course, the pickaxe should be faster when 'shoveling'. Maybe automatically switch modes determined by how far away the cursor is?
The mode can be switched depending on which material is in cursor direction. It's not necessery for the player to decide that.But thinking of clicking far away: If the player clicks far away near pickaxeable-material, the script could automatically search for the nearest solid pixel and pick that. It would make picking much easier.
What about putting all 3 mining items into one single normal slot? It can contain shovel, pickaxe and drill at once, like a stack of items. And when you have the slot selected and mine somethig, the animation the clonk is doing automatically shifts to the right one for the purpose. For earth it's automatically digging, when the clonk hits something hard, it switches to the drilling animation.
this branch move seems weird to me, the opening post seems to be missing.
![[th]](/mwf/flags/th.png "Thailand")
I don't like the direction into which this is going. Let me add my opinion and explain why I think the solution I/Sven2 proposed is the best.The issues
Pickaxe skips major parts of the mining process
The pickaxe is easily available as one of the first items you build and actually, you even get pickaxes as start items in most scenarios. So, even though using the pickaxe is slow and tedious, whenever I play rounds, most people use the pickaxe most of the time and only few explosives. The reason is that the pickaxe is just very handy. It allows you to skip these parts of the normal mining process...
1. Find and mine coal, bring it back to the base
2. Find and mine sulphur, bring it back to the base
3. Build the alchemy lab
4. Produce explosives
5. Get and use the explosives back to the mining site (you can only carry a few, then you need to go back)
... and replaces it with slow-mo mining. Not very exciting. It is in a way comparable to the mechanic of gold in Clonk Rage.
Explosives on the other hand are fun, but currently they are not that feasible. First the mining process to get to them is quite long, and second, we have a quite boring pickaxe in the game which is nevertheless very handy to have.
Also, for producing explosives in the first place, you need the alchemy lab. But you need metal to construct it, and where do you get that from? From mining ore and coal with the pickaxe! (and building at least a tools workshop, a source of energy and a foundry). The player has access to explosives rather late in the base building.
I think we can all agree that making it even more tedious to use to try to balance it with the explosive way of the the mining process is not the right solution because, because of these two points, the pickaxe is de-facto not a "luxury" but an important part of the mining process. We would only make the game more tedious/boring.
Pickaxe destroys challenges
Additionally to the stuff above, the pickaxe does the following:
6. You can mine for free, no one-time-use explosives wasted
7. You cannot hurt yourself while mining
So, to get through even an immense rock/granite barrier in the landscape is no longer a question of resources (can I produce enough explosives to blast through there?) but a question of time/diligence (will I fall asleep before I picked through there?). I think I don't need to mention that this destroys possibilities for scenario designers to create challenges (barriers) in the landscape because the player can already get through everything with one of his very first items.
Providing challenges is one of the things we wanted to add before the release.
The solution
Admittedly, the current mining process is not that interesting: Just dig out veins of coal and sulphur, no danger involved, and you are done. Really done? Eh no, need to get the quadrillion items back to the lab, ehhhh.
So my solution is:
Make the mining process more interesting and straightforward
The firestone material makes mining for explosives at the same time more dangerous and straightforward. For basic explosives, you don't need to somehow acquire metal, power etc. to build an alchemy lab, only if you need access to better explosives. To produce these must be worthwhile (bigger explosions, more efficient) but not necessary from the start.
Integrate the pickaxe into the mining process rather than marginalize it
De-facto the pickaxe is already part of the mining process. I want to eliminate it as an alternative to skip certain parts of the mining process but integrate it properly. So if you mine for explosives, you must take the pickaxe with you. If you mine for anything else, you leave the pickaxe in your base. The difference to how it is now is that you will actually have the pickaxe with you less often because you only need it for mining explosives and you can't use it for anything else. Now, you better have the pickaxe with you all the time because it is handy.
Add drill for scenarios that rely on the current pickaxe mechanic
Adding a new object for keeping the old pickaxe mechanic for scenarios that are built to rely on it enables us to make it less tedious, more fun. Add effects, sounds and most of all make it faster. Like the grappler, which is also quite unbalanced, the item can be easily excluded from most scenarios by having it built from the inventor's workshop. It does not need to be balanced with the "normal" way to mine.
Remarks about the other solutions
Upgradable shovel
A solution with upgrading the shovel into a pickaxe-shovel is very different from what I plan to do because the pickaxe mechanic is kept: The problem that the pickaxe skips major parts of the mining process and thus makes explosives less feasible alongside all the other points I mentioned under the first headline are not solved. The pickaxe mining must still be "balanced" with the normal explosive mining which I blame to be the reason why the pickaxe is so terribly slow and thus boring to use.
Swiss army pickaxe
However, as I understood the other voices so far, most argued for a solution similar to what I proposed with the addition to not have the shovel, pickaxe and the drill as separate items but make them similar with the only difference that the shovel can only dig soft materials, the pickaxe soft and semi-hard materials and the drill everything. The reason stated for that was that one would save one inventory spot.
I don't really see the connection though. We could also make the woodcutter's axe and the hammer into one object because often you need both while creating buildings. What is wrong with having several tools for one job?
So, if you go into the mine to get explosives, you need to take the shovel and pickaxe with you. So what? After all, if you go into a mine and mine for ore, you also need to take the shovel and a few explosives with you then (but no pickaxe!). No one would get the idea to create a shovel-dynamite or to add dynamite as "ammunition" for the shovel.
The idea is to make the different materials more different. The previous pickaxe made them all the same, one would just mine through everything alike. But just as for crops of wheat and mushroom trees, you need different tools for different materials in the earth. In my opinion this makes the ground earth more diverse because it strips away the conception a bit that it is just a big sameness with the only difference being that different parts poop out different items. A conception that was very much promoted by the "I can mine through everything" pickaxe and that still sticks to you. The addition of firestone and possibly firefluid and perhaps even more "weird materials" might promote this and add more challenges to the landscape.
> The idea is to make the different materials more different. The previous pickaxe made them all the same, one would just mine through everything alike.
That's not true. We have:
-SemiSolid (Earth, Coal, etc.): Shoveled (or pickaxe or explosives, but that's slow)
-Solid (Rock, Gold, etc.): Pickaxe (or explosives, but that's expensive)
-Granite: Explosives to turn into rock, then pickaxe
-Liquids: Pump, reroute to another cave or poof with another liquid (e.g. Lava on Water)
-Sky: Bridge with loam or wall kits
-Brick: Can't be mined. Go around it.
I somehow fear that if we add too many different mining devices, just getting through a mountain with several materials will be annoying because the only "difficulty" will be in carrying those extra devices. We should also make sure that building a basic mining settlement is not too difficult, because scenarios will want to introduce their own obstacles.
A drill that needs a power supply is certainly a very interesting idea because it's different from other mining equipment. But since that is very advanced and requires infrastructure to run, I think it should not be required for the basic settlement materials (coal/ore/sulphur). Maybe it could be used for gems and granite only?
I decided to do a write-up of my impressions and thoughts as well, mainly because I feel that with the currently suggested solution there are still a few issues remaining (and others even introduced).My main concern is that with the pickaxe as a mandatory tool for producing very basic flints, we have another item that we basically need to spawn the player with (in addition to the hammer, shovel, and the hatchet) and it doesn't even fill a unique role.
Also I don't think that "the player would decide for either the shovel or the pickaxe", since 1.) you would never go mining without a shovel and 2.) when mining for firestones, the obvious consequence is that you would want to use the firestones and therefore you would need your usual mining gear anyway.
the firefluid material
I really like this idea! Mainly because it gets rid of the coal-clone sulphur and introduces a new interesting mechanic. However, I am not that fond of using it as the basic material to construct basic firestones but I would suggest that it is the main ingredient for advanced explosives.
I propose that firestones (the objects) can be found as veins in coal, where they can be dug free. But be aware, for coal is inflammable! Don't drop one!
This would reduce the starting-mining-gear to just the shovel again and make the fun explosives more obtainable in the beginning. It would also add a new type of resource (object veins) in a way that is trivial to communicate with the players.
And some remark about the firefluid material - in case I might have understood it incorrectly:
I would suggest that it always turns into the inflammable fluid when removed via pickaxe or explosions - and latter obviously set the fluid on fire. To really obtain the resource, you would have to use barrels to scoop the fluid (which is a lot easier when not on fire, of course).
Also I would suggest that the fluid turns into FlyAshes instead of Ore, since I suspect turning into a very solid material could easily lead to annoying single pixels everywhere.
the pickaxe
I suggest keeping the ability of the pickaxe to dig through solid material like it is now, but not creating any resource objects when doing this.
I think that this benefits most of the current scenarios that rely on the pickaxe mechanic (since those are not about mining anyway - if they were, they should favour explosions). It also keeps the pickaxe as a cool, optional luxury item for mining: you could get rid of the thin layer of rock around your gold to place your explosives better or use it to straighten your tunnels and make way for the lorry.
Since the firefluid material is not "harvested" in the traditional way, the pickaxe would still be useful there (and create that valuable liquid).
This would make the pickaxe a useful, optional item instead of a must-have additional piece of equipment for mining.
the drill
If the drill was just a strong shovel, I would actually suggest rather having some sort of diamond shovel to better communicate it to the player. But I would like the following even more:
Make the drill a strong shovel that can dig through anything and make it use power! That way it would only be useful either in your base or where you can afford power producers. I believe this would be beneficial, since players could create a lot more interesting bases with more ease (for example, you could extend your base smoothly into the bedrock below and construct the really protection-worthy buildings there). It would also add to the feeling that in your base, you are actually the king.
This would also keep all of the items in question "balanced" or feasible for traditional settlement scenarios, while not making them any less interesting for special maps.
Phew, this is a completely different concept.> Firefluid
I gave up on that now though, perhaps at some later point in time, mostly for technical issues
> My main concern is that with the pickaxe as a mandatory tool for producing very basic flints, we have another item that we basically need to spawn the player
Well, as I said, de facto it is mandatory already.
> object veins
I am somewhat reluctant to this:
+ the idea to have one of the most basic/needed material not available as a material but only be obtainable by single objects scattered around the landscape is something I cannot befriend myself with. It is as if loam were the prime building material for structures (instead of rock).
+ it is up to each individual scenario designer where he wants to place the firestones. You can't force them to put them into coal veins
+ it requires every scenario being redone as sulphur cannot just be replaced with another similar material but removed altogether and replaced with some object placement
>I suggest keeping the ability of the pickaxe to dig through solid material like it is now, but not creating any resource objects when doing this.
This solves the "Pickaxe skips major parts of the mining process" issue but not the "Pickaxe destroys challenges" issue. The only advantage gained by doing it like this is that the pickaxe stays to be handy (mining away single pixels, not having to run back to base if you are out of explosives). And by the way, the bigger the explosion radius, the lesser pixel islands will be left on a mined vein. And who has the tiniest explosion radius: The pickaxe. The pickaxe mostly solves it's own issues here.
> drill with power
I find the idea interesting. However, it is quite incompatible with my concept. I would like to know, which scenarios currently rely on the current pickaxe mechanic right now? Perhaps they could just be adapted to work with a powered drill or without the pickaxe at all.
>I gave up on that now though, perhaps at some later point in time, mostly for technical issues
Ah, too bad :(
>Well, as I said, de facto it is mandatory already.
And yet we do not spawn the players with it. Also I think the current, broken situation is not to be taken for a guideline
>only be obtainable by single objects scattered around the landscape
That's why I suggest having firestone veins. "Clusters" if you will
>You can't force them to put them into coal veins
I'd provide a placement function similar to the known ones along the lines of
Firestone_Vein->Place()> it requires every scenario being redone
Do we have any carefully balanced scenarios, resource-wise? I would say we could just try to replace sulphur with coal then and add a
Firestone_Vein->Place() to the script. Not too much effort>but not the "Pickaxe destroys challenges" issue
That is true. One option would be to make the pickaxe itself more rare by having it be made out of diamonds™, making it a late-game/rare item if at all (assuming that diamonds can either be mined with a pickaxe or rarely found by themselves).
>And by the way, the bigger the explosion radius, the lesser pixel islands will be left on a mined vein
Well, I am speaking from ClonkRage experience there. And CR did not have a pickaxe but frequently had places in your mine where one would have been handy
>I would like to know, which scenarios currently rely on the current pickaxe mechanic right now?
I am not sure, actually. Sven?
> I gave up on that now though, perhaps at some later point in time, mostly for technical issues
Too bad indeed. I very much enjoyed mining hellstone in Terraria. It spawns lava when mined and also harms the player when standing on it. You really had to do careful consideration and planning before mining it, like digging out a hole where the lava can flow into. That was fun and refreshing after hours of mining regular metals where the 'only' threat is posed by enemies.
Just to let you know that I was most fond of that particular idea!
Naturally I liked the idea too. A hellstone behaviour would be much easier to implement but firestone is too basic of a material to make it even more dangerous to mine. However, we could always add more weirdish materials if someone had ideas for challenging materials.The technical reasons why I don't want to implement the firefluid now are:
+ fluids in barrels are not usable as construction material because the def is still the barrel when filled up, also a firefluid barrel might be filled up only with 3 (of 300) pixels. To make fluids in barrels useable as a construction material more thought and implementation work has to go into this. Something that I don't want to invest to just have a new material.
+ tests showed that converting the fluid back to firestone/ashes/ore based on
AboveTempConvert didn't work that well, the fluid would turn into the other material far too fast. It didn't look well.+ it's unsolved how to implement the firestone material being turned into firefluid
+ it's unsolved how to implement the firefluid being poofed into superflints. Also, for such a reaction one wouldn't need an extra material. One could sport the same reaction to lava into water (for example)
I see. Just this:> fluids in barrels are not usable as construction material
That's not true. Have a look at loam which is constructed from 100 pixels of water and 25 pixels of earth.
I would like to hear the opinion of the others on that matter. Otherwise I don't think how we can reach a compromise we are all content with.
First of all, thanks for your (and Zappers) write-up of the situation. Describing the problem like this really helps getting right into the discussion.I took the liberty of recapping once again while adding my commentary.
Problem 1:
We want to solve the problem that players don't use explosives to mine, but instead the cheaper, slower pickaxe.
Newton:
- make explosives more easily available by introducing firestone material (which in turn needs the pickaxe)
- make mining harder by introducing materials of different hardness which can't be mined by the pickaxe
Zapper:
- make explosives more easily available by introducing fireliquid and object-clusters of firestone (no pickaxe needed)
- make mining with pickaxe impossible by removing the ability to extract the resource objects
Other:
- Upgrades or groups of similar tools to regain the abilities of the pickaxe that we are about to remove ( Which sort-of-kind-of just pushes the problem onto some more rare items instead of solving it, but well )
Problem 2:
The pickaxe can basically remove every landscape pixel, thus posing a problem for the scenario designer who wants to restrict access to some areas with solid material.
Newton:
- Already solved by introducing harder materials that can't be mined by a pickaxe
Zapper:
- Make the pickaxe into a luxury item, not a mandatory start item
- Introduce new drill object that uses resources to drill away material for terraforming purposes
My thoughts:
I propose the following for explosives: Just to see how it works, introduce both the mineable firestone-material and the object-clusters of firestone in e.g. coal. No need to balance this at all right now: Just test how well each method works, see what happens if we reverse the current situation ("too few explosives to really get going" to "certainly enough explosives to mine with"). Fine-tuning the amount can come later: We'd just want to get our feet wet as soon as possible.
For the pickaxe, I suggest introducing the materials of different hardness as a first step: For designing unreachable places, granite can be used, which then is un-pickaxe-able. That's totally fitting, because no one mines granite for rocks anyways. Leave rock, ore and other resources as it is for now, as we'd want to see how they actually get mined once there are more explosives readily available. We can still make them un-pickaxe-able, "slower to mine" or not yield resource objects later on if we still deem it necessary.
Un-pickaxe-able materials need to give feedback that they can't be mined: Upon hitting those with the pickaxe, blue sparks, a sharp sound and the animation played in reverse (pickaxe "rebounding") will clearly communicate that this material is too hard.
The drill might still be a nice idea, but wouldn't really come into play as a part of the solution here. It'd would address another problem ("Terraforming is tedious and boring").
If noone except for Newton, you and me are interested in this anymore, I'll add my two pence again:I'd have nothing against starting a step slower. For example, making explosives more easily available without heavly changing the pickaxe at the same time to see how it works out.
Adding the firestone/firefluid material would be pretty cool, though. Maybe I can find some time to look into a nicer way of conversion engine-wise, if we decide that we want to try this
I am interested in this, I just don't feel like contributing a fourth competiting concept is of much help. :P
Sorry for the late reply, was on holiday :-)>
Problem 1:
> We want to solve the problem that players don't use explosives to mine, but instead the cheaper, slower pickaxe.
> Newton:
> - make mining harder by introducing materials of different hardness which can't be mined by the pickaxe
> Matthias:
> For the pickaxe, I suggest introducing the materials of different hardness as a first step: For designing unreachable places, granite can be used, which then is un-pickaxe-able.
This is already the case in the current snapshot. A while ago, I modified the BlastFree function to have a MaxDensity parameter, modified some material densities and use it on the pickaxe can no longer pick granite. You need explosives to blast the granite to rock and then use your pickaxe to go through rock (or use more explosives and blast all the way). Using this parameter, you could even create stronger explosives that blast through brick!
This solution works well in GoldenMountain. You usually walk into the cave with your pickaxe and some dynamite. You use the dynamite to weaken the granite and the pickaxe for everything else. Carrying too much dynamite is very risky in GoldenMountain, because if you fall into lava, it will fuse and explode.
The pickaxe and explosives have very distinct roles in GoldenMountain and both are used. GoldenMountain is also a case where combining the shovel with the pickaxe would be nice, because your inventory is limited but both pickaxe and shovel are just used to get through various materials.
Okay, since Sven2 just said that the minimal solution regarding the pickaxe is already in place, I only went to replace sulphur with firestone. Firestone is diggable.
> Firestone is diggable.
Huh? The current state in the repository is not diggable with the shovel. You need the pickaxe.
Btw: I introduced the auto-collection of fragile objects for the pickaxe as well (I had already done this for the shovel), so picked-free firestones are now collected automatically.
Perhaps you could unify this. I already stumbled upon the BlastFree and DigFree functions when I first had the plan to add a third function MineFree: Why not unify them internally into a FreeCircle/FreeShape function?
![[gb]](/mwf/flags/gb.png "United Kingdom")
>Btw: I introduced the auto-collection of fragile objects for the pickaxe as well (I had already done this for the shovel), so picked-free firestones are now collected automatically.
That sentence made my day.
Another topic revive! But I guess this is still an issue:
In Starbound the pickaxe gets dull after a long time, and needs sharpening. From this I got the following idea:
Make the pickaxe go dull in relatively short time in Clonk. This would keep it's ability of handiness for smoothing certain terrains, but also it would not substitute explosives. Say after you used the pickaxe for 20 seconds (just an example, could be more) - it is dull, and you would need to sharpen it up again in the tool shop. This sharpening could also cost material. You could still use the pickaxe efficiently around your base - but further away it becomes a hassle to always repair it again.
In Starbound the pickaxe gets dull after a long time, and needs sharpening. From this I got the following idea:
Make the pickaxe go dull in relatively short time in Clonk. This would keep it's ability of handiness for smoothing certain terrains, but also it would not substitute explosives. Say after you used the pickaxe for 20 seconds (just an example, could be more) - it is dull, and you would need to sharpen it up again in the tool shop. This sharpening could also cost material. You could still use the pickaxe efficiently around your base - but further away it becomes a hassle to always repair it again.
Personally, I really enjoy slowly hacking my way through a mountain with just a pickaxe. With explosives, I always need to worry whether I waste too many that I might need later so I only use them on granite.Explosives are used to blast granite, so they do have their place in the game. Isn't that enough?
I prefer explosions for mining, it's faster and things go boom.With firestone you always have pretty much explosives around all the time. I'd prefer the dynamite crate, but you HAVE to use 5 dynamite at once, even when you'd only need 3, so most of the time you can't use it efficiently.
I fully agree on the joy of hacking through mountains. That's one of the things that I really like when playing OpenClonk.
Indeed it is also something I like, for making paths or for cleaning up some small patches of hard materials. If people prefer using explosives they can do so, I do agree that dynamite and the dynamite box are rather expensive in terms of both time and resources, to be compelling alternatives.
One way of making dynamite more effective would be if the explosion size would scale up (like in Clonk Rage). So 2x dynamite on the same spot would have the radius of a superflint there.
Yes, for this the pickaxe is really handy. Smoothing with explosions is wasting explosives (and pretty difficult).
>Indeed it is also something I like, for making paths or for cleaning up some small patches of hard materials.
Yes, for this the pickaxe is really handy. Smoothing with explosions is wasting explosives (and pretty difficult).
I'm not under the impression that the pickaxe really substitutes explosives. That impression purely derives from personal experience. But for me, the pickaxe gets dull after 20 seconds of super slow mining and I crave for dynamite.
I have never been a big fan of the pickaxe. But I think we should try to make explosives more interesting before making the pickaxe even more annoying to use.For example, explosions could scale up when multiple explosives are on one spot (like you suggested). That could even be a linear scale-up in radius (which is a quadratic scale-up of the explosion area).
Or we could have that more realistic ray-system for explosions, that Sven once suggested: explosions would not be a circle but go further when there is nothing in the way and would penetrate material less deeply - the overall explosion radius could be increased then
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