So are all ore veins the same shape?

[Pernicious]

Was hoping to post a screenshot here, but it seems like you need to host it elsewhere and hotlink. Oh well, this could be a hard thread to explain. 

 

So, quick question - are all ore veins roughly the same shape? After setting up a few mines, I started noticing that all of them so far, went down directly for about 8 blocks (with nothing around it), before becoming much wider, in an almost predictable manner. So I excavated two new mine sites, but instead of mining out the desired resource, I mined everything EXCEPT the desired resource. They're not identical, but they do look very similar to the pattern I described.

 

Only asking this from another experiment - I tried to ahem.. Bulk mine by causing a mine collapse. It did work - kind of, when the large chunk fell, I had dozens, if not over one hundred of bags of the resource there for the picking, and thought I had found an ultra fast way to mine: Until all the soil collapsed down on it and buried it all and turned it into rubble.  

 

But I figured if each ore vein was largely similar, I could excavate all the soil away, and repeat the experiment, to see if I could cause a controlled collapse where I got to keep most of the resources as bags, rather than have them destroyed into rubble. 

 

Thoughts? Is it predictable enough to do that type of bulk mining?

[theFlu]

As far as I understand, the veins themselves are relatively random underground. Whenever it runs close enough to the surface, the game has a chance to generate an upward spike to the surface - and top it off with the identifying node. That part isn't random.

 

Couple alphas back, probably A16 with an older version of SI, I tried some massive collapse-based mines; I placed campfires as a line in the bottom, as the debris blocks were unable to settle on a campfire and thus wouldn't clog up. And made ramps up from the campfire line to both sides to have falling blocks slide to the bottom.. It somewhat worked, but it was a proper pain to get to collapse, and the ramp blocks ended up clogging up as well.

 

As a mining method, it was not worth it. Fun, yes, but massively expensive in time compared to normal mining. Part of the issue is, that the collapsing blocks turn into resources so very very rarely, you'll need to drop a lot of minable blocks to get any resources out of it. To match the amount of prep-mining you're going to have to drop at least a dozen layers of pure mineral just to cover the horizontal plane at the bottom, not to mention the sides which of course increase linearly with the depth of the mine..

 

With the current SI, I haven't even tried. It might be more predictable and less laggy, but I have a feeling it will give up calculating way too soon to cause a big enough collapse to be worth it.

[Pernicious]

I'm not 100% on this, but I think any block which hasn't taken any damage yet will become a bag. I.e. still 600/600

 

I think I need to test this more thoroughly. If it is 100% chance for undamaged blocks to become lootable bags, then cutting a 15 x 15 x ?? deep frame to cause a collapse is relatively quick and easy. 

 

Your tip about the campfires looks to be promising  Might give it another shot, thanks!

Edited July 25, 2021 by Pernicious (see edit history)

[Gazz]

The shape of ore veins is independent of what they contain.

[Pernicious]

So Gazz, are you saying that there are a fixed set of shapes, and they are independent of what they contain? Sorry, seems like a bit of a sentence expecting prior knowledge or has some assumptions. 

 

Unrelated, I checked through the logs from yesterday and saw a lot of this:

 

2021-07-25T05:33:21 23457.472 WRN Entity [type=EntityItem, name=resourceScrapLead, cnt=50] fell off the world, id=23694 pos=(-1021.9, -0.6, -249.6)

 

If that's what happens when they are crushed into debris, then there wasn't as much lead falling as I thought anyway, (maybe around about 50-60 lines of that) and I'll give up now. If that's just a small percentage that bugged out and somehow "fell through the floor to a -250 "z" position), and there are the hundred+ more I thought I saw before the crushing doesn't leave a log, this would be worth trying again. A block that was 15 x 15 x 12 deep or so, should have contained more than 50-60 lead. 

Edited July 25, 2021 by Pernicious (see edit history)

[Boidster]

Ore veins are random in size. The ones which have a surface marker (not all of them do) will have a fairly standard 8-block or so trail downwards to the main ore field. But after that it's random (but not scattershot - the veins are distinct & clumped, and spaces are packed with gravel). See screenshot below (using a mod which shows ore blocks).

 

When a terrain or ore block is destroyed, there is a chance that it will fall as a lootable bag. If I am reading the XML correctly, for iron the chance is 40%:

 

<drop event="Fall" name="resourceScrapIron" count="150" prob="0.4" stick_chance="0"/>

 

Various ore fields as seen from a few meters under ground:

Edited July 26, 2021 by Boidster (see edit history)

[Pernicious]

Awesome. Thanks for that. Will save me a bit of time trying a strategy that might not be worth it.