Nofew wrote:What happened to dirty mining? D:
Artman40 wrote:Same.
DOSorDIE wrote:2. Dirty Mining
Jarin wrote:Agreed on both points
vanatteveldt wrote:Totally agree
FasterJump wrote:I agree, I feel like this is the only thing the game miss right now.
GyroByte wrote:Are we ever going to get those space platforms and dirty mining you talked about?
We want dirty mining!
I don't think just begging for it is enough, though. I feel like someone "caught the bug" for the "rush to 1.0" in the office and spread it to everyone, so I'll go more in-depth as to why I feel this feature is absolutely crucial to Factorio instead of just hopelessly begging for it.
So, remember how the rocket felt useless until you guys started using it for infinite research? Electric mining feels like that now. From the beginning of the game we have a series of progressions; Yellow belts to red to blue, Assembler 1 to 2 to 3, steam to solar to nuclear, gun turrets to lasers to flamethrowers, oil to advanced refining to cracking, cars to tanks to artillery trains (They're not in yet, obviously, but this is where they'd go), and the list goes on!
Except for mining!
Burner drills to electric drills. Nothing after it!
This is more than just having "three stages of advancement", though. The most clear example I can use to demonstrate what I'm talking about is steam, solar and nuclear power. In fact, there's probably someone who stopped reading three paragraphs ago to complain about what I'm about to cover and doesn't know I'm already trying to mention it: Some people don't do the middle tier. Some people skip over solar and go straight from steam to nuclear.
Likewise, a lot of people skip red belts and go straight to blue (Especially if they're running a main bus), some people never touch laser turrets, some people never bother setting up advanced oil refining until cracking's ready too, and so on. However, there is no such option to do this with mining at the moment, and lacking this option severely bothers me.
In all of these cases, the middle tier is either somewhat redundant (like upgrading belts) or a "fork" (like solar). In essence, the actual progress isn't "Good better best", but is "Good and available, better but unavailable for a few minutes, best but unavailable for hours". On top of all this, setting up any specific tier takes significant time, and knowing how to spend your time setting things up is how you become (or avoid becoming) your own bottleneck in later gameplay. I believe all of these things to be core elements of Factorio's gameplay that shouldn't be taken for granted or overlooked, and that they're what make the game feel like Factorio.
Now, clearly, mining is important.
[citation needed] One might even say that mining is as much a part of Factorio as automation is. My issue though is that I currently feel like mining has become a "third wheel" that nobody can take seriously. I mean, think about it: When you have someone who's totally new to the game and you're 40+ hours in on your current map, you don't ever give them the task of plumbing an advanced oil refinery with cracking all by themselves, nor do you tell them to automate blue science production by themselves, and you definitely don't tell them to set up nuclear power by themselves!... But you can tell them to set mining up by themselves.
In my opinion, this should not be the case. If you're 40+ hours in on your current map and using super-duper advanced stuff, you should not have a single task that is so simple that a total newbie who's never played the game before can do it in a reasonable amount of time without any outside help. Furthermore, having *just one* thing that is is actually frustrating! If that's the *only* thing they can do, they're going to feel *utterly* useless, far more useless than if they'd have just been told to go to another server where they can actually contribute! I've been in this situation before, and it's how I felt, and I've put other people in this situation and have had them tell me (in so many words) that they feel the same way.
To simplify my previous paragraph, I'm saying you either need to cater to the lowest common denominator and super-buff steam power, assembly 1, red science, burner drills and gun turrets (Please for the love of all that's sane don't do this), or fix the one thing that isn't catering towards veteran players: Mining.
I don't even think it'd be that difficult to do, conceptually. You already have a great setup to build off of with nuclear power and the Kovarex Enrichment Process. You can take inspiration from that and use it for dirty mining. Heck, you can practically copy-pasta that!
Whoever suggested bringing water in via trains was exactly what I was hoping would happen. My assumption about how it'd work (Considering you outlined it in detail in one of your FFFs) is that you'd have a "deep mining" drill that is capable of harvesting both the surface and "deep" ore (Or optionally you can use the regular electric drills first to clear the surface ore before doing dirty ore) and that it'd put out regular ore (if there is any) and "dirty" ore, which you have to belt to a special building that takes it, runs it under water to clean the dirt off, and then puts out a totally normal ore. Perhaps you'd need two or three dirty ore to make one normal ore, and it may or may not require heat and may or may not also do smelting on the spot. The original idea also called for not increasing the surface ore count along with distance from spawn, but instead only increasing dirty ore count, and that the whole idea was to make it viable to build gigantic and complex mining facilities since there's no real motivation for doing that right now without turning up the richness globally, and turning that up pretty much ruins anyone's ability to take mining seriously.
Now, doesn't that sound a lot like uranium and nuclear power? It's not an identical clone, obviously, and it shouldn't be or we'd all have to question why you made unique graphics for it, but the added complication of having to run another train to the mining sites to deliver water (because if it takes three dirty ore to make one normal ore and the stack sizes are still the same it'd absolutely *murder* the efficiency of trains, which is by design to force the player to do the "cleaning" stage on-site) to the mining site and having to use different buildings for the purpose so it looks visually distinct from the previous tier is what I think all of us supporters are after. It'd also be a great gap between regular mining and uranium enrichment because we'd be supplying water rather than sulfuric acid, so that stage of the pipeline is less complicated.
So in closing, I'd like to sum things up by re-iterating that there is a missing step in skill between regular mining and uranium processing/nuclear power that can be filled by dirty mining, that I personally didn't want or care for nuclear power at all and just wanted dirty mining to happen and it feels like you're ripping away all my Factorio-related hopes and dreams by not adding it (I know this is over-dramatic, but it's sincerely how I feel!), that I don't think it's fair that you teased dirty mining in FFFs at least three or four distinct times but artillery trains barely got two sentences in one FFF and somehow those are making it into the game from seemingly out of nowhere, and that I think it'd be epic to see gigantic mining drills boring into the earth and spitting giant clouds of dirt and soot into the air while they produce earth-laden chunks of metal and steam gushes out of nearby buildings while they clean the dirt off that ore and trains constantly come in to supply the whole operation (both the drills so they stay cool and the cleaning facility) with water. Bonus points if the mining towers are actual /towers/ that are taller than any other structure in the game and physically take up 6x6 or 7x7 tiles or something else massive like that just to show how deeply down into the planet they're drilling. Double-bonus points if we have to run water to each of them individually rather than just letting them touch and the mining range is extended by one square around the physical building just like electric miners so that the order we lay the structures and pipes down is important so we don't box ourselves in and momentarily decrease efficiency.
I'd also like to open an invitation up for more people to voice their opinion on how
and why dirty mining is important (or not). Right now your voice (yes, your's!) is absolutely critical in gaining traction. We need reasons that aren't just "I think it'd be cool";
why would it be cool? What
gaps and
holes does it fill in the gameplay? Even simply quoting a part of someone else's post and saying "I agree with this" helps!