PC Mining, The final experience. 17.4

Some people simply think in the terms of risk and reward. If there is high risk, there surely is high reward. 7DTD proves that's not always the case.

Wouldn't mind some small surface nodes here and there, but would like only 2-4 blocks visible on the surface and the rest would be under ground (like an inversed mushroom). This way the landscape won't be dotted with them, it will be harder to spot them (need effort to find them), yet they are still good for finding.

 
The surface resource piles are supposed to come back in A18.

The question is always what is fun for the individual. Some want always only tension, excitement always dangers. If a cave is not full of bears and ferals zombies then it is boring for them. Honestly, their lives must be incredibly boring.

I, on the other hand, have always found mining to be something relaxing and I have enjoyed it very much. So exactly the opposite of other players.
I also enjoy the relaxing mining, but thats where the huge and messy iron veins kinda ruins the joy of stumbling on a vein.

you have to switch between pickaxe and shovel all the time,

earlier you dug out the gravel and then you ended up with a iron filled cave. not too big so it would take you 3 days to dig it out.

and why do you craft a stone shovel? i mean who would tie a rock to a stick and call it a shovel?...

a shovel from pure wood would make more sense, but in 7DTD we have scrap metal all around us.

even the auger for stone mining makes more sense... :crazy:

 
you have to switch between pickaxe and shovel all the time,
This seems to be "fixed" in A18. Ore veins will not be surrounded by shovely stuff

Yeah thats because in TFP's genius they forgot to have blocks muffle sound, I am so sick and tired of a zombie 30+ blocks outside of the poi hearing me open a locker inside a poi then coming in. The whole sound detection system needs a complete overhaul as its currently broken as hell. I am glad the smell system went away, as I always felt it was stupid. How is something with rotting noses, going to smell meat over their own stink? Same with hearing, they have rotted ears, there is no way they should be able to hear as well as they do.
"They have rotten muscles, how is it possible they can walk?" If you can answer this, I'll answer all your questions. :cocksure:

 
Yeah thats because in TFP's genius they forgot to have blocks muffle sound, I am so sick and tired of a zombie 30+ blocks outside of the poi hearing me open a locker inside a poi then coming in. The whole sound detection system needs a complete overhaul as its currently broken as hell. . . .
I asked about this once and actually got a response from one of the devs directly. It was a while ago, and I can't remember where it was so I can't link it. So take it with as much salt as you would like. But they basically said its not possible. Having blocks muffle sound that is. Like it would be way too demanding on the system in a voxel based game. *shrug* Now that was with reference to volume of zombie sounds. I was complaining about how a Zombie on the other side of concrete walls could sound like it was breathing on my neck because the sound wasn't muffled at all by the wall. Maybe with regards to player detection they can have blocks matter? No idea.

As for the general topic of mining and how it feels right now, I've been the teams dedicated miner in my gaming groups weekly 7 days game for a couple months now. So here's my input:

  • First things first. I appreciate how hard it is to find a nice balance on this subject without separating multiplayer and single player out and tuning the numbers differently for both. I feel that resources like iron are so excessively abundant it's actually annoying. Because it just feels bad when a resource literally becomes a nuisance to you. But I have all the time in the world to do nothing but mine because I'm in a multiplayer setting. If I was trying to balance my time around all the other stuff one would need to do in 7 days by myself it would be a whole different story. I don't know if it's possible, but if they could introduce a value kind of like Loot Abundance one could change when hosting a server, but one that only applies to resources acquired mining blocks, that could help a lot.
  • I'm the highest level person by far. It would be a struggle to keep up for a while in the early levels if I wasn't smart enough to take my gathering operation along to outside of whatever POI my friends were clearing at the time to get the shared exp. But once you get the levels under your belt to beef up your mining speed and get iron tools, it's smooth sailing from there. Once you get things maxed out you rocket past everyone else in leveling speed.
  • I miss the days of "Biome X has X resource" simply because it helped narrow in on what you were looking for. Currently, we have a serious problem with coal. Everywhere I try to mine I find so much iron it's useless, plenty of nitrate, and plenty of lead. We need gunpowder. And I just can't find coal. Something that would be SUPER cool if they could figure out how to program it, is make an item or perk that lets you sort of dousing rod your way to specific ores. Would be a super rewarding item/ability to obtain.
  • Would really really love to see natural cave systems. Exploring those for natural ore veins is literally my favorite thing to do in Minecraft.

 
a shovel from pure wood would make more sense, but in 7DTD we have scrap metal all around us.
This drives me bananas. The game is obtuse; there's zero connection with the situation on the ground and how the player advances in crafts. We have cars and wrenches and STILL no leaf springs to make a proper sword; the best we get is the machete. There's a simple stave bow (where the string comes from, god only knows) and then a compound bow, and nothing else. There's one gun of each "type". All the ammo uses the same casings. And on and on...

I'm sure the developers don't want bloat, and I'm not asking for Cataclysm: DDA levels of complexity. But the system in place right now is very crude; very crude for a game that has been in development for years now.

 
Concerning low amount of variety for tools and weapons - wait for performance and RWG improvements, then perhaps we'll see some more content. Even so, this is no Terraria, where you can build tools, weapons and armor from any type of wood, any type of ore, but also from a few additional materials.

I miss the "Biome X has X resource" also. Main reason why it was worth exploring other biomes, because i knew only some places had specific resources. In that sense, the progression is a bit broken. I could build my base anywhere, because with luck i would find everything i needed, even in the forest biome.

 
So in regards to actually finding the right ore, you need to dig up gravel. You get sand and stone and 1 resource. The resource you get is whats buried a bit deeper under the gravel.

Certain biomes yield specific resources more commonly. So oil shale for the desert, coal for the burnt forest for example.

But you can find all the resources in every biome it just takes a little bit of time.

And if you're grinding iron to upgrade your base then i can tell you now, you are playing the game wrong and you're wasting your time.

Don't build out of wood and upgrade to iron.

Build you base out of flag stone. There are blue boxes of cobble and bags of cement in and around most POI's.

The early game should be spent leveling up, scavenging, doing quests and picking up cobble and cement from these bags.

If you're lucky you can get iron and steel tools very early from the quest rewards.

My most recent world i did this and had a 13x13 reinforced cement base by day 7. Its that easy.

 
I miss the "Biome X has X resource" also. Main reason why it was worth exploring other biomes, because i knew only some places had specific resources. In that sense, the progression is a bit broken. I could build my base anywhere, because with luck i would find everything i needed, even in the forest biome.
I miss when mining was faster and gave you less resources per block, so that way you could really create tunnels, and find alot more smaller veins.

this also made it possible to mine wider tunnels and add wood poles and everything to make it look like a real mine.

i loved when i got to the point where one hit with the pickaxe was enough to destroy a stone block.آ¨

the overall mining experience was better.

Apologies if you knew this already, OP, but the other ores are usually below the iron layer and closer to bedrock. You will often hit iron before getting to them.
i actually didn`t know this, so i followed these instructions. i drove around trying to find a lead mine, and when found some gravel pointing to it i started digging diagonally down and had to switch direction 3 times to not stray to far from where i started i hit iron 4 times on my way down and had the shovel picaxe shovel pickaxe shovel etc experience, until i found a really big lead deposit. i got what i needed but i did not have fun doing it.

im glad mining is in for a change in A18

 
Glad i wasn't the only one making my tunnels supported by wooden poles to look like a real mine... :D
mining 101 back in the old days we had to do it. remember tunneling under a poi only to have a hell of a headache for not putting up supports... :)

 
One option might be to treat underground rocks like surface rocks where instead of finding a tiny amount of iron you have a chance to find a tiny amount of the minerals in surface rocks.

Perhaps change the distribution of veins too? Instead of an iron vain containing just iron, make it 80% of the blocks iron and 5% for the others (oil shale is just fine being found only in the desert.)

The surface gravel is a great help and if what I'm hearing is correct that gravel in veins will be removed that would certainly be nice. Maybe tinkering with block health and resource output could help

 
Perhaps change the distribution of veins too? Instead of an iron vain containing just iron, make it 80% of the blocks iron and 5% for the others (oil shale is just fine being found only in the desert.)
having many of these different blocks nekst to each other always messes with the textures though, working my way through a mine with iron stone and lead f.eks moldes the textures togheter making it hard to decide what is what. might be easier if they remove the gravel and then have a pure vein.

in my opinion oil shale and every other material should be found in every biome there is.

thats becouse i want every biome to be optional without having to mod the game.

lets say you want a desert only map,

or you want to an all snow world.

or you want to combine just two biomes.

now thats something that would greatly improve replayability.

 
Having some resources in specific biomes and snow only biome wouldn't be a bad idea. Remember that regular gameplay focuses on a multi biome map, where you can explore every type and find every resource. If you want to play a special map where you have only snow biome (remember that some POIs won't appear there) then it's a challenge map, rather than a regular one. You shouldn't be able to have everything as in regular game with every biome on map.

That being said, a mixed vein with resources wouldn't be too bad, but the counter point would be that finding some specific resource like lead (which you don't have enough and are seeking) would lower the yield in exchange of something you already have. So you want 100% lead, but get 80% lead and 20% carbon.

 
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