[MIRROR] [MDB IGNORE] ArcMining Pr Beta: Version 1.2

[TaleStationBot]

Original PR: tgstation/tgstation#78524

This one's not like the last one, so much so that I'm not even going to outsource the PR description to a robot this time!
Basically, You should read the PR body before assuming that everything is the same as last time. It's not.

Video Summary

Click the link below to see a video summary of the main features of this pull request.
https://youtu.be/Aho2omR0mjY?feature=shared

About The Pull Request

This pull request serves as a large rework of minerals produced by mining, and by extension mining itself. I'll try and list each change and it's associated nuance here.

Ore Vents

The biggest addition to the game with ArcMining is Ore Vents. Ore vents spawn as a ruin on the map, placing a randomized ore vent onto map generation. Ore vents spawn in 3 different sizes, Small, Medium, and Large. These vents will pick from a pool of materials they can generate, and will hang out across the map. A player can use a mining scanner to discover an ore vent, granting a small quantity of mining points to begin with. Once scanned, ore vents will show what minerals that ore vent will generate after they're fully tapped.

Scanning the vent again will trigger the extraction process. A small drone will fly down, called the NODE drone, and buckle onto the vent. Your job during wave defense is to protect the drone and to defeat waves of randomly spawning mobs (dependent on if you're on lavaland or on icebox). The quantity, duration, and time between waves is scaled to the size of the vent you're protecting. Starting by scanning and protecting lower tier vents earlier in the shift is a safer bet than doing a large vent in the first few minutes. The drone has 500 health, and can take a good few hits, but leaving it alone will cause it to meet an unfortunate end quite quickly.

Cooperation can be your best asset, as mining with allies can greatly help with wave defense, and mineral points are granted to anyone who helps with defending the ore vent equally (So 500 * size tier, regardless of how much help you receive). Once complete, the ore vent will have a mining machine constructed on top of it, and will start to dredge up Boulders from the earth automatically. More on boulders later.

Ore vents can be located based on your mining scanner, and will provide an appropriate audio cue based on if the ore vent has been discovered or not, and once processed will no longer alert you to it's presence.

Each station comes with a free vent that produces exclusively iron and glass, free of charge. This is to help with shifts where the station may not have shaft miners to produce minerals, and to provide the station with a baseline amount of minerals where none may exist otherwise.

Mineral Generation

Mineral generation has been completely reworked. Previously, Mineral Generation had a flat 13% spawn rate in-game. Once minerals spawned, they would also have a chance to propagate their minerals to nearby tiles, resulting in a rather massive pool of minerals that could spawn throughout lavaland on the whole.

This tweaks that, by making minerals in walls spawn based on their proximity to ore vents on maps that use cave generation. Both the probability, and quantity of ores spawning in walls is scaled based on distance, with ore vents looking like large caches of ores found in walls. This makes following ores found in walls and checking their quantity of minerals spawned a good indicator of how close you are to a nearby vent in-round.

This means you can collect some points form both discovering ore vents first, as well as collecting their surrounding ores, turn those in for mining points, and then trading them in for gear upgrades to more effectively take on ore vents. As a result of tweaking the balance of this, the total amount of ores spawned in walls overall has been decreased. However, by making more of the process time based, we still result in a mostly balanced finished product.

Boulder Processing

On station, there are now three new machines. These are the BRM, the Refinery, and the Smelter.

• The BRM acts as a teleporter. Instead of needing to carry boulders back to the station, you can activate the BRM, and it will automatically pick boulders to teleport back to itself. You can use this to teleport boulders dredged up from lavaland onto the station for processing. The BRM will only lock on to boulders that are resting on an ore vent. Moving boulders back by hand will mean you'll have to haul it back by hand.
• The refinery processes the non-metallic materials out of boulders. This process sends the materials straight to the ORM, and collects mining points from the ores smelted in the machine. Swiping with an ID card lets you withdraw those points for your own personal account, but remember that these points are for your whole team to share from. The Mining points obtained from this process is only 75% of the amount an equivalent amount of ores would provide.
• The smelter works nearly identically, however the smelter produces metallic materials out of boulders instead.
• Once a boulder has had all of it's materials extracted, it's broken down and deleted from the line. Otherwise, the boulder is spat out for the next machine to process it (either the refinery or smelter).
• Once there's no minerals left in a boulder of any type, the refinery or smelter will break the boulder down.
• Boulders do not stack onto tiles with each other, so they'll block each other when pulled or when moving on a conveyor belt.

Boulders can also be processed by hand. Using a mining tool on a boulder with right click will allow you to break down a boulder into it's composite ores, but limits you to a maximum of 10 ore per boulder, where the full amount can be extracted using the proper processing machines. Also, processing by hand does deal small amounts of stamina damage over time, do breaking a full large boulder can be particularly taxing.

Additional Boulder Processing Machines can be built, with the BRM board being obtained from the Protolathe, while the Smelter and Refinery boards being obtainable from the Autolathe instead. A boulder processing beacon can also be obtained from the mining points vendor as a reward to assist with boulder processing. Boulder processing beacons can be used to spawn in a new BRM, refinery, and smelter on the tile the user is standing on, however you'll still need to link them to the ORM!

All three machines can be upgraded with Stock Parts, allowing for more boulders to be processed at a time. It does not, however, increase the amount of minerals received from boulders, or points earned.

Mining Borg Tweaks

Mining borgs have been given some minor adjustments to compensate for the changes to mining. Their mineral scanner, which now has an active component to gameplay, is now a module as opposed to built into the mob. This module allows for the same ability to discover and start waves of monsters to fight.

Mining modules will find that their PKA now has a total of 90% mod capacity as compared to the 80% they had before, to allow for more robust defense of ore vents.

In addition, all borgs and AIs can interact with the BRM for boulder collection.

Mining Mech Tweaks

Mining Mechs have had their utility tweaked as a result of these changes as well. Mineral scanners to be used on mining mechs now have a larger radius by comparison to their handheld cousins. Similarly, it now has an active scanning button, which will actively discovery nearby ore vents. To begin wave defense, you will need to hop out and scan a second time however, so that you can properly accept the risks of drawing a horde of bloodthirsty wildlife towards you and your companions.

Mechs can also manually process boulders, similar to mining tools using their drill.

Golem Tweaks

Golems, being more gentle and less aggressive than humans, while being made out of LITERAL ROCKS, have a greater need to secure access to ores and minerals to eat. As such, they have adapted to be able to do two new things:

• Golems may now right click ore vents to be able to manually haul a boulder out of the vent. This costs a hefty amount of stamina, but it allows for golems to avoid combat during regular gameplay.
• Golems may now left click a boulder with an open hand in order to manually process a boulder like a pickaxe. While not faster, it is consistent and prevents golems from starving if they have access to a vent, but no ores, somehow.

Gulag Tweaks

The labor camp, being a camp for rehabilitation and excessive manual labor has been tweaked. Boulders now replace the random minerals located on their island, and to acquire their prizes inside, much be excavated and then broken out of the rock. Now YOU TOO can excavate minerals and become a true mineral hero by working your way to freedom.

Mining Point Changes

As a result of fewer mining points being available across the map due to the new ore spawning mechanics, and the shift in how and when ores will be coming in, almost every progress based mining point cost has been reduced by around 10-20%. Many numbers are still subject to change at present, but the idea is that core progress unlocks should be made a bit more available earlier in the round before players can start to solo or duo larger or more difficult ore vents, after which they'll be rolling in ores.

Rarities

Every once in awhile, an unusual boulder will get hauled up from the mineral rich depths of lavaland. These Artifact boulders can occasionally produce rare items, but for now they've mostly just been pulling up Strange objects for science. Nanotrasen Natural Sciences department will reward you extra points to be collected by boulder processing machines for successfully extracting one. In the future, this opens up a passive reward space that mining can reward to the station, like providing cytology DNA samples, ancient seeds, or other artifacts.

Misc notes

• Boulders can be stored in all varieties of ore boxes (ground, mech) should you choose, however as mentioned it's best to leave them where they spawn and teleport them to the station for convenience.
• Maps that are not subject to cave generation will find that they are largely untouched in terms of mineral balance.
• Future or existing ruins can now be tweaked to have a mineral balance cost, as the ore vent ruin does. This will allow us to spawn in more interesting ruins for pre-made combat challenges.
• There are unique ore vents that spawn across the map, that will summon a boss mob relevant to that map. If the boss mob is defeated, that vent will spawn large boulders pulling from every possible ore type that can spawn. Not for the faint of heart!
• Similarly, the number of ore vents and mineral budget is now adjustable in the cave generation procs, so maps may spawn with more or less ore vents as desired for balance.
• Artifact boulders opens up a LOT of room for possible future content like archaeology, xenoarch, artisci, and other design spaces!
• Megafauna STILL SPAWN ON THE MAP. They just happen to spawn in addition to boss ore vents.
• I'll add more to this as I get asked questions and remember things, this is a huge PR and I'm confident I've missed at least something

Why It's Good For The Game

I outlined a lot of this in #78040, so I'll try and keep this relatively snappy this time, while noting that I've made some concessions to make the whole system a lot more playable while not trying to break out design decisions that are at the end of the day, better for the game and the overall resource balance in round.

Minerals are a very poorly balanced system, and have been since their inception many years ago. We heavily rely on mineral balance in round, and yet we've really only balanced it by introducing so much supply that there's no equivalent exchange for materials that doesn't just heavily flood the exchanged material. For example, items printed from materials that are otherwise considered "rare" on master exist in such quantities and they'll never practically run out in our allotted 90 minute time slot design. This PR adjusts how ores spawn to a point where we can minimize the amount of ores that need to exist on the map for mining to be able to progress, while still providing enough resources for the station that it covers the needs of the station adequately.

Miners will need to be more strategic about what resources they've collected, and be able to make decisions about which vents are worth the risk of attempting to fight, how to prepare for a wave defense, and when to head back up for upgrades, while finally giving them at least some kind of incentive to work together and use different equipment. Resonators make cleaning up the caves around vent easy, sandbags set up easy defenses for your vent, mechs can serve as a wider range radar while mining, all while still providing a new gameplay loop to mining.

By limiting the amount of ores that can enter the round from the massive, massive amounts that were coming into the round beforehand (see #78346 ), we can make ore processing more meaningful by adding more gameplay to the processing of minerals. I have some plans for that, however this PR already got bloated really REALLY badly due to scope creep and the number of intersecting systems that rammed into each other to make this PR possible. So that'll be next. Plus, as I've mentioned, we open up places for ore processing to find fossils, relics, and other things that can implemented down the line.

Overall, I don't expect this PR to save or kill ore balance, but we gain a LOT more control over it through the use of our mining defines attached to this PR, and at the end of the day, that's a great place to start off of.

Changelog

🆑
add: Added ore vents. Scanning them with mining scanners shows what minerals they contain. Scan again to fight off a horde of beasts as your drone assistant excavates the vent, so the ore vent will produce mineral boulders!
bal: Ores that spawn in walls now spawn based on their proximity to ore vents, with their chance to spawn and their minerals contained scaling from low to high.
add: Added the BRM, Refinery, and Smelter. These pieces of equipment are used to process ore boulders into minerals for the station. Stock Part upgrades allow more boulders to be processed at one time. They collect mining points as well, to be redeemed with an ID card swipe.
add: Boulders are teleported to the station via the BRM if left untouched. Boulders can also be cracked open for a reduced amount of ore using pickaxes or golems hands.
add: All stations come equipt with a pre-excavated ore vent, which produces a basic supply of iron and glass only. Scan other vents for your critical resources!
add: Look there's a shit ton of changes on mining, for more detail check out the Pull Request: tgstation/tgstation#78524.
sound: New sounds and noises for your high octane factorio-like gameplay!
image: All new boulder sprites for the new minerals and rocks added to the mining gameplay loop, as well as mining machines!
image: Overlays appear over vents when scanned to let you know their contents at a glance when actively scanned with any mining scanners.
/:cl:

[Jolly-66]

Need time for our adjustments + I wanna thoroughly read this (I liked the video so far)

[Zytolg]

Mapping changes done, I'll merge when checks are green

[Jolly-66]

Zytolg finished this up so I'm merging it so I can work on the other mining PRs which have now since propped up.