Mining Loose Materials can't be automated

What inevitably happens, though a solo excavator is at greater risk, is the materials slide and catch the excavator on a slant. The trucks can't reach it, so it can't correct the situation. This mainly happens with sand and quartz, much less often with harder materials.

This means over a long time period - reachable much faster with mods to speed up the game - periodically the excavators will get stuck and the mine will shut down. The player has to intervene manually and recover to a vehicle factory.

Fix : if the current code to get unstuck fails for a long period (say a few months in game), teleport using unity to the mine control tower.

Wouldn't it work ok if you weren't throwing the asteroids on top of a mountain, and instead threw them on level ground with lots of flat area around?

Mining in general is semi automated, as you generally need to go in and assign new tiles, among other things.

prometheus0000 [discord] wrote:

Wouldn't it work ok if you weren't throwing the asteroids on top of a mountain, and instead threw them on level ground with lots of flat area around?

no, all my quartz mines have this issue, this one (I threw the asteroid up high to make it easier to get all the quartz from it) just has it worse than others.

ALL of them will eventually jam

and have, at least 5x-10x each on my current map

here's another one stuck, this is a stock map mine, devs can't blame it on asteroids

Not a solution but a workaround: try to have some med-exca and trucks, they usually stick around to "rescue" the megas

I have noticed that crews of multiple megas accomplishes the same purpose, and if the mining face is wide so that there is more places to mine at in parallel, the mine runs for longer. It still inevitably will fail.

example : this particular mine, 1 mega will likely rescue the 2 stuck ones automatically

however this mine will still, eventually, fail

code solution : if stuck > timeout, unity teleport to say the 8 squares immediately around the mine tower, the first one found that can hold the entity

another solution would be, if stuck, the excavator has temporarily ability to drive on a steeper surface

the excavator should be able to move here

brickonkeyboard [discord] wrote:

I have noticed that crews of multiple megas accomplishes the same purpose, and if the mining face is wide so that there is more places to mine at in...

You’re also trying to dig straight into a steep slope rather than use a ramp.

brickonkeyboard [discord] wrote:

another solution would be, if stuck, the excavator has temporarily ability to drive on a steeper surface

Solution: limit the height/depth of your cut to 10-15 designations deep. Slides are far smaller in size and far less likely to strand excavators.

While its true that there are some workarounds, I agree that this is an issue that should be solved.

rascallhunter [discord] wrote:

Solution: limit the height/depth of your cut to 10-15 designations deep. Slides are far smaller in size and far less likely to strand excavators.

found a more general workaround : just mine through the asteroid at a downward angle:

downward angles don't create the slides that get excavators stuck but you need to call more asteroids

yea the workaround ive done on my vanilla map was to mine a ramp up to the top of the mountain and do slices downward, if the cliff height is kept to a certain minimum (32-48?) the landslide remains small enough for the excavators to move themselves to safety

downward angle does seem like a good method as i see that limiting the amount of area the landslide can push onto the excavators

Can we also discuss how fully mining out an asteroid then levelling the area can't be automated and the game is missing something like a surface (to stop the asteroid from spreading underground) or walls (that could stop the asteroid materials or terrain deformation from spreading horizontally)?

i thought the whole fun with asteroids was to stack them into new mountains

i think something that would help would be sanitisation passes on the map editor so the mountains are self-stable

currently the whole mountain will just self-collapse on contact

which is a bit excessive even for realism, normally rocks dont behave like loose sand in that sense

i mean in fact solid rocks rarely even collapse at all given tunnels are a thing

of course eventually they do with a wide enough tunnel or just bad luck

i guess this is a bit tricky here since the world is a 2d blanket, so you cant exactly do tunnels of course but more importantly you have to have some amount of angle for rock above to come down

actually one thing that would certainly help; an option in the mining tower to set how long vehicles can sit before auto-recovery

actually i just noticed something; excavators prioritise emptying their bucket before moving to safety

which sometimes results in a loop of them continuing to dig in further away from safety until both trucks are completely out of reach and they are also too far away from navigatable tiles

this also introduces a weird behavior where they just continue a mining loop forever despite having no fuel for months

ihopethisisnt.taken [discord] wrote:

Can we also discuss how fully mining out an asteroid then levelling the area can't be automated and the game is missing something like a surface (to...

you all continue to discuss this as an asteroid related issue, but you forget that it is perfectly possible that a made map will have gigantic mountains of materials that span 20-30 or more above any level of terrain that covers the rest of the map - check out (https://hub.coigame.com/Map/Detail/1) for example - it's pre-update-3 but still - there are plenty of examples and even "gold mountain can be an example of this - simply put - if you dare digging into a mountain you might find your diggers/excavators get stuck more (or less) for long periods of times if there aren't enough of them still able to rescue the others, so this idea of auto-rescue after a prolonged period at the cost of unity (instead of you having to see an alarm on the storage meant for the resource, if any) is a good one and should be at least considered - I'd redirect the OP to the ideas website and #ideas-discussion forum to post it there.

if for some reason @brickonkeyboard [discord] is reluctant (or it seems they are not using that user anymore?) - someone else should post it then - let's agree that if I don't find it there in a week or two, I'll post the idea myself

Do both of these issues stem from mountains that are made too high and result in large avalanche when mined?

jockeril [discord] wrote:

you all continue to discuss this as an asteroid related issue, but you forget that it is perfectly possible that a made map will have gigantic...

Huh, they left the server apparently? I don't know why though.

I would consider it a gameplay feature that the terrain provides challengies if your cliff height is too high

where you need to remove that mountain in two passes because it's otherwise too tall

Yea, I mean, I found it much easier to use a ramp up into that huge mountain and dig down than trying to dig through the whole way.