What should coders do with Lavaland?

[nokko]

PRs that change Lavaland seem to be contested a lot. (#13202, #13013, #13075) It would be a lot easier for coders to figure out what should and shouldn't be added to/removed from Lavaland, if there were a set of agreed-upon-by-maintainers answers to some basic questions about the nature of Lavaland. (And the Shaft Miner job, in general.) I think that Lavaland on Paradise feels sort of incomplete and cobbled together right now, and adding content to it / changing it to be a more unified experience would be good. I'm in the process of asking some players what they think of a fairly major proposed set of changes, and I'll post a proposal once I have something workable that I can deliver as a PR in a timely manner. Knowing more about what exactly we want Lavaland to be on Paradise would help me make a proposal that isn't a complete waste of everyone's time.

Here's a list of questions, I'd really appreciate it if some devs and maintainers shared their thoughts about these:

What do we want miners to do on Lavaland?
    •    Yes, mine. How much should they mine?
    •    What should they do when no more minerals are needed?
    •    When should they go tendril hunting?
    •    When should they kill megafauna? In what order?
    ⁃    Why? (In-universe/In-game, what rewards, what incentives?)
What loot should drop on Lavaland?
    •    If new loot is added, how should it be themed?
    •    Is the old loot fine? Currently, a lot of items in the loot pool are only really useful to antagonists.
    ⁃    (Think Staff of Slipping, meat hook, ash storm staff, lava staff. They don't really help miners against fauna, and can't really help other departments do their jobs.)

Secondarily, I have two gripes with Lavaland that are less big-picture. Please tell me if you think these are problems that warrant solutions, or if they are fine as-is.

• Lavaland megafauna can sometimes either spawn or wander very close to the Mining Outpost.
  • In-game, this is a problem. An unlucky miner can easily kite a Colossus, Ash Drake, etc. to the mining shuttle, and cause a station emergency.
  • In-universe, this makes no sense. NanoTrasen have set up a Base Camp on Lavaland already - I'd say that it makes no sense to send a team of miners to an outpost where evil GPS signals are picked up just 50 metres north.
  • Solution: Move megafauna (and swarmer) spawns further from the Outpost. Make megafauna AI try to move away from Base Camp if they are too close to it, and aren't aggroed onto anything. I'll try to write a PR as soon as I figure out the AI code.
• Tendrils sometimes spawn within chasm distance of one another.
  • In-game, this is very annoying to tendril-hunting miners.
  • Solution: Make tendrils always spawn at least 5 tiles away from each other.

Thanks for reading. Please do consider replying with your take on Lavaland, whether you're a dev, maintainer, or you just really like to play a Shaft Miner.

Edited May 15, 2020 by nokko
I realized one of those PRs isn't technically rejected.

[diegorusten]

Hello, I like to play as a miner. I think lavaland is fine, but I've only played 40 hours.

A suggestion I have is to make a new mob, an ash hound. Ash hounds should wander in groups of two and be faster than other fauna.

They should have less HP and cause external bleeding with his bites.

These mobs would give challenge to Kinetic Accelerators users who can just be far from mobs and shoot them.

The Ash hounds tendrils should spawn far from base

The items they drop should be silver fangs, which would make a silver hound knife for ash walkers. Better than a hunting knife. And hide to make an armor that has little protection but allows you to move a little bit faster on low pressure areas "without space protection"