Automatic Mining Emitters

[Cocacolagua]

Short Explanation:

Mining emitters, as their name suggests, behave mostly the same way as emitters, with the biggest change being that the projectiles they fire can mine rocks. To allow for more complex designs that cover more asteroid turf, these mining emitters will be accompanied by reflectors that change their direction after being hit X times (you get to choose the number). 

Mining emitters can be upgraded in two ways:

• Tendril loot: Tendrils will have a chance to drop design disks that print upgrades for the mining emitters.
• Crusher trophies: Crusher trophies will give a better boost to mining emitters than the design disks from the tendril loot, with the counterpart of only being able to affect one mining emitter per trophy. The rarer the trophy is, the better the upgrade is.

You can obtain these Mining Emitters from the lavaland outpost, the mining vendor or R&D.

Here's a brief gif of the most barebones showcase, turn on emitter, it mine rock.

 

 

Purpose: There are two things this would tackle:

• Gamer loot: Currently, shaft miners are rewarded with more objects that are focused on either killing other crewmembers, killing lavaland mobs, getting you banned for killing everyone around you, or all of the above. Before removing/reworking most of this junk to help miners mine, I will add this first to better """balance""" the ratio of kill gear : mine gear, and see where we go from there.
• All methods of mining are the same: Kinetic accelerators, Kinetic crushers, The Resonator, Advanced Plasma Cutters, Minebots, whatever else are all the same method of mining with the same result, click at rock, collect ore. I want there to be a different way to mine, in this case being setting-up automatic miners and modified reflectors to mine for you.

 

Details up for discussion:

• Should they need a powernet in the same way regular emitters do, or would this make them not worth the trouble?
• How much damage the emitters should deal on pressure / should they even work outside of lavaland.
• Should there be an easier way to collect the ore that drops from the asteroid turf being broken by the emitters?

[AffectedArc07]

Making powernets for this would be incredibly difficult, but they shouldn’t be infinite. Having them take a power cell would be fine.

 

They should do less damage than a normal emitter, but still do some

 

Tackling the loot is nice but I ain’t sure this is the way forward, but I do like this concept. I love stuff you can work towards to make your job easier / automate it more, but still require user intervention to maintain.

[Viz]

I certainly like this kinda stuff, and I'd be interested to see what the gamers come up with.

[Longpipe23]

As an aforementioned "gamer miner" I feel like this would go incredibly underused for the following reasons. The first being that this requires crusher trophies. The crusher is already seldom used, and when it is, the last thought of a miner would be to pump upgrades into their cruddy mining emitter that they keep having to swap the batteries on. Even if they did upgrade it, it will likely only be the legion trophies as those are really easy to farm up. Secondly, these don't really seem to serve much of a purpose despite being cool side thing. I can mine far faster than these can with a KA with mining AOE and double cooldowns or even the Ripley mech should I have found the two that can spawn on lavaland or provided the golden unicorn moment of robotics being competent. Thirdly, I feel like this would be an incredibly niche item and just add to the bald-bait pile. It's an incredibly small window of "bald shaft miners who are using pickaxes and holding their oxygen tanks whilst dragging legion corpses to medbay" to "drake-punchers" and neither would have any interest in setting up an emitter line for minimal payoff. If you're going to do this at all, just make some lavaland factorio nonsense. Auto-Miners, Conveyers, Splitters, Inserters. I want to protect my plasma bus from Bubblegum in my Mining Spider Tank. 

[Gatchapod]

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it would actually be used.

I struggle to imagine a case where you'd pick the emitter over an advanced plasma cutter, a piece of gear available 15-20 minutes into the most rounds.
The APC mines significantly faster. Having to move and mine actively changes little, because after the emitter finishes its job, you still have to walk over all the ores it mined. Or failed to mine, as you can't really guarantee it won't miss a precious diamond node by 1 tile. Hell, it might even be outperformed by a KA with 3 cooldown mods.

I like the idea. I really do. However, the way I see it, to make your emitters viable, you'd have to break the whole lavaland concept. Currently, being a miner is not really a job per-se. You're on space safari and you only collect ores to increase your murderhobo power. The gear available already promotes passive ore acquisition, because you don't really mine. You just run around like a headless chicken looking for loot, shooting an APC and thoughtlessly picking everything up into a satchel of holding.
To make your emitters an interesting and valid choice, you'd have to either make some fabulous upgrades for them or, please don't beat me, nerf KAs and remove APCs along with SoHs.

Right now, it sounds like your emitters would end up in the same category as... I don't even remember their name. Resonators?

[Krossarn]

I would use these if i got it from the voucher.

Set it up. Let it do its shit. Go mine myself. And when its time to go back to the station, go collect all it have mined out.

Maybe some nice upgrades for it..

Also it should clear a good path for later use. 
 

Edited July 10, 2021 by Krossarn

[Coolrune206]

Sounds good for a mining perspective, just hope it does low damage - I'm not entirely sure how but I'm sure players would otherwise find a way to gamer it to kill Megafauna or maybe blobs very easily.

Mining Mains always find a way...

[Esenno]

1 hour ago, Coolrune206 said:

just hope it does low damage

You know that even if it does low damage they'll still find a way.

[Charliminator]

Make it do negative damage. It actually heals.

[PeakPerformance]

I'm in on it just for the reflector idea - But you're also proposing some factorio lavaland type stuff ? Would love to see it.

Edit : I was thinking about the powersource - what if instead of cells, you could use raw plasma/uranium/diamond ores, a mix of the plasma cutter and the pacmans ? Still forces an upkeep, but without the hassle of asking science for a bunch more things/being a little more independant.

Edited July 16, 2021 by Peak

[DevL]

Factorio lavaland... Factorio... Lavaland.... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

*stare