Suggestions for bombs

[Tj Pepler - Critcher]

Hi all, I came to the realization that ore blasting bombs have got to be changed, at least for my server.  I will make the mod and post it, but I'm looking for a fair idea.  This is why...
 

Spoiler

The moment you get your copper you can get all the materials for ore blasting bombs, they can easily do nickel, titanium, iron, meteoric, etc.  So getting a bronze pick or better is a waste of time, get copper, make bombs, get any ores you want without the correct tool.

I wonder if there should be tiered bombs?  That would be easy, tier 1 could blast up to tier 3 ores, tier 2 could do tier 4 ores and tier 3 could do tier 5 ores maybe, with each tier of bomb having proper ingredient requirements?

Another way around the issue would be to make it so hammers are restricted to what level they can break so they can't turn the advanced ores into bits at all? (eg, you need a bronze hammer to break an iron ore)

Input and ideas greatly appreciated!

[Tj Pepler - Critcher]

I think the best solution is to create 4 ore bombs, 
Tier 1 - The existing bombs, can do copper / tin / zinc / bismuth
Tier 2 - New bomb that requires (copper / tin / zinc / bismuth) one of these metals as an ingredient it can do gold / silver /iron and below
Tier 3 - New bomb that requires (gold / silver /iron) one of these metals as an ingredient it can do nickel / uranium and below
Tier 4 - New bomb that requires (nickel / uranium) one of these metals as an ingredient it can do chromium / titanium and below  (A bomb that requires uranium, what could go wrong  )

If anyone has any input I'm all ears, otherwise this is a fairly simple mod I will post it in a few days.

[LadyWYT]

Both of those sound like pretty good ways to make bombs a more involved process, without making them so frustrating that players won't bother with them. The hammer tiers being connected to ore smashing in particular could be a standalone mod itself(if you don't provide toggles for the options in the config), since that affects metalworking in general and might be something other players want to try out on their worlds specifically, rather than the bombs.

1 hour ago, Tj Pepler - Critcher said:

Another way around the issue would be to make it so hammers are restricted to what level they can break so they can't turn the advanced ores into bits at all? (eg, you need a bronze hammer to break an iron ore)

You could also just require the player to set up a pulverizer for more advanced ores, rather than allow them to continue refining the raw nuggets. 

Another idea is that rather than change how the hammers work, you could just add different tiers of blasting powder, and make that what determines the effectiveness of a bomb. Coarse blasting powder might be really easy to make, but the bombs might not be that powerful, so it'd be expensive to rely on long-term. Better blasting powder would take more time and effort to create, but the player would have better bombs for it.

It also sounds like the reason your players are relying on bombs is that they're very easy and efficient to use. Another solution is to increase the amount of ore that can be potentially lost in the blast, or perhaps add some sort of tools aside from bombs that allow the player to mine ores more efficiently by hand. Or perhaps simply buff the pickaxe to have a higher chance of obtaining crystallized ores or extra ore chunks for the players that bother to mine by hand.

If you want to be really dastardly...maybe not all ore should be mined with bombs. If it's something higher flammable, like coal, perhaps the deposit gets set on fire instead and burns away to nothing. If the ore is something more delicate and can't take rough-handling, perhaps the ore is shattered in the blast and drops very little. That way players can still use bombs to mine out things like iron veins efficiently, but they can't just use bombs on absolutely everything. 

[MKMoose]

5 hours ago, Tj Pepler - Critcher said:

The moment you get your copper you can get all the materials for ore blasting bombs, they can easily do nickel, titanium, iron, meteoric, etc.  So getting a bronze pick or better is a waste of time, get copper, make bombs, get any ores you want without the correct tool.

Why is this a problem? High-tier pickaxes are vastly more efficient for regular mining and have greater durability, so "waste of time" is an exaggeration at best, since you'll still generally want the better pickaxes even though they're not strictly required. I would say continuing to use copper is actually a waste of time in the current balance - while iron and steel can be occasionally debatable due to higher upfront and processing cost, bronze (tin bronze specifically for the sake of an example) provides a huge 50% stone mining speed and durability increase over copper at very little additional cost. Bombs are largely just an alternative tool, not a replacement for better pickaxes.

As far as progression goes, you're already limited by:

• anvil tiers - you can't forge iron without a bronze anvil and you can't forge meteoric iron and steel without an iron anvil,
• pounder caps - crushing olivine and iron ores requires iron caps, crushing ilmenite and chromite requires steel caps.

This means that bombs don't actually allow you to circumvent almost anything of note. If anything, I would actually argue that the pickaxe tier requirements for mining ores are currently almost entirely pointless and should likely be removed.

Using bombs is also not exactly a simple "just get all the materials after copper" either - it takes linen, sulfur, saltpeter and black coal (charcoal would be more realistic for the most part, but anyways), of which coal has to be mined or potentially looted and other materials can also be purchased. Not to mention stone blasting bombs, which need powdered iron oxide, so they need iron pounder caps. Bombs are an optional, more complex option which can reward the player for going the extra length to get them. Most people don't use them regardless as far as I can tell, possibly in part because they have a 10% base yield reduction relative to mining and prevent you from obtaining crystallized ores.

If your specific server needs bombs to be more restricred, then by all means, but I feel like you're going to have to make a much stronger case if you want to argue for a vanilla change.

 

3 hours ago, Tj Pepler - Critcher said:

I think the best solution is to create 4 ore bombs, 
Tier 1 - The existing bombs, can do copper / tin / zinc / bismuth
Tier 2 - New bomb that requires (copper / tin / zinc / bismuth) one of these metals as an ingredient it can do gold / silver /iron and below
Tier 3 - New bomb that requires (gold / silver /iron) one of these metals as an ingredient it can do nickel / uranium and below
Tier 4 - New bomb that requires (nickel / uranium) one of these metals as an ingredient it can do chromium / titanium and below

This still allows you to completely skip pickaxes better than copper, just with more steps.

I could easily see it becoming excessively gamified, cluttered or unrealistic, for the following reasons:

• The existing tier requirements are already a huge simplification and have little justification besides gating progression, so I currently see no meaningful reason to make bombs or hammers conform to this as well given that they don't allow to skip any steps in progression. It would be reasonable and would change almost nothing for hammers, but bombs are a significantly taller ask.
• Many players already practically never use bombs, and the current separation into ore-blasting and stone-blasting has practically zero basis in reality as far as I can tell - adding multiple more types just seems to me like it would add an excess of clutter for people to bother with when looking into bombs.
• There are almost no realistic types or variants of bombs besides black powder, at least for the purpose of ore/stone blasting - it's just gunpowder in a bag. There are technically four potentially notable subtypes which could be introduced (serpentine, wet-ground gunpowder, corned gunpowder, glazed gunpowder - they could give new purpose to alcohol and graphite), but that again reaches into excessive granularity - I would maybe just rename the current blasting powder to serpentine and add proper late-game gunpowder, not unlike the coarse/fine distinction that @LadyWYT has suggested.
• The most important improvements after the introduction of black powder in the 17th century to mining with explosives were centered on the blast holes and rock drilling, while the explosive itself remained practically the same at that point. Any more categorical improvements only came about in the 19th century with improved fuses, nitroglycerine and dynamite, and I would consider that to be too modern for the game (even though we already have some 19th-century technology in the game for some reason).

 

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

You could also just require the player to set up a pulverizer for more advanced ores, rather than allow them to continue refining the raw nuggets. 

For several late-game ores we effectively already have this. Doing it at least for iron as well would be reasonable, but I would be careful to avoid forcing the player to use mechanical power too early.

 

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

If you want to be really dastardly...maybe not all ore should be mined with bombs. If it's something higher flammable, like coal, perhaps the deposit gets set on fire instead and burns away to nothing. If the ore is something more delicate and can't take rough-handling, perhaps the ore is shattered in the blast and drops very little. That way players can still use bombs to mine out things like iron veins efficiently, but they can't just use bombs on absolutely everything. 

Asphyxiation due to methane gas as well as exploding your entire self with it or with coal dust seem to be significantly greater concerns in coal mining than directly setting the coal on fire.

I do agree, though, that blasting valuable  ores may be a good thing to disincentivize - the entire concept of an ore-blasting bomb can be easily argued to be very odd in that destroying or contaminating the ore is most often undesirable.

 

As much as I can understand the gameplay motivation, I personally get thrown for a loop whenever unrealistic improvements to unrealistic mechanics are discussed, because my preferred course of action would be to make them more realistic while keeping them interesting and engaging as well as addressing as many issues as possible. For mining, this is a pretty big challenge, as the system is in certain ways completely unrealistic at a very fundamental level and strongly tied to a number of world parameters and other mechanics.

I would strongly consider to make explosives (and possibly also fire-setting, for the early game) the dedicated tool for mining in igneous or otherwise hard rock, especially that which has no fractures which could be exploited. But as you can probably tell, this has a huge number of implications and may require a large revision of many parts of the system for satisfactory implementation.

Edited Sunday at 05:38 PM by MKMoose

[jerjerje]

8 hours ago, Tj Pepler - Critcher said:

The moment you get your copper you can get all the materials for ore blasting bombs, they can easily do nickel, titanium, iron, meteoric, etc.  So getting a bronze pick or better is a waste of time, get copper, make bombs, get any ores you want without the correct tool.

This is wrong. In order to make blasting powder you need black coal. No other coal works in vanilla. Black coal can only be mined by bronze pickaxes. It is not possible to make bombs before bronze*. (Not to mention the need for a bronze anvil to work iron)

The only ores you cannot mine with bronze are: meteoric iron, pentlandite (nickel), rhodochrosite (manganese), uranium, ilmenite (titanium), chromite (chrome)

- Meteoric iron requires an iron anvil.
- Nickel is the only one that could be worth skipping, as this allows you to start making Jonas Tech slightly earlier. But Jonas Tech also requires jonas parts. I don't think most players will have enough jonas parts to craft something with, while in the bronze age. So, I don't think this skip is a problem.
- Rhodochorsite and Uranium are useless.
- Ilmenite and Chromite require steel pulverizer caps to be usefull. No point in mining them before steel.

The only skip here is nickel. But like I said, this isn't really a problem due to the jonas part requirement.

 

*Technically you can buy blasting powder from commodities traders. This allows you to make ore blasting bombs in the stone age. But due to the anvil requirements, you still cannot skip the bronze anvil. This could allow you to get quartz, silver, gold, olivine, cinnabar, black coal and and anthracite without a bronze pickaxe. That hardly seems worth it. You can also just purchase a bronze pickaxe from a trader and mine these ores normally. (You still cannot skip the copper age though, since you need a copper hammer and (probably) a copper prospecting pick, before you can make the bronze anvil)

[Tj Pepler - Critcher]

AHEM...
I am wrong, I made a mistake because one of the mods I am running changes black coal to tier 2 as a mining requirement and seeing that made me think everything was broken.  Since without mods tier 3 tools are required, that breaks my entire argument.  Everything is fine, return to your seats folks!!!

This is me right now, a derp
 

[Rainbow Fresh]

...well, if you still want to mess with bombs for any reason, feel free to reach out. I already worked on a function library that allows a few more things to be done without breaking vanilla.

[Nathan Flaminio]

44 minutes ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

...well, if you still want to mess with bombs for any reason, feel free to reach out. I already worked on a function library that allows a few more things to be done without breaking vanilla.

Smoke bombs so the enemies can't see you

Sticky bombs for when you're getting chased

Cheese bombs that do no damage, but make all the enemies attack each other (BEHOLD THE POWER OF CHEESE!!!)