Copper mines

[byorgey]

Right now there is very limited and non-renewable copper available on the surface, but it's going to be an important ingredient in many recipes. The description for copper says you can get more by drilling, but that needs to be implemented. My ideas are:

• Create a new kind of terrain, "copper seam", which looks the same as stone.
• Add a drill command, with a corresponding capability provided by a drill entity. At first drill won't take any parameters, though perhaps later it will take a direction as an argument (to allow for drilling through boulders and mountains etc.)
• Executing drill on a copper seam cell has a small percentage chance of adding copper to the robot's inventory.

[abyo]

Besides the terrain I'd also suggest adding veins that we can drill for multiple ores (probably near mountains?). We could potentially drill multiple times in the vein then make it disappear after a few usages (maybe 5% chance to disappear and those chances would increase after each successful drill?). This would add 2 more ways to acquire those ores (copper and maybe iron later) besides collecting them in the wild.

[byorgey]

Besides the terrain I'd also suggest adding veins that we can drill for multiple ores (probably near mountains?).

I like this idea. I have been toying with the idea of requiring you to tunnel under mountains somehow to be able to mine more stuff, perhaps that's where these veins should be found. How about this: when you use a drill on a mountain entity (which is unwalkable), it turns into a tunnelled mountain (or something like that), which looks the same but no longer has the unwalkable property, and also has a high display priority so that it will be rendered on top of robots. So if you drill forward and then move you will "disappear into a tunnel".

We could potentially drill multiple times in the vein then make it disappear after a few usages (maybe 5% chance to disappear and those chances would increase after each successful drill?).

Yeah, making them disappear after some uses makes sense, but (at least in the case of the proposed "copper seam" terrain) I think it means terrain now has to be mutable instead of immutable. But honestly I think that's fine, there's really no particularly good reason that terrain has to be immutable, that's just the way I thought of it at first. And it's not too hard to come up with other applications for mutating terrain.

[Anrock]

As an alternative to disappearing veins - they can have diminishing returns.

[byorgey]

As an alternative to disappearing veins - they can have diminishing returns.

That's also a plausible mechanism, although it doesn't really make anything simpler. If anything the possibility of "tapping out" a vein is simpler, since it just means changing one terrain type to another. With diminishing returns we would have to keep track of some sort of number associated to each tile.