Hello everyone!

Today I am back with more terraforming features for the upcoming Update 2.2. Remember when I asked for feedback about personal mining drones here, and then later covered the received feedback here? We have been working on various different terraforming features since then, some of them I’ve been showing off in the blog post here. Now, for this iteration of FOUNDRY Friday I will continue with more Terraforming features based on your feedback.

While the vast majority of you enjoyed the idea of personal mining drones (see first linked blog post above), the key feedback was that ultimately you want to automate the process. Especially when you want to excavate very large areas it can get boring having to idle next to the area and let the drones do the work. Therefore we have continued to work on the feature and simultaneously thought about solutions to additionally add a way to automate it.

Work in progress.The shared element between both is that you will be able to mark mining areas with a special tool, the mining drone controller. You may mark single blocks, 2-dimensional boxes (1 voxel high and you drag length and width) or fully 3-dimensional boxes.

If you’re in close proximity, your personal mining drones will automatically start excavating. And in case you’re not a fan of that and want to mark your mining areas without the drones immediately starting, you will be able to disable (toggle) the personal mining drones.

Drones will pick the closest available block, go there, excavate it and bring back the mined resources. In case your inventory is full, they will let you know (similar to when a crafted item cannot be inserted into your inventory) and stop mining additional terrain blocks.

We’re planning on providing various upgrades for the system, for example increased number of mining drones or higher mining drone speed. However we might split those off into a separate update as we aim to release Update 2.2 rather soon.

As a side note I wanted to mention that we have also heard the feedback about there being no purpose for dirt, stone and other terrain blocks and how they just fill up the inventory. First, we will drastically increase the stack size of those, but we’re also working on ways to make use of it.

Time to look at the automatable version of this feature! Most people suggested a building that is able to launch mining drones similar to the personal mining drones. You would place it next to your mining area and the building and its drones excavate the area while you can go and do something else. But this presented us with a couple inconveniences which ultimately didn’t feel right. Examples are that a limited range might require moving the building frequently, and that you would need power at remote locations where there is none, or even just the fact that placing and soon after removing a building didn’t feel right.

So I was thinking why not implement this in a way where it just works, no matter what. And this is where our existing construction ships come into play. They are already able to move to modular buildings and construct them, so why not give them a few integrated mining drones and let them go to your mining areas and excavate for you? They have no range limitation, so no matter where you place your mining area, they will be able to reach it.

Work in progress.This required a few changes to the drone ports. Going forward you will be able to toggle if they should automatically assign mining areas and/or construction sites, so you can have a few for each task. We also had to add a storage inventory to the building, since the ships need to unload their mined resources once they are back. You can manually take out the resources, but we have also added a conveyor connection so that you can automatically move the items into a larger storage.

I believe this is the best and most comfortable solution and I’m looking forward to your thoughts!

Since the tunnel boring machine was also highly requested, I’d like to quickly mention it. We’re looking into it, but I believe we should think a bit more outside the box here. A machine that just allows you to build horizontal tunnels feels somewhat limited to me. I think it at least should allow you to also dig up and down. Additionally I’m not sure if an expanding building (that blocks the path until demolished) is really the best way to handle it. It would be easy to re-use the old underground miners for that, but I think we might be able to do a little better. Stay tuned for future FOUNDRY Fridays!

Thank you for reading and as always see you in two weeks!
-mrmcd



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