Idea for Actual Rework of Bluespace Miners

This is partially ripped at the suggestion of Fronsis, from where I posted it in the Discord’s ideasguy channel, though it’s been modified a good bit as well as being elaborated upon much more.

People keep trying to get rid of Bluespace miners for existing so I’m putting forward an idea for how to make them less immediately impactful without crewmates actually putting some work in, while also attempting to not totally gut them as well as hopefully not severely negatively impact lowpop (my personal general domain) in the process.

First, increase the crystal cost. –
5 Artificial Bluespace Crystals per miner would let a station get at most 2 BS miners running (without any mining occurring, of course) via someone tiding into both teleporters. This cost increase will also make them immediately beginning a process towards gray goo-ing nearly impossible without a person doing actual mining.
Them eventually being able to recreate themselves is nice in my opinion but seems to be a major sticking point with people who dislike the miners. Insert unironic between-2-absolutes centrism, this suggestion is indeed only some genocide.

Second, the parts:
Currently, upgraded parts do nothing. This is stupid.
Make the tier of the parts actually affect the functions of the machine.
Scanners : Scanners would determine what the Bluespace Miner could detect (and as such, what it can actually mine). Tier 1 scanners would only get Iron and Glass. Tier 2 scanners can bring up copper and silver. Tier 3, Plasma and Gold, Tier 4 Uranium, Diamond, and Titanium. You now have to upgrade the machine for it to snowball.
Manipulators : Manipulators would affect how frequently the miner generates materials; Better manipulators mean a bit less waiting for mats.
Matter Bins : Matter bins would dictate how much each load of mats generated would be worth. Bigger bin, more stuff being dumped out of the Miner.
Lasers : Lasers could be used to manage heat (which the miners would subsequently also radiate), with better lasers more effectively managing to only heat the ores they’re presumably being used to refine. Only tier 4 lasers would be efficient enough to not cause the machine to radiate heat into the environment. This disincentivizes rushing a bunch out, because they’ll literally slightly sear kill you if you don’t have Quad-Ultra-Micro-Lasers and make too many in one place.

For the Matter Bins and Manipulators, I feel tier 3 versions of the parts should essentially mimic the functionality the current in-game BS miners have in regards to the aspect the parts are now controlling. Tier 4 Bins and Manipulators would be slightly better than how the machines currently function in-game.

Something to keep in mind: Every part within tier 1 and tier 2 only requires Iron, Glass, and/or Copper.
tier 3 introduces silver, gold (for capacitors, which aren’t relevant), and uranium to part costs
tier 4 brings in Diamond, Bluespace, and Titanium to the costs, and every tier 4 part uses at least one of these.
For scanning modules in particular; tier 3 scanning modules need silver, tier 4s need Diamond and BS. With my proposed gating of resource types behind the scanning module tier, this would mean you’d need tier 2 to get silver for the tier 3 without ripping apart a surgery table, and that the tier 3 scanner wouldn’t let you jump to tier 4, because tier 4 scanning modules require Diamond and Bluespace Crystals, both of which would only be generated with a machine that already has a tier 4.

In summary, this proposed rework of sorts would make it so that while Bluespace Miners still serve their purpose of bringing in materials for the station, helping especially for lowpop, it’s going to be doing a much weaker job of it without actual boots on the ground mining, and will also be likely to never reach its full potential in said situation. They’re costlier to make, and weaker without tier 4 parts, but would end up being slightly more rewarding than they are now once tier 4 parts have been fully applied.

I should also mention that while a fair bit of the foundation of my idea seems similar to the PR “Bluespace Miners Nerf” (which the forum will not allow me to link to), I feel my idea is distinct enough from that because as far as I can tell parts in the miners as dictated by that PR congeal into a lump sum of general efficiency with hard thresholds based on the value of that lump sum, while what I’ve detailed is the parts having individual effects related to the part itself, making upgrades work how most other upgradeable machines treat them.

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Bluespace miners are fine, we don’t need to listen to these ‘special’ people whining about every little thing. The autodoc was fine it was just about those ‘special’ people bitching about every little thing, if we continue to listen to people like that we will likely have nuke ops removed for ‘powergaming’ we should just ignore such people.

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I do think they have something of a point, though, or I’d just point and laugh. Bluespace Miners being able to snowball and self-replicate with only the real caveat of someone having to physically assemble the bits that the miner’s spit out makes them a bit over-impactful, and reduces Shaft Miners to near useless unless you literally just decide not to make the Bluespace Miners.
Also I don’t like machines not having effects when upgraded, though that’s probably just indicative of me being somewhere on the spectrum

Also also the autodoc made it far too easy to near-instantly implant yourself with any and every augment you could tide into a place to print, and while I loved abusing the fuck out of it, and am somewhat sorry to see it leave, I absolutely understand that it was kinda yikes.

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But the miners always die in the first 30 minutes

Miners are useful because you need someone to actually get you to a point where you can afford BSminers. After one or two ore batches, most miners will stop mining and go monster hunting. Also, it takes me around forty minutes to get infinite-mats BSminers going on a server where the longest rounds last 2 hours.

Translation.

“Bluespace miners are critical for my gamer gear, I don’t need to listen to these people with a different opinion. Insert strawman argument here, Insert strawman argument here, Insert comparison here, I should make a comment about those people with a different opinion”

as if miners don’t just play miner for the loot

Miners are useful because you need someone to actually get you to a point where you can afford BSminers. After one or two ore batches, most miners will stop mining and go monster hunting. Also, it takes me around forty minutes to get infinite-mats BSminers going on a server where the longest rounds last 2 hours.

With the way Bluespace Miners are now, Shaft Miners are relatively redundant. I didn’t mean to imply they were literally useless, but they’re much less noticeable/impactful if any BSMs get created.
Getting the BSM snowball to be noticeably large may take a decent bit of time, but it’s near-inevitable as long as you don’t let the botanists tide into R&D and waste mats on bluespace matter bins.

Translation.
“Bluespace miners are critical for my gamer gear, I don’t need to listen to these people with a different opinion. Insert strawman argument here, Insert strawman argument here, Insert comparison here, I should make a comment about those people with a different opinion”

Nobody’s going to care what you say if you insist on being a dick the instant you disagree with them, especially if all you do is cry “fallacy!” when they’ve said something that borders on such while refusing yourself to actually engage with the person or their argument, however weak or flawed you may think that argument is.

as if miners don’t just play miner for the loot

This would hopefully be somewhat remedied by my idea, though in my mind it would definitely depend heavily on the miner(s) in question in a given round.
If they know their job is important, they may be more inclined to do it, and if they’re the type who’d normally shrug it off because they don’t want to spend all round actually mining, then they might see getting mats for science to run Bluespace Miners as an out, both doing their job and making it so they don’t need to continue doing so in the process.
People who literally only play for gamer gear may not be particularly inclined to mine no matter what happens, but people who actually give a shit about not themselves may be encouraged to cooperate more with science by getting mats to ensure that science can be less and less reliant upon the miners as the round goes on.

oh yeah i’m absolutely down for the changes, was just mentioning BS miners still take time and an initial investment to get running as a counter-argument to “please delete”

What changes were made to the autodoc?

On bee? Deleted wholly

fuck off

Just because you want easy materials doesn’t mean you get to fuck over anyone who wants to use the teleporter for a gimmick that round.

Your playstyle doesn’t take precedence over other player’s playstyles.

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Most shaft miners are useless though

fuck off
Just because you want easy materials doesn’t mean you get to fuck over anyone who wants to use the teleporter for a gimmick that round.
Your playstyle doesn’t take precedence over other player’s playstyles.

“Nobody’s going to care what you say if you insist on being a dick the instant you disagree with them”
–me, earlier, in this thread

That aside, there’s a few things I’d like to note that I feel are relevant;

One is that my idea heavily incentivizes at least some actual mining being done, meaning it’s entirely possible tiding for crystals would be redundant. This especially applies when there are actually Shaft Miners whose job description is getting mats, working to get mats, not dying, and knowing what they’re doing, however rare any and all of those qualifiers are.

Two, I consider people who don’t go back and fix the teleporter by replacing the crystals scum, and personally always make an effort to repair it as soon as the Bluespace miners are running (other people don’t so much, which I acknowledge, and I find quite unfortunate).

Three, if the station has no mats, I think fixing that takes priority over someone’s gimmick. If they want to use the teleporter so bad, why don’t they just go mine for the crystals? That said, it wouldn’t be particularly hard if you’re already breaking into secure places to take apart the less accessible of the two teleporters and leave the main one alone, getting the best for everyone involved, and again, once the station has materials someone can always go repair the teleporter.

Most shaft miners are useless though

This is why I think having a safety net like Bluespace Miners isn’t unhealthy, especially as I’ve stated, time and time again, for low-pop. People who don’t pick miner probably don’t want to play miner, and the people that do tend to either only want gamer gear (thus blowing off the “Miner” part of “Shaft Miner”) or be totally inept/unlucky and end up dying, whereupon it’s almost guaranteed that nobody’s gonna go down to lavaland to find them.

You at minimum take it out of commission roundstart, and deny anyone who legitimately obtains the hand teleporter to explore space a way home.

Three , if the station has no mats, I think fixing that takes priority over someone’s gimmick. If they want to use the teleporter so bad, why don’t they just go mine for the crystals?

If the station has no materials, the mining conscription kit exists for a reason.

Player interaction shouldn’t be shortcircuited with a machine that invalidates the expected responsibilities of an entire job.

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I’ve figured out how to quote properly, revel in my genius

Maybe one. I rarely see anyone break the one on the AI sat, so it would be feasible to set it and use its target for the Hand Tele. Even more rarely is someone going off into space in the rounds where Bluespace Miners are actually important (the rounds where few people are actually present).

I don’t think Bluespace Miners are a worse alternative to strongarming people who already declared they’d prefer not playing miner, by means of not picking miner, to tide into cargo and spend credits to buy a conscription kit so they can probably go die or spend the next 15 minutes interacting with nobody and doing mind numbing, repetitive, bland grunt work because if they don’t, the station will stagnate totally in what players are capable of producing.
If nobody wants to mine, my proposed changed Bluespace Miners can make sure the station at least has something coming in.
If people actually do a good job of mining, the changed Miners would actually start allowing for passive income of the ores people actually care about and free up the miners to either continue mining at their leisure, if they enjoy it, or do other things like explore, loot lavaland, and fight megafauna, if they don’t.

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I’d like to note that the space ghost spawner for Charlie station relies on bluespace miners existing, they get exactly 3 bluespace crystals to construct a bluespace miner and can build up from there.

It doesn’t, people have always managed without them.

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The only thing miners do is try to hunt megafauna and die, without BSMs every single round there would be no mats, there would most likely be no power, and everything would be just a mess.