Mining – A Devblog
In the spirit of trying new things, Razmael and I have decided to bring you a DevBlog about the second skill in Agriculture, which is Mining.
We don’t want to spoil too much for you, of course, but here is a broad overview for you to sink your teeth into. We have gone ahead and broken it down into bite sized pieces.
Overview
Combining wilderness maps and Agriculture’s commodity generation concept, Mining provides an opportunity for your characters to interact with various methods of prospecting and excavating ores as well as exploring new dungeon-esque maps that provide environmental challenges through fighting monsters, balancing workers and mining kits.
Goals
- Provide an engaging, long lasting experience.
- Provide a means to generate commodities for crafting, city maintenance, work orders and future content.
- Create more city management content.
- Encourage player and character creativity for turning profits.
- Encourage a new avenue of roleplay.
Summary
After gaining some experience in the mining field, characters will be able to open their own “instanced” mine by utilizing the relevant skills and, within this mine, face various environmental, monster and economic challenges with the reward of commodities, precious gems, experience, profit and roleplay opportunities.
The mines themselves are generated in a large, wilderness style map that will also incorporate our previous method of basic pixel maps.
Skill Samples
The below skills are only a few examples of the wider skillset, however they play an important role in the foundation of Mining as a whole and create the backbone of the skills.
Prospect – You can prospect areas across Sapience to decide if they are viable to mine in.
The idea is to break prospecting up into three skill levels as a mini talent that becomes more viable through continued use, adding some realism to the skillset.
- Lv1: Pan mining. Sifting in mountain streams, sands etc for gold pieces.
- Lv2: Surface mining. Digging at the surface of mountains to find low level coal and shards of metal.
- Lv3: Underground mining. Dungeon style, underground mines you have to light up and where high quality can be found as well as gems.
This concept introduces something unique to mining itself where you need to grow towards the big, instance mines through use of the skillset.
Kit – A basic kit for the mines.
Mining is largely built around two things; mining itself, whether through panning or deep mines, and kits. Kits can be upgraded to have more utility slots, up to a maximum of X. Your characters then need to decide what tools are important to take depending on the type of mining they plan to do.
Lignite – You can mine lignite coal.
Coal, and its quality, will be important for mixing with ores to create certain commodities and materials as well as the longevity of factories.
Map Legend
The mining instances themselves will have a variety of biomes and we decided we didn’t want to give you a full list because that ruins the fun of exploring, but I will drop the icons here for you to mull over for fun.
Kyna and Raz signing out from this DevBlog, but please let us know if you’d like to see more of this sort of stuff from all of us here! We can’t promise anything crazy, but if you enjoy it, we can definitely try more in the future where the opportunities present themselves.
P.S. We predict your first question will be an ETA and to that, we say, when it’s done! But this DevBlog should be a good indicator of the work and resources going into it.
P.P.S. From Tiur – All of this is from our current design, and it works! But it needs balancing; or we might decide it needs major changes. Don’t get too hung up on specifics! The idea here is to get feedback and maybe you can find things we didn’t consider.
