Mining and Production: Current Issues and Potential
I’ve read and upvoted many suggestions related to ores, mining, and production systems here (I’ll link a few at the end). Not because I fully agree with every detail, but because they all point in the same direction: the current system has a lot of potential, but also room for improvement.
Before getting into suggestions, I’d like to summarize the current state of mining and production in SE2, to establish a clear snapshot at this point in time.
Snapshot
We have many new ores added to the game. In addition to the 10 ores we had in SE1, we now also have Copper, Lead, Chromium, and Titanium. No aluminum so far, but more ores can likely be added later. The biggest change is that we are now missing many basic ingots. Instead, we have a much larger variety of components split into different tiers. The concept of ingots is partially replaced by tier one components. For example, instead of smelting iron into ingots as the first step of production, you can now directly create basic components from iron ore, such as steel plates, tubes, and construction components.
Mining, in principle, is not very different from SE1. You still mine either with a hand drill of different tiers or with drill blocks. Ore patches are relatively small and scattered around the world. All basic ores can be found nearby on planets and asteroids, while some rare ores require traveling to other sectors. The biggest mining-related change is that stone is no longer collected at all. If you mine regular terrain, you get nothing, and if you mine ore, you only get ore and no stone. As a result, there are currently no blocks or components that require stone or gravel.
That was a brief recap of the current state of mining and production in SE2.
Positives
First of all, I want to praise the developers for putting survival foundations into players’ hands at an early stage. A lot of work is clearly going into this system. Below are some aspects that I personally consider positive, many of which are also frequently mentioned by other players.
The early game is now more accessible and convenient. You can find everything you need close to your spawn location and progress quite quickly. There is no longer a need to search for cobalt for a long time, no more grinding through stone, and no more waiting for large amounts of stone to be processed. You can also survive without relying on a survival kit, which feels very good.
Sector-specific ores are a great idea. They promote logistics, transportation, and potentially trade between sectors.
The production chain is now more complex with higher-tier components, which adds depth and progression. This also adds variety and feels more realistic overall.
The gearbox block for crafting and upgrading character equipment opens up interesting survival scenarios and is more accessible, as you do not need assemblers of any kind.
All production blocks seem to remain relevant from early to late game and are not obsoleted once you unlock better blocks. There are no strictly “better” blocks, as the production chain requires all block tiers.
Backpack building is a very nice addition. It helps a lot with early game progression and is very friendly for new players. Even later in the game, it can still be useful for building interiors, decorations, tables, chairs, and similar blocks, or for doing quick repairs. Overall, it is a great feature, although it might still need some balancing, and area welding would help a lot.
Iffy Parts
There are some issues that may be temporary, so I will not focus too much on them. That said, ores and mining now feel very similar to SE1, which can be seen as a good thing, but also as a missed opportunity to improve or rethink some aspects.
One downside is that we now have even more different ores, which means more mining trips. Ore veins could be made larger, but the overall number of times you have to go mining increases together with the number of digging sites. At the same time, the lack of ingots limits our ability to efficiently stockpile resources or recycle materials from existing components. As soon as you run out of a specific resource, the only solution is to go and mine that ore again.
Stone is another big topic. Many players, myself included, miss stone for several reasons. Nobody wants to deal with massive amounts of useless stone like in SE1, but instead of removing it completely, it could be given more meaningful uses. Stone could reinforce gameplay around waste management, logistics, and infrastructure. Removing it entirely simplifies things, but also removes a layer of gameplay that many players actually enjoyed despite its issues. More about it later.
Possible improvements
First, the biggest elephant in the room. Removing ingots did not really simplify the game and, in some ways, made it more complicated and grindy. Many issues often associated with ingots were not actually caused by ingots themselves.
One common argument is that ingots add an unnecessary production step and make players wait. In SE1, refining times were indeed exaggerated. A better solution would be to drastically reduce refining time or make it scale with power input. Removing minimum power requirements would also help in certain survival situations, while still allowing faster refining when more energy is supplied. Ideally, with a small number of refineries and sufficient power, all ore could be processed in a reasonable amount of time, and likely be finished while players focus on some other survival aspects like base building or mining. On the other hand, components crafting time can be reduced so actually you end up waiting less.
Another argument is that ingots add complexity for new players. In practice, the large variety of components and higher-tier components adds much more complexity. Having base ingots actually reduces complexity by allowing flexible stockpiling and on-demand production, instead of forcing players to constantly mine and store many different components.
There is also the argument that ingots are unrealistic or outdated. This is debatable, and ingots are not unrealistic in general. What matters most is whether a system works well for gameplay.
Now about backpack building. It is a good and useful feature, but it does not necessarily require removing ingots or stone to be viable. Mining with a hand drill could automatically convert some ore into ingots at a lower efficiency than a refinery (less yield). This would reduce inventory mass and volume, allowing fewer mining trips). Players could still collect raw ore if they want, by holding an additional key or toggle mode. This would make backpack building even better rather than limiting it. You would not collect any stone, of course, unless we add some basic stone “ingot” to the game.
Speaking about stone, there are many potential uses for it. We could finally have long-requested concrete blocks, useful for base building as a cheap alternative to iron, while at the same time making iron more valuable for other blocks instead of using it so heavily for basic structures.
Another interesting use case is terraforming. Why not collect all voxel materials in a similar way to how ore materials are collected? This would allow some “stone-like” materials to be used for crafting concrete blocks, while others could be placed back into voxels, either by hand or using special “dispense” blocks. If the same material is used as before, it could potentially “repair” holes, effectively resetting voxel damage and improving overall performance and save file size.
Imagine placing grass material to form parks, even inside a dome in space or on a planet without atmosphere. Forming roads for rovers, building walls around your base, creating ramps, creating leveled landing pads without using large amounts of blocks, or fixing voxels in tunnels or underground bases. With all these additional uses, dealing with stone and other voxel materials being collected while mining would be more than justified.
Ores
Lastly, I want to shine a light on alternative ores and different ways to collect and refine them. As mentioned before, an ever-increasing number of unique ores creates an additional burden by requiring more mining. Reintroducing ingots can partially mitigate this issue, but not entirely. What if, instead of having dozens of dedicated ores for each individual element, we had compound ores?
Compound ores would contain certain concentrations of several elements. There are many real-life examples of such ores, and for gameplay purposes there could be interesting combinations, for example an ore containing 20% gold, 10% silver, and 5% platinum, or one with 30% nickel, 30% cobalt, and 20% magnesium. Of course, there could still be rich single-element ores, such as hematite (70% iron) or magnetite (75% iron), as well as two-element ores like nickeliferous limonite (50% iron and some nickel). Cobalt (irl) is primarily recovered as a by-product from the mining of other metals such as copper, nickel, silver, gold, and lead, rather than being mined specifically for cobalt.
This approach would not only reduce the number of mining sites that need to be excavated, but also make sector-specific resources more interesting. Sectors would not only differ by which ores are available, but also by how rich and concentrated those ores are. For example, nickel could still be found almost everywhere, but in certain sectors or planet biomes it would simply be more efficient to mine and refine.
Conclusion
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the mining and production systems in SE2. Some changes are clearly a big step forward, while others feel like a step back or a simplification that removes interesting gameplay. There is still a lot of potential to make the system deeper, less grindy, and more engaging, and I hope this feedback helps guide future improvements.
Thx for reading.
References:
I like this feedback
Problem with removing stone and them trying to bypass ingots is several fold and I'm glad to see more folks talking about this.
First, I'm glad to see you mentioned that some of the issues attributed to ingots and stone aren't their fault, because it's 100% correct. In SE1 as it sits currently every time you stick a drill to terrain you're getting something that you can turn into a resource, even if it's just trace resources via stone. By removing stone you're pretty much at the mercy of the spawn generator and where it throws you. It makes every part of the planet that's not a dedicated ore vein completely useless and needlessly complicates things while adding unnecessary grind. Stone shouldn't outright replace dedicated ore veins, but it should give you enough in basic trace resources that you're never completely without the ability to build. In SE1 even if all you have is stone, you can still do some basics. So that's one thing that SE1 absolutely gets right. Every bit of the planet has some kind of value. Removing stone and make it useless means that I'm wasting my time resource wise if it's not a dedicate ore vein, and there will only be so many of those.
Next, gravel piles up and is considered largely useless in SE1 not because it's a bad ore/ingot type, but because SE1 the game itself doesn't really do anything with it and it's a forgotten ore type. Outside of a select few things which use very little of it, gravel is forgotten about and basically left to languish. That's not a fault of gravel or stone, that's bad design on the part SE1 forgetting about one of its ores. For some of my mods I've started attaching it to various recipes to give it some use and so folks don't feel like they've got to just throw it out. For most folks however they're just going to toss it because they have no use for it. If the game itself and Keen can't give people reasons to want to use it, they can't logically expect people to just magically think reasons up to use it either. It may happen eventually but if you're not going to do much of anything with it, why include it. Similar is the "organic" ore type. Point being, gravel should've had more uses for as abundant as it is. That's not a fault of gravel, but bad planning on the development side for its uses.
For ingots, even 10k years from now, we will still need to process various materials before we can use them or get the most benefit from them. In real life as it is right now, very rarely can we take a raw material straight from the ground and make it into something. If for example I took a chunk of raw iron ore, I could certainly try to forge that into a sword or a knife, but it's going to be super weak and brittle due to impurities which will break easily. That's assuming I can even get it into a knife/sword shape without it breaking to start with. In real life refining materials like raw metals into an ingot serves 2 purposes. First is that it removes impurities could weaken the material and removes excess weight. Meaning that when I am ready to craft something from that material, it's pure metal and not a bunch of junk elements that will weaken it or make it unnecessarily heavy. On top of this, forming the material into an ingot allows me an easy form for storage that I can stockpile for later use, transport easier without excess weight, or even sell/trade for other materials. Then when I am ready to use said materials, all I have to do is go grab one of those ingots and I can start forming it into whatever I want or need. Ingots are also typically marked with their purity and other critical info stamped into the ingot itself.
With ingots I can craft them into whatever I need when I need it. If for example I've been crafting a bunch of steel plates and something changes so that I need something such as steel tubes, I can just change over to the new component without issues. If I'm stuck with basic components and the ingots are removed, then I'm up the creek. I have to go get more resources because I can no longer break down excess steel plates into resources like I can now in SE1. Even if yes I eat a partial loss by breaking down the excess steel plates, it's better than a complete loss of being stuck with components I don't need and can't use at the moment. Being able to break down the excess steel plates into a raw/scrap resource guarantees I'm able to keep going even if that's the only resource I have. However if I'm stuck with the "basic components" then I'm up the creek, especially if there are no other resources veins nearby. Now I've hit an artificial snag in the crafting tree that shouldn't be there. I call it an artificial snag because it's there by bad game design and because it's designed for me to hit a snag there, not because of anything I did. It's the game forcing the snag on me vs running into it organically.
I also don't buy the "ingots slow down production" argument on its own because by that same logic, having to go out an mine for resources at all can be said to be slowing down production. Removing them or excluding them to the degree they're doing now simply just makes production rooms more barren. See also previous arguments above about forcing us to keep material with alot of impurities and excess weight that doesn't need to be there. Overall mechanically speaking from a gameplay perspective, you can go straight from ore to component, irl that would never be possible in most cases. Not to mention my brain still sees it as a weaker material because it's not properly refined. "removing" ingots doesn't solve production issues, you're just changing which part of the process they handwave away. In SE1 they handwave away the smelting part by having the refineries poof out the ore and poof in the finished ingots. Not to mention trying to keep something in a purely liquid metal state is going to take far far more energy than simply storing in ingot form. Trying to handwave away the ingot stage is just foolish to me. I know for me at least at the end of the day I'll be modding ingots in if they don't get added. I get that they're not everyone's favorites, but the slowdown can be addressed easily enough by just outright decreasing the time it takes to process the stuff whether by just straight cutting the times down, allowing us to stick more power to the refineries to speed them up, or both. I have my own thoughts on this stuff, but will leave it at this for the moment.
Problem with removing stone and them trying to bypass ingots is several fold and I'm glad to see more folks talking about this.
First, I'm glad to see you mentioned that some of the issues attributed to ingots and stone aren't their fault, because it's 100% correct. In SE1 as it sits currently every time you stick a drill to terrain you're getting something that you can turn into a resource, even if it's just trace resources via stone. By removing stone you're pretty much at the mercy of the spawn generator and where it throws you. It makes every part of the planet that's not a dedicated ore vein completely useless and needlessly complicates things while adding unnecessary grind. Stone shouldn't outright replace dedicated ore veins, but it should give you enough in basic trace resources that you're never completely without the ability to build. In SE1 even if all you have is stone, you can still do some basics. So that's one thing that SE1 absolutely gets right. Every bit of the planet has some kind of value. Removing stone and make it useless means that I'm wasting my time resource wise if it's not a dedicate ore vein, and there will only be so many of those.
Next, gravel piles up and is considered largely useless in SE1 not because it's a bad ore/ingot type, but because SE1 the game itself doesn't really do anything with it and it's a forgotten ore type. Outside of a select few things which use very little of it, gravel is forgotten about and basically left to languish. That's not a fault of gravel or stone, that's bad design on the part SE1 forgetting about one of its ores. For some of my mods I've started attaching it to various recipes to give it some use and so folks don't feel like they've got to just throw it out. For most folks however they're just going to toss it because they have no use for it. If the game itself and Keen can't give people reasons to want to use it, they can't logically expect people to just magically think reasons up to use it either. It may happen eventually but if you're not going to do much of anything with it, why include it. Similar is the "organic" ore type. Point being, gravel should've had more uses for as abundant as it is. That's not a fault of gravel, but bad planning on the development side for its uses.
For ingots, even 10k years from now, we will still need to process various materials before we can use them or get the most benefit from them. In real life as it is right now, very rarely can we take a raw material straight from the ground and make it into something. If for example I took a chunk of raw iron ore, I could certainly try to forge that into a sword or a knife, but it's going to be super weak and brittle due to impurities which will break easily. That's assuming I can even get it into a knife/sword shape without it breaking to start with. In real life refining materials like raw metals into an ingot serves 2 purposes. First is that it removes impurities could weaken the material and removes excess weight. Meaning that when I am ready to craft something from that material, it's pure metal and not a bunch of junk elements that will weaken it or make it unnecessarily heavy. On top of this, forming the material into an ingot allows me an easy form for storage that I can stockpile for later use, transport easier without excess weight, or even sell/trade for other materials. Then when I am ready to use said materials, all I have to do is go grab one of those ingots and I can start forming it into whatever I want or need. Ingots are also typically marked with their purity and other critical info stamped into the ingot itself.
With ingots I can craft them into whatever I need when I need it. If for example I've been crafting a bunch of steel plates and something changes so that I need something such as steel tubes, I can just change over to the new component without issues. If I'm stuck with basic components and the ingots are removed, then I'm up the creek. I have to go get more resources because I can no longer break down excess steel plates into resources like I can now in SE1. Even if yes I eat a partial loss by breaking down the excess steel plates, it's better than a complete loss of being stuck with components I don't need and can't use at the moment. Being able to break down the excess steel plates into a raw/scrap resource guarantees I'm able to keep going even if that's the only resource I have. However if I'm stuck with the "basic components" then I'm up the creek, especially if there are no other resources veins nearby. Now I've hit an artificial snag in the crafting tree that shouldn't be there. I call it an artificial snag because it's there by bad game design and because it's designed for me to hit a snag there, not because of anything I did. It's the game forcing the snag on me vs running into it organically.
I also don't buy the "ingots slow down production" argument on its own because by that same logic, having to go out an mine for resources at all can be said to be slowing down production. Removing them or excluding them to the degree they're doing now simply just makes production rooms more barren. See also previous arguments above about forcing us to keep material with alot of impurities and excess weight that doesn't need to be there. Overall mechanically speaking from a gameplay perspective, you can go straight from ore to component, irl that would never be possible in most cases. Not to mention my brain still sees it as a weaker material because it's not properly refined. "removing" ingots doesn't solve production issues, you're just changing which part of the process they handwave away. In SE1 they handwave away the smelting part by having the refineries poof out the ore and poof in the finished ingots. Not to mention trying to keep something in a purely liquid metal state is going to take far far more energy than simply storing in ingot form. Trying to handwave away the ingot stage is just foolish to me. I know for me at least at the end of the day I'll be modding ingots in if they don't get added. I get that they're not everyone's favorites, but the slowdown can be addressed easily enough by just outright decreasing the time it takes to process the stuff whether by just straight cutting the times down, allowing us to stick more power to the refineries to speed them up, or both. I have my own thoughts on this stuff, but will leave it at this for the moment.
I'm all for it.
I'm all for it.
I think we need stone mining potentially for concrete and gravel, so we can get gravel blocks and cement and make roads.
But I don't really want to go back to stone mining gives you trace minerals. When mining I would have to always make it so my drills didn't collect stone at all because it was annoying. By the time you set up good enough stone production you already had 1 million of each ore anyway.
A lot of games solve this issue by just having specific stone deposits in their world. And the stone deposits are usually huge. Sure it makes you wonder, can't you just get stone from other things that look like stone? But it's not a big deal, and perhaps it would be difficult for them to code it in that everything that looks like stone gives stone? Or it would end up being too process heavy/performance hitting to do it that way? So one option is just having a stone ore vein.
As for compound ores, it sounds like a decent idea. I wouldn't mind this.
And as for aluminum armor blocks or carbon armor blocks ( in the light armor section ) and Titanium armor blocks ( in the heavy armor section ). I would love these changes, and this in fact was one of my ideas I was saying for a long time in the discord. I want to have armor blocks I can make out of different materials and it would have different advantages.
As well we could have metals that we could also get by combining other metals, so mining ores isn't always necessary.
The other concern I have is that I am still fine with no ingots. I don't mind if ingots are added into the game to show them off, like maybe they can be put into stacks on a pallet, and people can store them in warehouses and show off how many they have. Or they can be used for commerce or transport. But this would be an optional step. No one in real life uses ingots to craft components directly. Ingots are smelted down and then the molten liquid is used to manufacture items. In the same way, Ore is smelted and purified and the liquid is then used to manufacture. If you can do all of that in 1 facility you have no need to make the ingot to transport the ore to do it at another facility. Hence the current system makes sense. But sure, bring back ingots as an optional step.
For the above comment, I watch tons of videos on youtube about smelting and purifying metals and chemistry. The ingot is not what purifies the metal. The metal is already purified as it's poured into an ingot cast. Usually from various steps using acids, water filtering, or powder separation. Meaning in its molten state the person already took the time to the filter the elements through multiple steps. Casting metal into an ingot, is helpful when you want to make swords, because you need something semi solid to hit, but that is also heated up at 1000 degrees or more so it's soft and can be shaped. And then you want to fold the metal a lot, and then maybe harden the metal depending on the application.
So my upvote is based on things in my comment.
I think we need stone mining potentially for concrete and gravel, so we can get gravel blocks and cement and make roads.
But I don't really want to go back to stone mining gives you trace minerals. When mining I would have to always make it so my drills didn't collect stone at all because it was annoying. By the time you set up good enough stone production you already had 1 million of each ore anyway.
A lot of games solve this issue by just having specific stone deposits in their world. And the stone deposits are usually huge. Sure it makes you wonder, can't you just get stone from other things that look like stone? But it's not a big deal, and perhaps it would be difficult for them to code it in that everything that looks like stone gives stone? Or it would end up being too process heavy/performance hitting to do it that way? So one option is just having a stone ore vein.
As for compound ores, it sounds like a decent idea. I wouldn't mind this.
And as for aluminum armor blocks or carbon armor blocks ( in the light armor section ) and Titanium armor blocks ( in the heavy armor section ). I would love these changes, and this in fact was one of my ideas I was saying for a long time in the discord. I want to have armor blocks I can make out of different materials and it would have different advantages.
As well we could have metals that we could also get by combining other metals, so mining ores isn't always necessary.
The other concern I have is that I am still fine with no ingots. I don't mind if ingots are added into the game to show them off, like maybe they can be put into stacks on a pallet, and people can store them in warehouses and show off how many they have. Or they can be used for commerce or transport. But this would be an optional step. No one in real life uses ingots to craft components directly. Ingots are smelted down and then the molten liquid is used to manufacture items. In the same way, Ore is smelted and purified and the liquid is then used to manufacture. If you can do all of that in 1 facility you have no need to make the ingot to transport the ore to do it at another facility. Hence the current system makes sense. But sure, bring back ingots as an optional step.
For the above comment, I watch tons of videos on youtube about smelting and purifying metals and chemistry. The ingot is not what purifies the metal. The metal is already purified as it's poured into an ingot cast. Usually from various steps using acids, water filtering, or powder separation. Meaning in its molten state the person already took the time to the filter the elements through multiple steps. Casting metal into an ingot, is helpful when you want to make swords, because you need something semi solid to hit, but that is also heated up at 1000 degrees or more so it's soft and can be shaped. And then you want to fold the metal a lot, and then maybe harden the metal depending on the application.
So my upvote is based on things in my comment.
I think the idea of compound ore deposits would definitely help with the issue of having a million small mining locations, gives more variety and strategic importance to various locations in the solar system, and would give incentive to justify building infrastructure at larger ore sites. Plus, having multiple ores types available at each location would reduce the need for mined stone to give trace amounts of other ores in order to give access to materials to those who have not yet found a bunch of ore deposits.
I do still think stone should be brought back, but in a way that is made more functional. I agree in the belief thats it's failure in SE1 was not due to it's existence, but due to a lack of ways to use it. Concrete blocks and voxel shaping tools would be instrumental in making it useful, and would prevent it from clogging up our inventories.
I think the idea of compound ore deposits would definitely help with the issue of having a million small mining locations, gives more variety and strategic importance to various locations in the solar system, and would give incentive to justify building infrastructure at larger ore sites. Plus, having multiple ores types available at each location would reduce the need for mined stone to give trace amounts of other ores in order to give access to materials to those who have not yet found a bunch of ore deposits.
I do still think stone should be brought back, but in a way that is made more functional. I agree in the belief thats it's failure in SE1 was not due to it's existence, but due to a lack of ways to use it. Concrete blocks and voxel shaping tools would be instrumental in making it useful, and would prevent it from clogging up our inventories.
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