New skill idea: Mining!

[Variaz]

Digging bonus has been requested before, so I came up with this skill that does that, and more.

Each points in this skill will:
- Give 1% per points chance to clear a diggable wall, regardless of strength. Considering a standard 'T' command or CTRL+Direction gives 99 tries, you can see that with only a few points, it's going to make it much faster.
- Increase damages of pickaxes(a new weapon that will use this skill as it's weapon skill)
- Improve the Mining-related feats below.

FEATS:

- Gold & Ore Mining(15 points): You get a chance to find gold and metal ingots when digging. (I might add licialhyds too) Dungeon level and this skill's level affects what type of ores you find, and how much gold you'll get. This could allow you to get gold quickly, and better ingots sooner.

- Ceiling Crumble/Pit Digging(40 points): Allow you to make the ceiling crumble, creating a pile of rubble to block the way. You also gain another ability, "Pit Digging", that allows you to create a pit in front of you(useful to prevent monsters from getting near, and cast spells or shoot ammos at them!). And finally, Ceiling Crumble will be usable on pits to turn them into floor.

- Archeological Dig(80 points): When digging, you get a chance to find ancient, hidden ruins to explore. The idea will be that you'll occasionally come across a stair that will bring you to a special level, containing treasures and monsters. The deeper you go, and the higher the skill, the higher the "level" of the ruins will be, meaning better treasures and tougher monsters.

And to support it, Pickaxes will be added. Two-handed weapons that uses Mining as the weapon skill. They won't be as strong as other two-handed weapons, but will be useful should you decide to raise your Mining skill a lot.

Overall, a nice little skill that can be both a simple digging bonus, or a useful skill in which you can focus as your main skill. Dwarves will most likely get a bonus to it.

[khan]

Great Idea, it will fit in nicely with my latest character (a dwarven defender). However, is it posible to have a one-handed digging weapon in addition to the pick? (Think bigger version of Rock Hammer as in Shawshank Redemption).

Does the pickaxe need to be weaker than other two-handed weapons (I can see a real pickaxe causing at least as much damage as a Warhammer for instance) and I think it will be balanced as there are no combat orientated feats associated with the weapon.

[hairybolox]

A very interesting idea Variaz - Especially the chance of finding ruins !!!!
Although it brings up a couple of questions....

If your skill level was high enough would there be a chance of more than one ruin per level ? Possibly a stupid question since currently we can't go back to the same dungeon, but you may be planning on changing that...

Could those ruins have ruins in them ?

Would bringing down the ceiling on an enemy be damaging ? I hope so :-)

[Gando]

*has nightmares still about Durin's Bane* when you talk about finding ruins with potentially high level monsters I think of Balrogs and other ancient enemies of light.

Some ideas for pick type weapons.

Awl Axe -- 1d6 1handed weapon
PickHammer --1d8 1 handed weapon
Dwarven Awl -- 2d6 1 handed weapon
Gnomish Pick -- 1d5 (adds alot to mining skill though) 1 handed weapon
Standard Pickaxe -- 1d10 2handed weapon.
Dwarven Great Pick 2d10 2handed weapon (adds some to mining skill)
Ancient Mining Pick 1d8 2 handed weapon (adds to mining skill and is quite old so it has a high value as an antique.)
Orcish Battle Pick (requires a strength of 20+ to weild) 3d10 2 handed (-5 to hit)

[junyortrakr]

I like the sounds of the mining skill.

I also think it would be very nice if there were a set of one-handed weapons.

[Variaz]

Well, seems like this skill will definitely be in 008.

Yes, one-handed picks would be nice after all. I'll make the picks more on par with other weapons too.

[Gando]

Does that mean Kobolds, Gnomes and Dwarves will get some mining skill bonus?

[Variaz]

Not sure about kobolds or gnomes, but dwarves definitely will. Gnomes in Portralis focus more on their inventor/wizard side than their miner side, so I don't know.

[Gando]

I was thinking of the traditionally underground races. Just as Im assuming that the more charisma oriented races will be interested in a music bonus.

[kingmonkey]

Well this does seem to mean that the spell stone to mud will not be implemented, however completion of quests that require digging through granite will still be possible to complete so mission accomplished. Sounds like it could be fun as part of a treasure hunter class.

My only thought is that making pits that are impassable by that melee boss while safely shooting it from 2 squares away could have some balance issues.

[challtdow]

Jan 26, 2009 1:15:46 GMT -5 kingmonkey said:

My only thought is that making pits that are impassable by that melee boss while safely shooting it from 2 squares away could have some balance issues.

Maybe adding a new 'permanent' floor tile would also be an option for when you're not suppposed to be able to dig your way out.

Chall T. Dow

[Variaz]

Jan 26, 2009 1:15:46 GMT -5 kingmonkey said:

Well this does seem to mean that the spell stone to mud will not be implemented, however completion of quests that require digging through granite will still be possible to complete so mission accomplished. Sounds like it could be fun as part of a treasure hunter class.

My only thought is that making pits that are impassable by that melee boss while safely shooting it from 2 squares away could have some balance issues.

Stone to Mud could still be useful for it's radius effect though, so I might put it. I will also give it an additional bonus of being able to cause damages to golem-type enemies. ("g")

Actually, as far as pits are concerned, they aren't much unbalancing, it's mostly good against pure melee enemies, which gets rarer and rarer. Most depth 40+ enemies have some form of ranged or magical attack in addition to melee. And then there are many flying and incorporal enemies that will cross pits without any problems. And then, one pit at a time, which is what I had in mind, will be mostly useful in corridors, not in open rooms.

[Variaz]

Started coding the ruins.

How I plan to make this work is that whenever you discover a ruin, a stairway will appear at the spot where you dug. You may only find ruins(and actually, other treasures as well) when digging "mineral" walls(such as normal walls, quartz walls, etc...). Rubbes do not count, as do trees and snow trees. (although that could change, tree-based ruins would be interesting). You also cannot find any ruins(and any treasures actually) while digging in quest levels.

Once you go on the stair, there is 50% chances that you will find a randomly generated ruin, similar to the end level of dungeons, except there will be a stair to go back to the previous level, and no exit at the end. Based on your Mining skill and how deep you go, these ruins will have various items and monsters that may exceed the current depth(or might actually be easier).

The other 50% will instead generate a premade level. Anything goes in these ruins, they're like quest levels. Some will probably hide some artifacts and ancient monsters. It will also be possible to make it so that once you get an artifact, the ruin might not be generated again, thus avoiding redoing an already-cleared ruin over and over.

The challenge here is to try to code the random dungeons algorithm in lua, which isn't too easy. If it takes too long, I might just end up creating a modified version of the random dungeon code to work for the random ruins for the moment.

[Variaz]

Well, it's going well, the ruins generation code wasn't actually too hard to make in lua, and produces interesting results. I also fixed a bug that I discovered in the process that randomly chosen monsters in quests that uses event 13(a randomly chosen monster) and 14(randomly chosen monster of a specific type) wouldn't appear.

So the implementation of Mining is going pretty smoothly.