Background: On UOR there are a total of 12 different colors of ore: Iron, Dull Copper, Shadow Iron, Copper, Bronze, Gold, Agapite, Verite, Valorite, Stone, Sandstone, and Marble. Each of these ores comes in four basic sizes: Small, 2 different types of Medium, and Large. That means there can be up to 48 different piles of ore in a miners backpack. Ore is "produced" through 4 different avenues: Traditional mining, Gargoyle pickaxes, Gargoyle shovels, and through smelting. In traditional mining, every time the miner strikes his tool onto the mountainside or cave he will be pulling from one of the 9 standard colors of veins. Every ore mined will be one of the 4 basic sizes and will be deposited directly into his backpack. Gargoyle pickaxe mining operates exactly the same as traditional mining, depositing one of the 9 standard colors of ore in 4 different potential sizes into his backpack. In addition, there is a chance to spawn an ore elemental. Upon death the elemental will have 25 pieces of ore which can come in the standard 9 colors or the 3 special colors (stone, sandstone, marble). A total of 25 ore in one of these 12 colors of ore will appear in the elementals secondary backpack in their corpse, and will come in one of the 4 basic sizes. What color is dependent on the elemental's type ( dull copper elemental, bronze elemental, marble elemental etc). Gargoyle shovel mining operates the exact same as tradititional mining, depositing one of the 9 standard colors of ore in 4 different potential sizes into the miner's backpack. In addition, there is a VERY high chance of spawning an ore golem that is the color of the gargoyle shovel used. Upon death 3 stacks of ore of the random 4 sizes are dropped onto the ground (Approx 50 ingots worth). Ore is also "produced" in the smelting process. Whenever you fail an ore smelt, you will destroy half of the ore pile you attempted to smelt. If you for instance fail to smelt a single valorite ore, you will be left with a medium ore. Failure to smelt the medium ore will result in a small ore. The Problem: On UOR, a miner is inundated with small and medium ore piles. In traditional mining and gargoyle pickaxe mining, your pack is littered with a ton of small and medium ore, slowing down your productivity while the miner deals with weight and smelting issues. In gargoyle shovel mining, not only is the miners pack littered with a ton of small and medium ore, the entire cave you are mining is littered with the piles as well. In a typical hour of mining I will consume an average of 35 gargoyle shovels, which at 6 swings a piece means 210 ore golems, which at 3 random piles of ore each means 630 piles of ore sitting on the ground of the cave. Due to item decay, a miner cannot leave the ore on the ground for longer then 60 minutes plus the time until the next world save. This means he has to scurry about trying to gather and combine together this random ore assortment and smelt it before it decays. This process is not fun and it takes roughly 15-25 minutes per hour of mining. The standard item action delay would mean even if you were perfectly efficient and combined one pile every second, it would take 10.5 minutes to combine the 630 piles. The different sizes however make it very difficult to be efficient as misclicking is very easy, especially with the small and medium sizes. The Solution: I suggest that traditional mining, gargoyle pickaxe mining, and gargoyle shovel mining should never result in small ore. The small ore produced during the smelting process can stay, as it has a mechanical purpose of dividing a single ore pile. This would leave small and medium ore in UOR for mechanical and decorative purposes. The ore pulled from caves and mountains would always be of the large size, the ore found on ore elementals corpses would always be of the large size, and the ore dropped onto the ground by ore golems would always be of the large size. In addition, I suggest that instead of 3 piles of ore dropping per ore golem, one consolidated pile of ore drop. The amount of ore dropped can be adjusted to account for the increase in ingots since large ore smelts into more ingots then small. These adjustments in the amount of ore dropped would be to ensure that the net of 50 average ingots per golem should remain. TLDR: Nix small and medium ore.
Out of my "mining is clunky thread", I would have to say this is public enemy numero uno for miners. Not to mention it's Era inaccurate
Pack Horse(s), "All Drop" command, on a single tile. This will auto stack the ores by matching type. Drag/drop to container, smelt by type (4 types) macro, looped. Even without gating to a single tile, just drop, drag to container within reach of a forge, smelt-by-type macro looped. Problem solved. I wouldn't lose sleep over it changing as you've suggested but I don't think it's necessary or saving a ton of time and it reduces a small element of the game. I know those pile types have and likely will be used for decoration as well.
Problem not solved, 3 piles of random ore are still deposited on the ground every golem you kill, as well as small piles in ore elemental corpses, as well as in your pack when traditionally mining. As I showed, it is actually a considerable amount of time wasted, 15-20 minutes of just cleaning up. Also as the small ore would still result from smelting failures, those pile types will still be readily available should someone wish to decorate with them. I agree this is not worth losing sleep over, however it is certainly worth changing. The suggested change to small/medium ore falls is nearly identical to other changes like allowing small BOD's to be filled by simply targeting the container. It takes away an unnecessary carpal tunnel causing system and replaces it with something more functional. It also does not depart at all from what new players will expect when they join a UOR shard, adding no extra learning curve to this already difficult game.
Yeah, not saying it's bad just that it's a pretty simple thing to handle. I pick up piles and drag them to pack horses but admittedly I've never done a run with gargoyle shovels so perhaps I'm not handling as many small bits as you are (lol). The small piles all generally stay in my 'smelt container' and I rarely look at or evaluate what I CTRL+Shift and Drag to that container. I only really look at the container weight and resulting ingots (never even really track success rate, just curiosity).
We should get rid of the medium and large ore. Removing the small ore from the game would somehow increase the ingot yield when mining. If all successful mining attempts return a large ore, that's 2 ingots per success. Keeping the small ore in game and adjusting the amount of small ore retrieved while mining wouldn't affect the perfectly balanced mining system on this server.<== LOL !!! So yeah I vote YAY for removing large and both medium ores and instead replace them with two or four small ore piles when mining.
This sarcasm missed the mark, at least with me. I'm not sure if you're serious or?? Currently a brand new 50/50 dexer from character creation can make more gold per hour grinding ogres/ettins than a GM miner mining and selling at 8gp per. The amount of medium/small ore is completely era (not only era, but I don't think there was ever an era where you'd get this much trash ore) inaccurate. The small ore doesn't need to disappear it just needs to be only at the end of a vein, I'm just guessing making it disappear is an easier fix?
IIRC, mining used to trail off and tap out when you got towards the end of a mining run (large for the first 12-14, medium for 1-4, small for 0-2). Don't remember what era but I believe this was UO:R on OSI timeframe but might have been publish 16ish. As to getting rid of small ore entirely, no. Not just no but hell no. I had posted elsewhere the value of small ore not just from a smelting standpoint but also carrying capacity. I used to carry around a bag with one of each small ore so I could get more on a packy when they stopped appearing regularly (around the time of the resource patch for Fel). I agree that at the very least the chance for large ore should be increased slightly and the chances for medium and small reduced but they should not be removed entirely. Where I would like to see it go is that the chance for the different ore types (and outright failures) should be based on the shown mining skill (so mining gloves actually help). Seems like now the chances for failures and the "trash" ore types is set way too high (if I can't fail on smelting, I shouldn't fail on digging).
Alright, taking into consideration all the feedback thus far I would like to adjust my proposal. Small/medium ores remain during traditional mining, however at either low procs or just as you near the end of the vein. Ore golems should only drop 1 large pile of ore, keeping the same average ingots per pile (50). Ore elementals remain the same.
I don't think there is a 1 second delay as I'm faster than 1 per second. I even bandicammed myself to make sure. WTT combining lesson for a decent golem axe.
I've been thinking on this for quite some time, and I think that i'd just like to see it be Era-Accurate for how the ores spawned. That is to say, they were all large ore until the ore vein was getting "tapped out" and then you would see a medium ore and small ore for the last couple of pieces. The whole diminishing return as the vein runs dry was kinda neat. Regardless of anything, I do NOT want to see the other small pieces of ore stop spawning. I've used them over the years for all sorts of decorations and would be quite annoyed if they were removed or became hard to come by. That, and I really like combining them into the small ore piles so that I can carry more.
