The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

    I have two suggestions about things that have always bugged me about mineral collection in SC2:

1. Currently when the lander is near-full and picks up a big load of minerals that can't fit in its hold, it will pick up a portion of the minerals and then the rest disappear from the planet's surface.. I find this annoying. Instead the remainder should be left behind on the planet so that you can return for more.
    This is especially annoying if there are 20 units of a very valuable metal (gold, etc) and you only pick up 4 because your lander is almost full and the rest vanishes (while your hold is filled up with worthless base metals instead).

2. Fix it so that you can no longer blast minerals with your lander's blaster. This seems really wasteful and pointless. Does it even make sense? ("blast that pile of metal with the stunner!")


Thanks!

Those are both good ideas, but this isn't the first time problems with the game's mining system has been brought up. If I recall correctly, the core team didn't think your first idea was feasible. The second one might be. Maybe they can be convinced to implement that.

Discussed in bug 411 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=411).

Reported as bug 469 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=469).

In both cases, the "that's how the original works, so we won't change it" argument applies.

Just do what I do, when you see a huge block of exotic or radioactive minerals return back to the ship and then fire off again to get your RU's worth. I just make sure I have a means of getting back to Sol, either through having enough fuel to scrape back there by checking the starmap constantly or using other methods in the game.

EDIT

Somebody already said what I was saying  ;D

I think this argument is valid for many things but is not applicable for this complaint.

Re: minerals disappearing after pickup
Making it so that minerals are not wasted (you can't even see how much a dot is worth vs. how much space is in your hold) will only increase usability of the game and will not in any way change any gameplay mechanics or balance in remotely significant ways. It is simply a user interface and headache-removing issue so that people odn't have to have anxiety and overthink things needlessly when mining minerals. This particular variety of micromanagement really adds no value to the game.

As for shooting minerals, we could ask the creators if they did this on purpose but I really doubt that they thought "oh wouldn't it be a great idea if minerals disappeared when you shot them?" In my mind it could easily be (and to me seems likely is) incidental oversight.

We are very careful not to go down the slippery slope of changing the original gameplay. Our guideline has been not to change any conscious decision made by TFB.

The fact that rest minerals get lost is likely a product of the limited space available; the presence of each mineral is stored as a single bit. I agree that picking up partial deposits could at least be made an option. At some point we will change the format of the savegames, breaking backwards compatibility. At that time, this issue should be considered again.

As for shooting minerals, it is possible that this was an unintentional effect which went unnoticed in testing, but it's also quite possible that it was not. It was even so natural to me that things like this get destroyed when you shoot them, that I never even seriously considered the possibility that it was an accident. Although I must admit that it is quite unusual that there is no sound effect when it happens.
Regardless, in case of doubt, the default is not to change it