Mining

[BlazeStryker]

Okay. I have seen many, many ways of trying to tweak the mining experience over the years. For a start, the uniform number of strokes to mine a vein is weird, but that's the least of the problem. Mix in the lack of rock removal and the oddity of mining a vein once and once only. (No, bad Bathysphere, no biscuit, I'll never, ever buy your "game balance" gibber so leave it at home!)

 

This leads to the player being fully capable of mining Skyrim dry in less than a month. Seriously.

 

So, what to do? The infinite veins idea was always weird in its own way, just ask anyone quarrying stone for their Hearthfire houses.

 

I... have an idea. While I restart a clean save and work with the improved Cidhna Mine expansion, consider this. Mining has a number of strikes per vein, varying between seven and thirteen. This includes Quarries. Miners sell ore with the proper mod, one that I am now using. Mining makes stone fall out of the vein site, be it wall or floor... and when cells reset, the veins in that cell also reset.

 

This way, there is logic to your impact on the ore veins and in the tunnels that needed digging over the years and decades, so extensive mines make just as much sense as small ones. Heck, apply that to the lumbering and wood chopping as well as returning later there will have been more wood brought in to chop or work at the sawmill.

 

Best of all, it spits in the face of "excuse-motivated" game balance for actual logic.

[IsharaMeradin]

My mod Random Mining has a 'hard worker' option in the MCM that allows one to change the number of ore received as well as the number of strikes required to obtain said ore. It is not a perfect match for "reality" and does not affect quarry and clay deposits. It may, however, be a decent start towards what you wish to see.

 

Making stone fall out would be tricky to achieve. Not sure how one would do that to be honest. And ore veins already reset when cells reset. The downside to resetting with cell reset is the base game has a 30 day duration before cells will fully reset. The duration before cell reset and respawn can be changed and that does help to make mines look like they are actually active.

[BlazeStryker]

Yeah, thanks to "tweak settings" in my Smash and my being bashed patch friendly, my resets are 3 days for general cells and 10 days for cleared cells. Cell reset fixing the veins is all needed. rock falling out and leaving a hollow until reset? That would be an animation sequence at a guess, not much stranger than the added animations cooked up for Hunterborn actions I have seen of late. I'll definitely look into your Random Mining mod, hopefully, it won't conflict with the mods I have installed to have things take time.

 

(answering during thunderstorms is not conducive to writing well...)