There was still a point in acquiring it at the pinnacle of one’s power and it had value. At the same time, however, I liked the fact that it made iron ore relevant even late-game. I certainly see your reasoning, as it was kind of additional task gobbling up plenty of time and resources. Steel change I am ambivalent towards – it may be good, it may be bad. Maybe said pockets could be semi-rare but at the same time digging out enough of certain resource could provoke off-map attacks the way gold does for bandits? I’m unsure about there being just pockets of enemies. Certainly it’ll help a bit with planning and provide nice risk/reward feature for rapid dungeon expansion. I’m glad to learn about the rework of dreadful geology (though in all honesty, since I was one of the players not happy with it, that’s not a surprise). In the following animation you can observe how the empty tile assignment changes when a new mining task is created.

There are still some nuances that need to be solved, but a nice improvement in imp intelligence should be noticable. Luckily, a reasonably fast algorithm is easy to implement, and from now on the imps will use it when trying to mine. The assignment needs to be updated dynamically, as mining tasks get created and are finished continuously. Of course no empty tile can be assigned to two different mineral tiles, which makes this task identical to the maximum matching problem. An imp is then ordered to occupy the matched tile before it starts mining.

The solution was to assign an empty, neighboring tile to each mineral tile. As a principle KeeperRL doesn’t allow many creatures on a single tile, so the imps would either switch their positions at a very fast rate, or one imp would stand and wait needlessly, even though other mineral tiles were freely accessible nearby. One of the problems was that multiple imps would try to occupy the same tile in order to mine the minerals around it. There are more possibilities for different rock types, such as one that’s completely undiggable, and that will also be part of my research on more interesting maps that I mentioned earlier.įinally, after implementing the above changes, it became very obvious that imp AI needs improvement, as the little creatures get in eachother’s way a lot when mining. The harder rock starts about 20 tiles into the mountain, and will stand in your way to the ores and to building a bigger dungeon. To make capturing them worthwhile, I added a new type of rock that takes longer to mine. With the upcoming changes to the prisoner system, players have the option to supplement their imps with a large number of prisoners. Placing the adamantium ores on the map also gives me the possibility to have them guarded by adamantine golems, which are of late-game difficulty level. I felt that the extra production step was unnecessary and wasn’t adding much in terms of gameplay. Another change that the screenshots reveal is that the steel resource will be renamed to adamantium, and will be mined instead of produced in furnaces.

Tile miner door