My idea about vein-mining (I've seen several suggestions while searching/browsing the boards, and pointers to the Bloat item that already exists, but not read them all so excuse me if I'm repeating someone else) is for something like a (d)ig-(V)ein designation marker that opens a standard (d)ig-(d)[Mine] style of job on a chosen square (or squares) and then as each square is dug out any further adjacently revealed squares (or even already revealed squares, if lazy people are to be catered for who only designate one of two/more visibly connected same-type spots) of the exact self-same type as the the one just dug are auto-designated
unless it has a warm/damp status (of the kind that would stop an "unseen area"'s digging designation). The warmth/dampness encounter would not stop other areas of the vein continuing to be dug into, though a co-adjacent digging-in-progress would be similarly stopped from spawning a dig-out on such a forbidden spot if also adjacent and testable due to the same sanity checks. As it never seriously attempted to send a digger to a spot known to be a problem, it also wouldn't generate the pause-and-Announce that the subsequent discovery of danger on dig-job applied to obscured areas would bring upon one.
I also had personal thoughts about an auxiliary settable option that would add "would break into an open space" as a selectable/deselectable veto for auto-designation. Put simply, the open-space veto would check for any (known?) voids adjacent to the potential site and refuse the internal auto-dig on the potential break-through spot it if any of these were open space areas /not/ uncovered by the current Vein- (or Cluster- or Mass-)following job. This would stop penetrating deliberately left walls (smoothed or otherwise) surrounding one's own rooms, out into the open through mountainsides
and stumbling into chasms (although maybe you'd get the one gap made into it if unexpectedly penetrating the wall of an underground cavern is needed to discover its existence).
But to address the issues in this particular thread, could there also be a (d)ig-(R)eserve designation available? d-R areas would act as an
additional veto on the d-V process (as well as the aforementioned warmth/dampness, perhaps in place of the wall-breaching veto) and could even be useful to manually place upon discovered damp/warm rocks to prevent accidental selection by d-d[1]. Also imagine designating a room-wall grid as d-R with a few well-placed cursorings, removing the selections for doorways/corridors you want open from the start then selecting the entire area for d-d (automatically excluding the mask you left laid down), instead of selecting each and every room space individually and then the doorways between (assuming you don't use some fancy template implementing mod, of course). Could it/should it also bar channelling in from above, maybe?
I'm sure your fertile imaginations could come up with more of the uses for this, depending on how the implementation is achieved. Also I'm not married to d-V and d-R being the precise command sequence, especially if I've accidentally incurred upon the territory of some other method already in existence.
As far as the vein-follower is concerned, though, it
might even be something that Toady would be willing to allow only upon Vein (or Cluster) resource squares, disallowing its use upon 'mass' stuff like the typical loam or granite strata, lest one effortlessly (leastwise at the keyboard, if not for the dwarf(s) assigned) set off a "point and click" evacuation and wander away, never to worry about the kinds of bad things that can happen (or come back to find one paused at the first hit of a damp stone, perhaps moments into the process).
(I'd also quite like an 'edge follower' auto-dig command (applied to a safe bit of rock adjacent to where you've found a damp, warm or space-adjacent wall and it'll auto-dig each and every
safe square it discovers following the edge of that phenomenon (cutting out when there's no more safe squares, indicating circuit, edge of map or hitting an intersection of the original edge zone with a new warm/damp/edge-proximity zone, which is
probably a trivially easy programming exercise). But this may encourage a level of laziness or two beyond this wish for vein-following, apart the possible necessity of having the original request include input on whether to "follow to left" or "follow to right" where the choice is available. It might be deemed too powerful to "Fire and Forget" your miners while you deal with other things and come back to a perfectly designed cavity/more experienced miner in a way that might be considered 'unfair'.
)
[1] I've often d-(s)moothed any discovered warm or wet stone to give that little extra visual warning/inhibition, even when I've not been bothered whether it ends up to be smoothed or not, and a d-(R)eserve designation would be an ideal compromise, even though it would mean that I'd need to give my idle good-for-nothing stoneworkers something
else to do.
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Topic: Mine-for-specific-stone designation (Read 1883 times)