Artisan Archive
Thread: New profession... Miner.
#1 there was a mining profession and it got nix before release because of.....get this, hehe.....an anticipated lack of interest, HA
#2 You arent the first to suggest a revival there are plenty of posts here about mining and refining being put into aritsan or as a new prof.
I dont mean to flame but i wanted to let you know before someone less appoligetic about it comes along.
Also nixed due to "lack of interest" was a ranching profession. This is why quality meat and hide sells for 50cpu or more.
Now wasn't THAT special. . .
Every time I've mentioned that Creature Handlers should have ranch animals as one of the types of non-combat pets they train, I've gotten unanimous agreement, regardless of how much or little they depend on organic materials or whether they love or hate Creature Handling.
The basic idea is that Creature Handlers could use one lot to place a 'Range' of sorts: a large open area or pasture fenced in with one of those SW forcefields (like with ranger camps, but one that works) that keeps mobs out, but inside would create a spawn point of whatever creature type the CH has put into it. The CH would take pets from their datapad (lets say 4 Banthas for example) and place them inside the Range (pets probably shouldn't be able to be pulled back from a Range, though the Range should keep track of how many creatures it holds if it's pulled up). In this example, the Range would then spawn 4 adult non-agressive Banthas (whether they should be totally docile even when attacked or if they should fight back is debatable) and could be either milked or just killed for hide/meat/bone (possibly should give reduced xp so it isn't more convenient than actual hunting, and possibly reduced hp/attack damage as well, but that might make harvesting too easy if they're all one-shot kills).
If The CH left the Range alone for awhile, the number of herd creatures it held would slowly build up (based on CH skill, number of creatures already inside, and their CL, so a womp rat farm would multiply very quickly and a Rancor farm would multiply very slowly), so the next day this example may have as many as 50-60 banthas stored up. It would still only spawn 4-5 at a time for the sake of bandwidth and preventing the CH from getting ganked by their own ranch, but as soon as the CH has milked and/or killed and harvested one spawn, another non-agressive one would instantly pop up and the process would repeat.
The benefit would be that Scouts that lean towards ranching and herding could take Creature Handler as a way to harvest large amounts of organics with just a little planning and management, and therefore provide the galaxy with decent stacks of the same types of materials. Ranching would be to hunting/harvesting like mining is to sampling.
*Ought to post this in the CH forum*
I just started playing again, so I don't remember, but wasn't some minig stuff rolled into one of the other 2nd tier professions, like Merchant or Industrialist?
O that's right, Industrialist got axed too, didn't it?
Yeah, the mining profession was nixed in beta, but the big reason for the nix wasn't really lack of interest....
Commodities (resources) are the basic block of the economy. The Dev's could not allow placing the fundemental building block of the player economy firmly into the hands of one advanced profession. If only miners could mine, or if one profession gained an advantage in the gathering of resources, it could cause havoc among the player economy. This basic economic piece must be accessible to everyone within the game to allow fair and balanced play. A miner profession, while interesting, would just be too dominant in the resource market.
That being said, if you are really intent on "Mining" as a profession, you can do it under the current professions...Merchant allows reduced rates for structures in one tree, combat and scout skills would be almost neccessary to place harvesters in the wilderness....if you look hard enough, you could be very successful as a miner with the current professions....
Just don't expect to have one profession soley allowed to mine, it can't and won't happen.
As a Master Artisan who's wealth primarily has come from selling mineral resources up until I was finally able to craft more desireable objects, I consider myself a Miner and would love to see more added to the game in this respect. Maybe it's not interesting enough to make a full-fledged profession, but I know I'd certainly spend some skill points to unlock advanced skill boxes above Surveying IV. Ideally this new mini-tree wouldn't take away anything from existing professions (I'm not in favor of only Miners being able to run harvesters, etc.) ... however, I like the idea of Miners being able to refine (slice? buff?) raw materials to produce better quality, conductivity, etc. This should be costly and perhaps even consume some oil or energy or something else in the purifying process. And I also am in favor of seeing new materials added to the game (Gold, Silver, Lead, Diamonds, types of Stone like Granite or Marble) ... currently no one can mine these, since they don't exist in the game. So no one would be disadvantaged by only allowing Miners to extract these much more rare resources (and naturally there would have to be some new schematics added to the game that would use these materials).
It's an idea that clearly needs some work, and I would vote for the Devs to address current bug fixes long before contemplating something totally new like this. But I do think it's a worthwhile idea that deserves some further exploration.
Making weapons is actually alot more costly and time consuming than many would suspect. What makes it possible is that I mine 95% of my resources myself with heavies. If I had to buy most of it the cost would remove the profit from what I do. Mining MUST remain open to all. If only a few controlled it the price would soon strangle much of the crafting we have now.