Day 108:
Occasionally, when I dig up from a chamber below where I am, I hit a wall from a chamber above, instead of a floor. That’s annoying.
I could avoid the problem by sizing every space I carve equally, so that they’re all 3 meters by 4 meters, by example. I’ve seen the results of mining companies that follow that kind of policy.
There are a few problems with doing that:
- Every room starts to look the same, so regardless of how well you map, it’s easy to get lost. That’s not a big deal in a small mining operation, but in a large one, it can literally be deadly.
- Crossing a half distance underground, one does not want to open dozens of doors. TRUST ME.
- The ore doesn’t cooperate with that layout, so you end up with a lot of empty spaces behind walls or spaces you weren’t planning to dig out but have to because that’s how you get the chambers evenly spaced.
Another alternative is giant rooms. There’s only one problem with that:
- The ceiling gives way and you die.
No matter how high or low the gravity of a planet or planetoid or asteroid, eventually gravity wins the fight and no manner of stabilizing poles will last forever.
So my mining chambers are somewhat randomly sized. (They’re a lot more randomly sized when I don’t have to sink a torch every three meters to keep the local fauna away.) That means sometimes when I dig up, I hit a wall. One can’t carry maps this size everywhere.
Anyway, that’s the quick reason why my digging is annoying the duck out of me today.
