My last blog was actually helpful to me, so I am going to try the same again.

So here is our status: We want to keep digging down. For that, we need workers. Workers need to rest, eat and have fun. To keep everything up, we need energy. We produce energy by dumping ore into reactors. We find ore by digging veins. We also use ore to construct buildings, stairs and hire new workers.

I tried to visualize it:

(Ignore the top one for now - we may add an ore processing thingie but we start simple)

Bottom right is the simple chart. Worker "Time" "produces" nodes, nodes produce ore, ore produces energy and energy keeps the workers up. Bottom left adds more context and reveals the reasons of digging further.

First of all, ore is limited per node so we need more over time. Energy does keep workers up, but it's spent, not transformed. Also, workers spend some time not working (which also means energy spent). One important thing not noted there is that the ore is also spent for construction and purchases.

So perfect sustainability is not possible and the only way to go is to dig further and further.

I like where we are now. Everything is clear.

We can express everything roughly in terms of each other if we need to.

I added some simple maths for random ores. Each level (as in, each row) can have 0-4 ore nodes, each of which can contain 20-100 ore. With the maths, you get 61 ore per level. Let's say that the workers can carry up to 20 ore per trip.

Each ore can be used for 1 unit of energy (this is the one I find hardest to get the feeling of)

Buildings require 10-40 ore. We spend energy per "period" (ie 4 times/day)

A sleeping quarter+eating quarter+morale quarter altogether spends 16 energy per day. Not sure about the system at the moment, but I'll assume that you need one of these per 5 workers. That means:

Input: 16 energy/ore Output: 100 WorkerT 100 WorkerT is more than enough to dig another 16 ore for energy. Even one trip to the smallest ore node returns 20 energy and spends only a portion of the WorkerT.

I'm getting a bit overwhelmed and I'm pretty sure some things won't add up. I need to see this action. Time to document these for our coders!

Also, feel free to read our team's blog entries:

• Ragnor: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/i-am-in
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/finding-the-game-like-a-pro
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/status-late-night-revelation
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/3-ways-to-improve-communication-using-discord-experts-dont-want-you-to-know-t
• SUPERDAZE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/making-fadelands-a-space-western-themed-track
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/main-pass-on-resource-conversion-and-delay