Chop, Mine, and the Afternoon Mining Was Completely Broken

You cannot have a survival-flavored pirate RPG without the two most satisfying verbs in the genre: chopping a tree down and cracking ore out of a rock. So that was the week. Walk up to a palm, swing an axe, get wood. Walk up to a rock with a pickaxe, chip away, get stone.

Here is the war story.

The first time we tried to mine a rock, nothing happened. The character swung. The animation played. The rock sat there, smug, completely intact. We swung again. Nothing. From the code's point of view everything was perfect. The swing was firing, the game was politely reaching out to ask "hey, is there a rock in front of me?" and getting told "nope, nothing here."

The culprit was almost funny. When you swing, the game pokes an invisible feeler out in front of you to find what you hit. Our rocks were half-buried in the ground, the way rocks tend to be, and the ground and the rock were both wearing the same "I am solid world stuff" label. So the feeler hit the DIRT first, every single time, shrugged, and reported back that there was nothing to mine. The rock was right there. The game just kept high-fiving the floor instead.

The fix was small once we understood it. Give harvestable things their own private label that only the harvest feeler looks for. Suddenly the terrain is invisible to the swing and the rock is the only thing it can find. Chip, chip, chip, stone in the bag.

The lesson we keep relearning around here: code that runs clean is not the same as code that works. It looked done. It compiled. It would have sat there looking "finished" for a month. It took one person actually swinging at an actual rock to find out it did nothing at all.

Next up, making the stuff you gather feel worth gathering.