Wilderlands The Weight Below

Wilderlands The Weight Below

 

***When updating to 1.0.2, delete your old config file to allow the new, updated config file to generate.

 

The Weight Below adds a deeper, more dynamic underground experience by overhauling cave stability, rock failure, and structural mining support in Vintage Story.

 

Mining is no longer just excavation—it becomes an engineering challenge.

 

• Different rock types now respond uniquely to stress based on their geology.
• Some can hold wide natural caverns, but collapse quickly if beat upon carelessly.
• Some will stand the test of time no matter what comes.
• Other stone types are unstable by nature and constantly, but slowly, shedding stone as ages pass, working their way toward natural stability. Lay your pickaxe to these caverns without care, and you will pay for it.

 

And if any of them feel too easy or not harsh enough- The mod ships with a powerful config file to allow you to tailor settings by rock type to fit your taste.

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Features

Geological Rock Stability

Each stone type has its own structural properties, including:

• Rock competence – how much load the rock can bear before failing
• Maximum unsupported span – how wide ceilings can remain stable without support
• Support effectiveness – how strongly nearby beams reinforce surrounding rock
• Collapse behavior – how rock breaks and what it leaves behind after failure
• Spalling mechanic that features some rock types passively shedding stone if disturbed too much. In some rock types, it is a warning before catastrophic failure.

 

Granite, shale, sandstone, slate, claystone, and other stone types all behave differently underground.

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Stress Fracturing & Rock Spalling

 

Before a collapse, unstable rock may begin to show warning signs.

High-stress brittle stone can:

• crack audibly
• passively shed blocks of stone
• produce bursts of falling stone before major failure

 

These events act as early warning signals that the surrounding rock is under dangerous strain, and generally make the cave environment feel more alive.

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Support Beam Integration

 

Support beams now play a critical, and more intuitive, structural role underground.

Proper beam placement can:

• stabilize weak rock
• reduce stress buildup
• prevent collapse zones from spreading
• secure large mining chambers

 

Well-designed mines become safer. Poorly planned ones may not survive.

The new support beam feature is backed into the mod and applies changes ONLY in a mining/solid-rock context. When used for non-mining purposes, support beams behave according to normal game mechanics.

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Rock-Type Specific Failure

 

Failure behavior varies by geology.

Some rocks fail rapidly with warning and debris.

Other rock types hold firm and resist collapse, but can still suddenly rupture without warning.

This creates different mining strategies depending on what you’re tunneling through.

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Config feature

 The mod ships with a config file that provides a powerful tool to shape how each rock type behaves on almost every level:

["granite"] = new RockBehaviorSettings
 {
     RockCompetence = 0.95f,         // Extremely resistant to kinetic pulses.
     MaxUnsupportedSpan = 14,        // Allows massive, expansive vaulted halls without the need for many columns. Increase this to make them even more stable.
     MaxSupportDistance = 6.0f,      // Supports propagate easily, providing support in a six block radius from placement.
     SupportBonusPerBeam = 0.25f,    // Each placed beam provides 25% support bonus to the blocks in the area. Place more beams on neighbor blocks to increase support..
     IsBrittle = true,               // Hard, stiff crystalline structures means that while granite is tough and resists collapse, it will fracture and create weakness that can result in material breaking loose in small amounts over time.
     SpallStressThreshold = 0.75f,   // Stress level at which spall begins to break off. Only works if "IsBrittle=true".
     SpallActivationChance = 0.04f,  // Low micro-gate roll for clean performance. Not all blocks that fall within the SpallStressThreshold become spall. With this setting, 4% of granite blocks that reach this stress level can become candidates for spall-shedding.
     CollapsedBlock = "crackedrock-{rock}",  // Defines what block type a rock block collapses into.
     ImpactDamageMul = 10f,          // Extremely heavy fragments do more damage.
     DustIntensity = 2.5f            // Define how "dusty" a rock type is when it comes down.  
},

["shale"] = new RockBehaviorSettings
{
    RockCompetence = 0.40f,         // Absolute floor for sustainable world mining. Collapses easily.
    MaxUnsupportedSpan = 2,         // Massive flat spans will fail instantly without support.
    MaxSupportDistance = 2.0f,      // High spatial precision required for support placement. I.E.: You're going to need a lot of support beams if you want to tunnel into this stuff.
    SupportBonusPerBeam = 1.0f,     // Good news is, one support beam does a good job supporting the blocks in its narrow radius.
    IsBrittle = true,               // Highly fissile stone. Breaks/weakens aggressively under pressure.
    SpallStressThreshold = 0.15f,   // UNIQUE PERSISTENT THREAT: Spalls constantly at low stress.
    SpallActivationChance = 0.05f,  // Excellent atmospheric warning sign for weakend layers.
    CollapsedBlock = "crackedrock-{rock}", // Defines what block type a rock block collapses into
    ImpactDamageMul = 4f,           // Moderate damage.
    DustIntensity = 1.8f            // Define how "dusty" a rock type is. Shale is not as dusty as granite, for example (Unless you want it to be. In which case up this value).
},

 

 

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Future Goals

• Apply similar mechanic to all ore and mineral blocks.

• Add compatibility for popular modded rock variants, ores, and minieral.

• Explore other geological features that can be incorporated to make mining more interesting.

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Compatibility:

• This mod is probably not compatible with other mods that modify UnstableRock behavior.
• It should be compatible with mods that add new rock types via patching them into the game as new rock variants. But modded rock types will need to be added manually to the config list in order to apply the new behaviors to them. (I'll add compatibility patches in the future for mods that add new rock and mineral assets as variants of the vanilla game assets, but it might be a bit before I can get to it.)

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Community & Support

If you have issues, suggestions, or feedback:

Please post in the Wilderlands Rustbound thread in Vintage Story's official Discord.

Interested in following development more closely?
Join The Wilderlands Community Discord server.

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Other Wilderlands Modules

•  
• Wilderlands Adjustments
• Wilderlands Behaviors (Rustbound dependancy)
• Wilderlands Block Adjustments
• Wilderlands Caves
• Wilderlands Custom Sea Level

• Wilderlands Deposit Scarcity

• Wilderlands Echoes
• Wilderlands Environmental Stability

• Wilderlands Ethology

• Wilderlands Forests
• Wilderlands Ground Layers
• Wilderlands Lunarbound (Rustbound dependancy)

• Wilderlands Panning Overhaul

• Wilderlands Rustbound
• Wilderlands Spawnbound
• Wilderlands Stonebound (WIP)

• Wilderlands Tweaks (Set of adjustments for Wilderlands servers)

• Wilderlands Waymarkers