Shouldn't there be boreholes near the boreholes cluster?

[Muzta]

I'm playing a single player. I start scouting, there's the Borehole cluster sign so I'm thinking "great" Then Investigate to fing, to me suprise, no boreholes.


ummm...why?

[RedFred]

I have never had that happen. I have reached it with two of the boreholes gone and the third one about to be eaten by a worm though. So probably you are having trouble with worms.

Worm distruction of boreholes seems to be more of a problem if you have them unexplored within your own territory than if they are outside of it.

Of course, if you play again and have the same problem, you may have a brand new bug named in your honour.

[Muzta]

I never thought of that. But I found it within like 40 years. how fast are they eaten?

[Sprayber]

I once found the borehole cluster with only one borehole and once without any boreholes. One time the borehole was located between Yang and Miriam and it was down to only one borehole. Don't know if it was the worms or the fighting. But it does happen.

[Chowlett]

Ok, call me thick, but how in the name of all that's good and holy are mindworms meant to damage, let alone eat a deep shaft penetrating below planet's crust down to the mantle? Particularly since the weapon of choice against worms is the "flame gun"?

[RedFred]

Chowlett, my fault. I said worms but it is usually spore launchers. There you go. I am sure it is way more realistic for spore launchers to take out a borehole instead of worms.

[Blake]

I've caught a spore launcher in the act of destroying the borehole cluster. Altough the question still begs *how*

[Hydro]

A borehole goes to the mantle, and by all accounts it is huge. But, it is fragile. Imagine the stresses involved, and the effort needed to keep the borehole open, especially when it is open to liquid rock at the bottom. The first small earthquake should take it out or it should fail under its own accumulated stresses unless some pretty serious engineering maintains and backs it up.

As to mindworms and spore launchers, those little suckers know Planet, and when something doesn't belong (e.g. - ecodamage). Since a turn is a year, it doesn't seem too unlikely that a judicious use of resonance fields to destabilize the rock strata and the destruction of structural elements within the borehole (since they can, apparently, eat or bore their way through about anything) would be more than enough to let it collapse under its own weight. All they do is let the stresses take their course, and maybe help it along a little. We don't see structures like this in nature for a reason - they are unstable.

Hydro

[Jasonian]

That makes sense for human-made boreholes and other eco damage, but what about the actual borehole cluster. Those things have been there a LONG time... so why didn't the worms destroy them eons ago?

Hmm...

[JAMiAM]

You guys are all missing the obvious explanation. Most likely, someone else got there first and popped a pod that was close by triggering an earthquake and in the process destroyed the boreholes.

The boreholes, like all other landmarks, go away when their elevation is changed.

[Muzta]

I do remember a some what odd hill before the lettering. But I still think there should have been space for at least one

[Aredhran]

It's definitely the Spore Launchers, it has happened to me numerous times.

All it takes is for some fungal tower to spawn a spore in the vicinity, and the little bugger will happily bomb the boreholes until they no longer exist.

The fact that they're alien-built doesn't mean anything to the SMAX code, they only LOOK different on the map, but they are still terraformed (or progenitorplanetformed ) and as such become a target for the spores.

Aredhran

[Deimos]

I too have seen the Bore Hole Cluster disappear. I have never ascertained what was removing them. I just chalked it up to fungus growth, since it seemed to me that after their destruction, the area was covered in fungus, whereas before it was not.

It also appears to happen more frequently on random map games. I have yet to see them disappear on the Map of Planet.

[Hawkeye_td]

I agree. I too have seen Spore Launchers destroy the Borehole Cluster, at least once. I have the same question that someone asked above... if the Borehole Cluster has been around for eons, why do the worms just decide to destroy it when humans come around? These little storyline issues bug me, and the only satisfactory explanation that I can come up with is that the human arrival somehow triggered a great growth in worm activity, before which there were never so many worms, and Spore Launchers never had the numbers or motivation to destroy the Cluster.

[Hydro]

Jasonian,

Now that you mention it, it is strange that the borehole cluster was left unmolested for what may be millions of years. But then, almost everything else of the Progenitors is gone (destroyed by the Flowering and mindworms?) except for the monoliths. Maybe the mindworms were saving it for last - kind of like dessert

Anyway, you are probably right, Hawkeye. Chalk it up to Planet's overactive immune response.

I did kind of like the dessert hypothesis, though…

Hydro