Tunneling taking too long?

[ewilkins]

I've been noticing that every now and again, tunneling seems to be taking far too long. For example, in the attached image, it took 45 turns instead of the 14 I would expect. Am I misunderstanding, or is something weird going on?

[backwardsEric]

The number of turns displayed in the object information is the average number of turns it should take. Each turn there is a dice roll with a certain chance (1 in 14, approximately for this case) of success. Having it take 45 turns is not very likely ((13/14)^44 * 1/14 = .274% or 1/365), but it isn't so improbable that I'd suspect something was wrong based on that one observation.

If it's any comfort, 1/14 (7.1%) of the time it'll only take one turn and 13/14^2 (6.6%) of the time it'll take two turns (at least if things are working correctly).

[ewilkins]

So I was misunderstanding. I hadn't realized that it was a probability. The description really could be clearer about that.