It says you can't connect them anymore. Then how do you mine an ore patch at the coast that is both on land and in water? They need to be connectable.

Umm, little misunderstading. The normal-underwater pipes are only connectable with each other, but no longer with other types of pipes, so now players can't just build underwater first, then add landfill at the sides to connect the underwater to normal ones.

The intended way is to use the underground-underwater pipe, which is allowed to connect to the normal underground pipe. Sooo, what u could do is add a normal underground(from the miners/pumps), and start waving using the underwater ones.

Before this last update, there were some scripts in control.lua which prevented to build underwater near the coast, so players needed to use the underground pipes to connect the underwater ones...

(it's too much "underwater", i just barely can follow my own words)

I could add an option to revert it too... but that could just be cheating.

I should also add some screenshots too. and add a truly useful thing to them, probably increase the resistances OR make them untargetable by enemies (as they're in the deepest), andddd increase the extension limit by at least x2