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[Sphalerite]

Don't like it.  I used to deliberately avoid mining out rare minerals until my miners were legendary.  Now, I have a good chance of not getting any of that platinum or whatever no matter how skilled my miners are.  Also, I play with some experimental mineral mods that need small amounts of various minerals as reagents, and those have been completely wrecked by this update.

Don't think I'll be updating to the newer versions unless Toady changes it back, or someone makes a patch to fix it.

[Mudcrab]

Tis good for stone, also I like not having to care about miners so much!

[Bilanthri]

I really like that I no longer have to burrow and micromanage my miners to seperate the legendary ones from the apprentices. And the stone drops have not slowed me down for constructions either (I always churned out blocks anyway and this is much faster now).

As for metal, my current embark has hematite, galena, and garnierite and I have not had a shortage of any of these metals despite having not spent a great deal of time digging out said minerals. As far as I can tell, the new drop rates are balanced well for minerals and ores that come in vein quantities or greater. I have yet to find a small ore clump like plat or aluminum though, but it does seem like that might be a bit of a problem (read "Crap shoot").

Over all, it's a thumbs-up from me.

[Girlinhat]

I've not had a major issue with it, but then I usually import my platinum, so I'm enjoying that a lot more.  I get 4x more imported than I did before!  It'll take some adjustments overall, but I like it in general.

That said, I hope that materials get a new raw token to designate their drop rate.

[fakechuck]

Anyone done science on this:
Does this change mean that adamantine will be also mined out 25% and the smelting of wafers from strands will produce x4 wafers? If so, this drastically reduces the amount of time taken to produce adamantine goods by eliminating 75% of the slow-ass strand extraction bottleneck.

[khearn]

I'm pretty sure that admanantine mining is still the same. It was independent of mining skill before, so i don't think it changed at all.

Ore prices at embark time have not been increased. This makes the DIY embark strategy even more attractive, since you now only need to buy a quarter as much ore. This makes bringing enough ore to fully equip a fighter or two much more practical.

[Bilanthri]

An interesting result of the bars-per-ore changes came to me when smelting galena. It appears that ores which have a % chance to drop additional bars do not automatically make 4 when the check is met. It will take more experimentation to be sure, but it appears that each bar produced is checked against the % chance to create it, 100% for main metals, then 50% or 25% for things like galena and tetrahedrite. My example with galena resulted in 16 lead bars and 5 silver bars.

[Putnam]

It makes native iridium/palladium/rhodium really hard to get.

[Ubiq]

Flux is the major issue as far as stone drops go; ore drops are offset by increased bar production, but scarcity of flux means that adamantine is a more effective option than steel again.

It also limits being able to build things early on, but construction can be dealt with by bringing a few stones along on embark and having a mason crank out blocks. Furniture is a lot harder to come by now, but wood takes care of that for now.

[FearfulJesuit]

Thing is, this doesn't change a problem that's been around since bars got fixed: most metal objects take a lot of bars. And we're still getting one bar per tile of ore on average, but it can't make as much. Changing drop rates is a good idea for this reason- it's really quite OK if iron ores don't drop all the time, but I think it unfair to do this to platinum or candy.

[khearn]

Flux is the major issue as far as stone drops go; ore drops are offset by increased bar production, but scarcity of flux means that adamantine is a more effective option than steel again.

Scarcity of flux? My current fort has 2 layers of chalk, 3 layer of limestone, and no less than 5 layers of marble. Even at reduced drop rates I've got more flux than I can ever use. It may take longer to get the same amount delivered to the smelters, but with a few decent miners I can still supply flux faster than i can use it. That is, I could, even if I actually had any iron ore in this fort.

[biomatter]

I'm not a fan either. 25% drop with 4x times as many bars sounds fine in theory, but I feel like the negative feeling of not getting 25% outweighs the positive feeling from getting more than 25%. Not only that, Miner skill levels are worthless now.

You know what would be great? If for each level of skill a Miner had, it tacked on X% additional chance to succesfully mine an ore. +1% seems a little low, because at Legendary+5 you'd still only have 45%. Maybe +2%? 65% sounds reasonable to me, especially given the whole 4 bars deal.

If that's not possible, then Toady needs to raise the flat ore drop rate to 50%, final answer.

[fakechuck]

Unlinking skill to excavation rate for miners is certainly a significant change, but I feel it is rather absurd to say that miner skill is now useless. It is never a bad thing to have miners mining faster and faster unless you are one of those people who just dumps everyone into the miner labor.

[NW_Kohaku]

I think the complaints are pretty silly.

We don't need the amount of ore we already had, so getting less dropped is a refreshing change. 

It's not like I need the rare minerals, or ever really used them for anything, anyway, so it's no particular concern for me. 

Anything I actually used is still wildly overabundant, since it's still pretty easy to find maps that have several z-levels full of flux, and at worst I might have to purposefully quarry stones when I want to have more building material.  (Oh no! Having to actually purposefully take a slight amount of time out of my day to designate a chunk of materials to be harvested because I actually want to gain more materials, not simply using up all the stone I'm just trying to throw away?  Whatever is DF coming to, actually resembling a game?!)

[Psieye]

Ok, before we go through the long discussion on "dice-based vs card-based randomness in games" and "luck^1 vs luck^2", here's the previous thread on this topic. I appreciate this may fall under tl;dr though, but I'm linking it for those who stick with the reading.

With that out the way:

1) Some people feel edgy about rare minerals (not gems - those are 100% drop) as they can only see a fraction of the clusters at a time and there is tangible risk of not getting anything from these clusters as they are small. But as Girlinhat points out: you get way more from caravan delivery anyway. Mods... are going to have to undergo major re-writes if they were relying on rare mineral drops for something. But then, that behaviour can be kept by turning those rare mineral clusters into gem clusters.

2) Some people don't like having to put in extra time turning boulders into blocks to get their construction materials in proper quantity. Presumably they aren't megaproject builders as such players are already used to having an army of masons for their construction works. So this is a complaint about "I need to get blocks made before I can build lots of workshops". As in, a complaint about extra micromanagement and time required to get non-megaproject infrastructure up (especially when a railway system needs to be set up). Well, the game is getting more fleshed out - Toady has a LOT of features in mind for future releases years down the line. You will always get 'more to do' as the game versions go up. In this particular case, you're getting a tradeoff with a much easier time cleaning up the 'trash boulders' from digging out your fortress.

3) I see a psychological aversion to the possibility of getting less than 25% because it's random. Players feeling this want an entirely deterministic mining mini-game, or at least feel 25% is too low for their comfort zone. Well... isn't the philosophy of Dwarf Fortress to go by the RNG, roguelike style? The community has adopted the "laugh as your dwarves meet their end in whatever messed up way" policy. It feels counter-intuitive that players can accept losing legendary[1] dwarves with rare 'perfect profiles'[2] to randomness[3], yet throw a tantrum at losing some rocks to randomness. Hmm, well I guess that's a dwarfy attitude in its own way.

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[1] highly sought after skill, e.g. weaponsmith

[2] ideal physical and mental stats, fitting personality traits, emotional attachment from history, physical description clicking well, etc

[3] victim of Fell Mood, burning sock fatal attraction, lucky thief's knife stab, etc