On grinding boulders some rock contains significant trace elements, would it be possible to implement a way to get a small chance to have any ore in the game as a product?
Edit: oh and grinding bones to bone meal for flux would be cool too..
I'm hesitant to make it easier to access ore, but I might consider say, a 1-5% chance. Maybe. I'm not sure on that one, you'll have to sell me on that point given you're grinding boulders for sand in the first place.
As for bones to bonemeal, that is something I may well do.
The sand is the main product while a small chance for a random ore as a byproduct, many metals come as byproducts such as silver in tetrahedrite (or vise versa) or lead as a massive byproduct when extracting silver from galena, there are byproducts in almost every mineral processing, one alternative is you could make byproduct dusts to be compressed into blocks like the iron sand idea, so infinite* random ores for
those with the patience time and fuel