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[nasobema]

This thread is meant to collect hints on how to influence the distribution of ores in world generation.

The frequency of several ores seems to be out of balance both in terms of realism as well as in terms of challengeing gameplay.
I never payed too much attention to this before but reading the forum threads (e.g. http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=146333.0 it seems af if this situation got worse in the 40.x releases.

In particular, I'm bothered by the vast abundance of native gold that seems completely unreasonable and because of its high material value makes trading a piece of cake (=boring). I agree that it's fun to build 10+z high statues of armok out of native gold blocks just because you can but most of the time I prefer more balanced gameplay.

The second thing that seems unbalanced is the sparsity of iron ores and coal. This seems less severe since it just makes the game a bit harder, since you have to earn your steel instead. But at least it seems unbalanced since iron should be more abundant in the world (I think).

Instead of just complaining or even requesting Toady to deal with this, I would like to collect hints on how one could change this by either setting the right parameters in world gen or modding the raws.

A first suggestion would be to delete or alter the following line in the raws of native gold:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:VEIN:100]

As I understand the occurrence of gold in nature, "gold vein" are in fact veins of metal ore that contain small amounts of gold as nuggets and the like. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Aranador]

Change the alluvial deposits to soil deposits.  Add a new material (quartz maybe, or some other stone that you can research at your leisure) and have it show up in the same places where gold  currently shows up as a vein.  Then have gold show up in small clusters in the new material (IE the way kimberlite and diamonds currently work)

Between your new gold bearing stone vein being in any igneous layer, and the alluvial deposits, gold will still be plenty more common than diamonds, but way less than it is at the moment.

[nasobema]

I do not quite understand what exactly you mean by "changing the alluvial deposits to soil" (you mean actually replacing them or changing the ENVIRONMENT token to have gold in soil, which wouldn't really make sense or would it?).

However, I think that replacing Native Gold by an arbitrary gold ore harboring small gold clusters would be one solution.
I had another idea: reduce the yield of gold bars by smelting.
So the raws have now :

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:VEIN:10]

This should result in a 66% chance of getting no gold bars, 29% - 1 bar, 5% - 2 bars, and <1% for getting 3 or 4 bars of gold.
On average, this is ten times less gold

[samanato]

That number is actually the relative chance of it appearing in the map, not the chance of getting metal upon smelting. For that would you use [METAL_ORE:GOLD:x] where x is the percent output.

[scamtank]

What are you babbling about? That's the geological frequency tag. When the world generator decides that there's a free vein in a layer that happens to be either of the igneous ones, it randomly rolls between all of the eligible inorganics, weighted proportionally by the numbers.

The effect you're looking for can be made to happen with a custom "smelt gold ore" reaction, but you can't get rid of the default one. For the argument's sake, I think the reaction product would look something like this:

Code: [Select]

...
[PRODUCT:33:1:BAR:NONE:INORGANIC:GOLD[PRODUCT_DIMENSION:150]
[PRODUCT:33:1:BAR:NONE:INORGANIC:GOLD[PRODUCT_DIMENSION:150]
[PRODUCT:33:1:BAR:NONE:INORGANIC:GOLD[PRODUCT_DIMENSION:150]
[PRODUCT:33:1:BAR:NONE:INORGANIC:GOLD[PRODUCT_DIMENSION:150]

e: oh, shit, there's a special ore yield tag too? forgot all about that one.

e2: I'm fairly sure that the METAL_ORE tag is an all-or-nothing affair. For all the useless ore you throw into the pot and get nothing in return, every so often a pile of four gold bars poot out as if by magic.

[nasobema]

That number is actually the relative chance of it appearing in the map, not the chance of getting metal upon smelting. For that would you use [METAL_ORE:GOLD:x] where x is the percent output.

Sorry to confuse you. Of course, you're absolutely right and actually that's exactly, what I have changed... 

So the altered line should be this:
[METAL_ORE:GOLD:10]
(while you normally have 100 as the parameter)

@scamtank:
This is actually not necessary. The chance of getting less than 4 bars of any specific metal is defined in the ore's raw and is commonly used in the raws of Tetrahedrite and Galena for the chance of getting silver bars with the common metal (copper and lead in these cases).

I feel that setting the METAL_ORE token is producing more realistic results because gold veins do exist but contain usually only small amounts of gold, unlike iron for example, where you may have more than 50% iron content in the ore.

[Putnam]

"Native gold" is literally solid gold, so it doesn't make much sense for it to give gold less than 100% of the time.

[samanato]

I do like the idea of gold as inclusions in quartz vein, since "gold ore" is very commonly that. To make for more scarcity, you could make them [ENVIRONMENT_SPEC:QUARTZ:CLUSTER_ONE:(some less than 100 probability)] and put pyrite in the same environment with a higher probability of appearing. Although this would preclude both pyrite and gold being in the same quartz vein.

[scamtank]

Aren't vein inclusions a one-in-million deal right now? The way I've looked at it happening, it requires that the world generator happens to throw a random CLUSTER_SMALL right on top of a random VEIN and then the small cluster rolls randomly between all viable options (all bullshit minerals like brimstone, gems appropriate for that background layer) to see what it becomes.

I don't even know if you can have a CLUSTER_ONE occurring outside a CLUSTER_SMALL. This would just make gold an import-only commodity in your forts.

[nasobema]

"Native gold" is literally solid gold, so it doesn't make much sense for it to give gold less than 100% of the time.

That's absolutely true. Actually gold is always (I think) found in its solid form, though often in solid solution with other metals like silver.
But still, gold veins of this size are not present in nature. Thus I rather imagine "Natural Gold" as a vein of arbitrary mineral which contains many small inclusions of gold.
To be accurate, the name shouldn't be "native gold" anymore.

Of course, one could instead mod new gold bearing ores, possibly with other metals and keep the gold probability for smelting (the METAL_ORE token, you know...) low.

The purpose of all that is to make a better balance of challenge and realism. I was excited when I got my first fortress with gold veins. After a few years in game, it got a bit boring, since you could buy whole caravans with just a few masterpiece gold items (besides old socks...).

[scamtank]

Here's a thought. Veins of some specific light quartz that's innocent enough on the surface, but dwarves have a special crusher with a reaction where they can sieve it for a tiny chance of STONE:NONE:INORGANIC:GOLD occurring. It'll pile up eventually, but you'll have to grind through a mountain to get any significant amount.

The player can have gold if he works for it LIKE A GODDAMN DWARF WOULD, AI civilizations still have access to the precious metal through riverbed deposits. Win-win.

e: Can you somehow disqualify minerals from being actual rocks that do actual-rocks things while still occurring in geological formations? Native gold millstones make me a little miffed.