I don't think a surveyor should reveal tiles. Visually it would make for much less appealing fortresses as large amounts of normal stone is revealed where you used to have neat, black space. However, I do not feel the idea is without merit. Instead of revealing tiles around them, I think it should be more of a hunch system.
Lets say you've stricken the earth on a fresh fortress. There are several exposed veins of hematite and an exposed vein of gold. Once your miners have exhumed X monies worth of mineral ores, the Prospector noble will be dispatched in the next migrant wave. This dwarf is similar to the dungeon master in that his likes are preset, but he prefers his furniture made from raw ore and economic stone, say, marble statues and hematite crafts. When satisfied with his arrangements he goes to work. The prospector then begins to walk around on any rough stone, indoor or outdoor, and snoops about for traces of this or that. Smooth stone will block his "vision" as any trace veins or other clues have been marred to his eye. This also keeps him in the mine works. When he draws near a deposit, as according to his current skill's search radius, a check is made on his skill level and he either discovers or ignores that deposit. If he discovers it, a single tile of the deposit is marked with a blinking ? and the message is displayed "Urist McPicksworth suspects Coal", or whatever. Then your miners can head down and dig to the site. If the prospector ignores the deposit, he gains no experience and will not make checks on that deposit until his skill level has improved a point, at which time all "ignore deposit" flags are reset.
If testing shows this reveals too many deposits and makes mining too easy, the prospector could make mistakes early in his career, accidentally labelling Orthoclase as Yellow Beryl and so forth.
I also think HFS should be invisible to him. They don't exactly have samples of that in the geologist's guild back home.
The logic behind this character was gained in my real life; after a college geology class I was enormously attentive while touring a Georgia gold mine. Pencil-thin veins of gold bearing quartz ran all through the granite mountain, while the mine was dug to exploit an enormous gold-bearing ore deposit that could fit a house and all the handsbreath wide deposits they could find. Here's a hint; they economically mine those pencil veins in Africa. They discovered that the hills had gold not because someone was digging a cellar but because the creekbeds had gold specks in the quartz sands. They went a little up the creek, finding more gold, walking farther up the creek, and here was a mountain. Now the role of this geologist dwarf is to walk up to a cliff and see these thin little traces of quartz, chip a little out, stir it around in a pan back in his office, and find gold with a jewelers glass. Then he calls out Eureka, points at what the miners thought was an ordinary granite wall in a bedroom, and tells them to dig. Sometimes he's right, sometimes he's wrong.
For that matter, he should get most of his experience when proven right by digging out the spot he chose and finding the mineral he suspected.
It has been suggested miners also use this skill passively, but I feel it should be reserved for legendary miners, or one rank of Geologist added at the ranks of Master and above.
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Topic: Geological Survey, Exploratory blasting. (Read 3114 times)