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[Impaler[WrG]]

Metal with few exceptions is almost never found as large masses of pure minerals even on the scale that DF uses.  Rather the veins that contain stones of ore (veins are indeed of man-sized scale) are themselves a normal type of rock (typically quartzite) and a native metal or metal rich crystal is sprinkled through that rock vein.  "Ore" would no longer be a defined subset of stones but would be any stone which is infused with a metallic mineral or nuggets, or even better "ore" would be obtained by crushing/pulverizing the stone to extract the small amount of desired mineral which would then be smelted in a second step.  So rather then seeing a tile called "Gold Nuggets" we should see "Gold nugget bearing Quartzite".  The metal essentially 'decorates' the stone.  Gems are of course even more minute but act in the same manor.  Naturally not all veins will contain ore, many will naturally be 'empty' having only plain stones and some will contain varying amounts of ore (veins can be more common to compensate if need be).

Now your probably wondering "What is the point?", well this change allows some interesting stuff to happen, ore can now be concealed by just not showing the ore information to the player.  You can always see the base mineral of each stone tile but seeing the ore would be unlocked by special conditions.  What kinds of conditions you ask, well their have been ideas bouncing around for a 'prospector' skill or noble for a long time and that might be one requirement but I have my eye on a civilization based requirement.  One of the long term goals of DF is to have playing multiple races as a part of normal game play (rather then a mod) and it would make sense for the non-dwarven races to have less skill in metal.  One of the most direct ways is to simply have them be blind to certain ores which only dwarves know the secrets of identifying.  I could easily see Aluminum and Bismuth being detectable only by Dwarves along with obviously Adamantium.  This gives us a nice clean way of restricting metal mining to certain races without mangling the map generation which will always be impartial to civ selection, unskilled races just see plain veins and are oblivious too them.

[Il Palazzo]

You don't find large masses of pure minerals in DF. When you find a gold vein, it's exactly a

normal type of rock with native metal or metal rich crystal sprinkled through that rock vein

A dwarf miner simply extracts gold nuggets from it. Same with gems. For the sake of convenience it's not described as e.g. Kimberlite rock decorated with clusters of diamonds, it's just a diamond cluster. And you know which rock it is embedded in just by looking next to it.

[Aquillion]

One thing I've always sort of thought would be neat:  Make it so what people see about the world around them depends on their race and training.  Any dwarf who looks at a cave will see shale, granite, etc, all the exact stone types -- but an elf (with no relevant stonecrafting skills) might just see 'stone', or at least nothing more specific than 'light stone, dark stone'.  In an elven/human 'fortress', if one ever exists, there could be nobles to fix this.

Conversely, dwarves might have trouble identifying specific trees and plants without the correct skills; while an elf would recognize the exact type of every tree in a forest.

[Align]

Yes, that's more like it. Like how inuits supposedly have lots of words for snow, and of course they would.

[Mechanoid]

As an addition, the longer the world (generation) goes on and the more the characters interact with one another, the more each other would learn about things they may not be able to at first.

A human king wants a castle, and hires dwarves to teach the masons about the correct stones and where to get it. This could also result in the dwarves, who may not like the humans, giving them the wrong information "Oh, yes, that purple stone and that soft black metal... Yes, make mugs out of it." and then every persons' hair falls out from radiation and they get lead poisoning.

[Hectonkhyres]

The elves would of course retaliate by having the dwarves manufacture several metric tons of +Cane Toad Tallow Soap+ for themselves. And then the hallucinations begin.

[winner]

Yes, that's more like it. Like how inuits supposedly have lots of words for snow, and of course they would.

they have less words for snow than english does.

[Duke 2.0]

Yes, that's more like it. Like how inuits supposedly have lots of words for snow, and of course they would.

they have less words for snow than english does.

I was under the impression they had words for different types of snow. Freshly fallen snow, old snow, dirty snow, falling snow, icy snow, snowy ice, untouched snow, smooth snow, a layer of icy snow over a layer of normal snow, etc...

Although I suppose we have some Latin words to categorize such things in the scientific community.

[Draco18s]

Actually, what it has to do with is that the words are smooshed together.

So, in English it'd be like freshsnow, dirtysnow, yellowsnow, harpackedsnowgreatforskiing, etc.

[Duke 2.0]

 So they really do have more words for snow. We have phrases that describe different types of snow, they have words for that.

 But yes, I would like this suggestion. We could even have different qualities of ore. One rock could have only traces of iron, while another would basically be a hunk of iron with a few impurities in it. Of course, this would require said ores to be a bit more natural in occurrence instead of either clusters of 4-8 or large fields of it.

 Then again, Toady did say he was working on making underground features occupy 3D space instead of regional tile basis.

[Draco18s]

So they really do have more words for snow. We have phrases that describe different types of snow, they have words for that.

Define "word."

If "fresh" is a word because it has a space around it/either side and "snow" is also a word for the same reason, then removing the space between ("freshsnow") somehow makes it a new word?  It's still the words "fresh" and "snow."

[Mikademus]

 So they really do have more words for snow. We have phrases that describe different types of snow, they have words for that.

You fail at languages. Languages differ in how agglutinative they are, English is low, Innuit, Finnish and even Swedish are high. In English you rarely write words together, so you write "red wine". This is quite unspecific and many languages makes a difference between "red wine" and "redwine" where in the first case the adjective describes the noun, and in the second, the noun is prefixed by a adjective-derived classifier. This is one example of an "agglutinative" construct and you make these freely on the fly (f.i. in Swedish you could easily make up "järnvägsövergångsvarningssignal", warning signals of rail road crossing), no need to look up a dictionary, and this is one of the reasons why English speakers have issues learning new languages.

[Silverionmox]

English is more Romanic than the other Germanic languages in that regard, for example kind of a word joke in Dutch: hottentottententententoonstelling, meaning an exhibition of the tents of a certain South African tribe.

To get back on topic, I don't know whether complicating the stone composition is the best way to implement this. Letting them recognize the ore pieces as such only if they have the knowledge is better. When there are nuggets of metal present, they're usually easy to recognize; but most of the time, melting ores means changing their chemical composition. Malachite contains the element copper, but no pieces of copper.

[Neonivek]

"Metals and gems should be bound in other stones"

I pretty much agree with you there... I dig out diamonds and suddenly get diamond floors and walls? Some Minor Gemstones also could have been thrown in the mix so while you dig out Ruby you could find some *shrug* Rocksalt too.

However though some Gemstones and metals/ores are particularly numberous enough to constitute their own individual sections without needing rock attachments.

[Silverionmox]

I actually like that traces of the minerals you mined out remain. It's a matter of nomenclature, it could be called diamond-traced floor just as easily. In any case it breaks up the monotony and adds to the underground diversity, so I'd like to see that feature to be preserved.

"Urist was proud that he will be buried where once lay sapphire."