Okay, I'm trying to make a mod to adjust the scarcity of metals in .31.19. I've been at this pretty much all day, trying out various things in inorganic_stone_mineral.txt and while I've had a certain degree of success I'm getting frustrated. Here's my observations, if anyone can point out something I'm missing and help out I would appreciate it:
The first thing I thought was that the following underlined number was the frequency number:
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:VEIN:
100]
I thought that by changing that, I could determine the likelihood of this mineral appearing compared to other minerals. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it; I first gave my desired minerals a high value and the undesired a low value. Next, I swapped that -- desired got a low value, undesired got a high value. Finally I went back to 100s all across the board. For each test I embarked five times on a 4x4 square with a single biome that had both "Shallow Metals" and "Deep Metals" listed, recorded the prospector totals and then recorded which minerals appeared in what layers and what size (cluster, vein, small cluster), and I can safely say, after spending hours tabulating the data, that this number does not affect frequency at all; I received essentially the same results on all three tests. Yes, it was only a total of fifteen embarks, but there wasn't a lick of differentiation between any of them. You would think that if this number affected rarity then a mineral would not be equally common at values 25, 100, and 600.
My next thought was that this number determines the likelihood of receiving a unit of stone out of a block of this mineral, but this was easily tested and debunked; a level 20 miner still got 1 rock per block out of something with a 25 in this value as from something with a 600 in this value.
Ultimately, I have no clue what this number does. Does anyone know?
In my next attempt I tried to solve this by duplicating the above line multiple times for the minerals I desired and not duplicating the minerals I didn't want at all. For example, Hematite looked like this:
[INORGANIC:HEMATITE]
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:STONE_TEMPLATE]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:hematite][DISPLAY_COLOR:4:7:0][TILE:139]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:SEDIMENTARY:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:VEIN:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ENVIRONMENT:IGNEOUS_ALL:CLUSTER_SMALL:100]
[ITEM_SYMBOL:'*']
[METAL_ORE:IRON:100]
[SOLID_DENSITY:5100]
[MATERIAL_VALUE:8]
[IS_STONE]
[MELTING_POINT:12736]
Unfortunately, this didn't seem to have the desired effect at all. In fact, doing the same data checking on this I get nothing but large clusters of ores mixed with regular amounts of fluff minerals. I think the duplication was causing issues with placement.
Now, if I wanted to try duplication again but instead with multiple instances of the same mineral would I need to name the multiples different names? It wouldn't handle having multiple entries for [INORGANIC:HEMATITE], I would have to add [INORGANIC:HEMATITE2] and [INORGANIC:HEMATITE3], and then in-game those would appear as hematite2 and hematite3 respectively, right? Is there any other way at all to affect rarity of minerals? This is getting frustrating; adding cluster and small cluster versions of the various minerals helps a lot, but it's far too blunt and ends up with too many minerals. If possible, I want something finer than that.
Thanks in advance for any help. Sorry if it sounds like I'm ranting; I've been at this all day and I feel like I'm trying to swim up a waterfall.