Damnit, so many ninjas they black out the sky!
You'll have to learn to be more concise to be first on the spot.
THEN I'LL POST IN THE SHADE!
... sorry, I couldn't help it.
Might help. In RL Kings and barons who could afford the best used high quality boiled leather in preference to plate for a few centuries.
This would really require either a mod or a suggestion for a second type of leather, I think.
You could make an "armor-grade leather" of hardened leather or a studded leather or something instead of the standard soft leather which is basically like shoe leather or a leather coat right now.
Just make the process more resource-costly, difficult, or time-consuming somehow (like requiring lye in the reaction or something). Then, you can make a hardened leather material type, give it some material stats, and let players make armor out of it.
It probably can't be a particular animal's leather (the way that it's "Cat leather gloves" right now) if you're altering the materials, unless there's something I don't know about raw mods, but you could at least make a leather material that is worthwile by doing so.
I just thought of something....
Toady always seemed to like the idea of sending an adventurer to a potential site first to scout it out.
Currently doing so will let us know what the soil is and maybe the top layer of rock or so, with what the lower levels are if you can manage to spelunky your way to the site in the caverns. Combine that with shallow metals and deep metals and some basic geology, and it gives a fairly reasonable idea of what will be at the site.
Once DFHack offsets are found, we could use that with prospector and get a detailed idea of a site before embark.
Just think, adventurers sent by the mountain home, not to save the world, or kill monsters, but to prospect sites for ore!
Yes, but that's... kind of boring for players who don't really want to use Adventurer Mode to be forced to make an adventurer just to prospect for ore for Fortress Mode.
"Adventurer Role: Prospector/Cartographer" (as an extension of "Explorer") might be a good idea - instead of completely leaving areas of the map blank, you just have the contents of the land, aside from potentially basic things like "HERE THERE BE MOUNTAINS!" until explorers hit the spot. Explorers and Cartographers might make money selling this information on minerals back to the kingdoms of dwarves, and give Fortress Mode players some more information on the areas...
However, there needs to be at least some information on the areas, at least within the "reach" of existing dwarven civilizations, and the sphere of influence of friendly trading partners on the lands and their potential mineral wealth to represent the explorers and prospectors that came before.
That way, at least the areas near the home civ are very well-detailed.
Found a good place with in minutes. Hematite on the surface. Try to look for shallow metal. Learn to use the site finder. It's great!
The problem is not that "metals are impossible to find", the problem is more that "metals are far more scarce on the world map than they really should be".
Do a search for "Shallow Metals: None" and "Deep Metals: None" and see what percentage of your world map lights up in green "X" marks. I'm getting nearly 2/3s of one map to light up with no mineral deposits whatsoever, including an entire mountain range taking up about 1/4 the map, which is where a dwarven civ is locked in.
In 40d, people did plenty of worldgens to find "perfect" embark points with plenty of features. .31 changed much of that by putting most features everywhere. Now, we have basic resources missing in most locations that require plenty of worldgens to find "perfect" embark points again. Except now, it's for looking for worlds that actually have iron deposits that aren't under aquafers or oceans rather than legimately extremely rare things like volcanos and chasms.