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[forsaken1111]

I just had an idea:
As soon as we are able to send our own caravans out, it should be also possible to send a mining team out of your normal map area. Build them a wagon, give them food and drinks for, let's say three months and picks. Then you tell them "Go to that map tile and try your luck!". Three months later they come back and you see what they have gathered. Maybe they got a shitload of iron ore, maybe only worthless orthoclase, or maybe they have been killed during the journey or while they've been mining
IMO this would solve the problem with lesser metals on your map pretty good. My current fort doesn't have much metal by now, but enough food and wood to send out three of those teams.

What do you think about that guys? Good idea? Should those teams be directly controllable by the player?

I would love a system like this.

[Lielac]

I just had an idea:
As soon as we are able to send our own caravans out, it should be also possible to send a mining team out of your normal map area. Build them a wagon, give them food and drinks for, let's say three months and picks. Then you tell them "Go to that map tile and try your luck!". Three months later they come back and you see what they have gathered. Maybe they got a shitload of iron ore, maybe only worthless orthoclase, or maybe they have been killed during the journey or while they've been mining
IMO this would solve the problem with lesser metals on your map pretty good. My current fort doesn't have much metal by now, but enough food and wood to send out three of those teams.

What do you think about that guys? Good idea? Should those teams be directly controllable by the player?

Pretty sure that's one of the things Toady's planning on adding at some point.

[EveryZig]

On stone diversity, what I did was turn the environment_spec of all the clusters/veins from 100 to 1000. I still only get gold for a metal (even though I embarked in a site with 4 biomes saying 'deep metal'), but now I have plenty of pretty stones like microline. Which is good, because I love having color coded levers.

Strangely enough, it seems to have made gems much more common than before, though I only edited the environment_spec of non-layer stone (including metal), not gems.

[forsaken1111]

On stone diversity, what I did was turn the environment_spec of all the clusters/veins from 100 to 1000. I still only get gold for a metal (even though I embarked in a site with 4 biomes saying 'deep metal'), but now I have plenty of pretty stones like microline. Which is good, because I love having color coded levers.

Strangely enough, it seems to have made gems much more common than before, though I only edited the environment_spec of non-layer stone (including metal), not gems.

Hm, I'm gonna try that too. Good idea!

[Cotes]

You cannot have an effective trade system if every material is available everywhere in high abundance, it simply doesn't work.

The problem isn't that the ore isn't abundant enough now, it's that you have very few types of metals in each biome.

Fixing the overabundance without making embark sites boring is all I am asking here. That's what the whole thing is supposed to do, wasn't it, to make mining more fun by making it stop being so arbitrarily easy and thus adding a lot more weight into finding a vein.

Now it just eliminates all variety or sense of exploration from the process (while what you can find at all still really easy to find in ridiculous amounts).

[forsaken1111]

I'm not sure what all you expect to realistically find in a single embark area. I could see one or two large veins of a single metal and then some other tiny trace metals scattered around, but most places SHOULD only have one or two types.

[ThrowerOfStones]

I'm not sure what all you expect to realistically find in a single embark area. I could see one or two large veins of a single metal and then some other tiny trace metals scattered around, but most places SHOULD only have one or two types.

And his point is this is boring.

I agree, that my ideal would be having (most?) sites having 1-3 "common" metals that are in large quantity, but then any number (as in, 0+) of "rare" metals scattered throughout that would not register on the site finder, so there'd be a point to exploration, because you just might run across a platinum vein the sitefinder failed to pick up.

I liked stumbling across things like platinum and aluminium before. Now it's true that a quick survey of an area (usually not more complex than digging to the third cavern, doable in less than a season) will give you a full inventory of everything you can expect to find on your site. However realistic that is, it's boring. And ultimately this is a game, not a simulator.

This problem will probably be addressed by the world gen options Toady mentioned, though, if only by a return to .18 material density, although personally I would prefer the option of keeping the game as-is but with occasional rare, unshown veins.

Maybe even add in a few more "mythic" metals like mythril or what have you to be these hidden metals.

[Cotes]

I'm not sure what all you expect to realistically find in a single embark area. I could see one or two large veins of a single metal and then some other tiny trace metals scattered around, but most places SHOULD only have one or two types.

Realistically you shouldn't be able to dig until you hit magma either. Can we stop pretending this is a hyper-realistic simulation of Earth's geology? Like I said, realism always needs to make some room for fun in games, even DF.

And like ThrowerOfStones pointed out, it's not like there needs to be equal amounts of every ore. Gold could be really rare in some places, while in other places you'd be struggling to find those few pockets of iron ore. And really, that'd be much more fun than .18 was, too.

[MarineMorton]

Thats all well and true for the Earth maybe but who is to say that the 15 different worlds i have are all the same as Terra!

So metals are a bit easy to get hold of in 0.18  but whats the point of being dwarfs if we cant dig down and find a good amount of ore and make cool things to sell to the rest of the races?

Edit In reply to forsaken1111

[NW_Kohaku]

A tiny number of trace materials really would be nice.  Just a small pocket of gems or some mineral that isn't a massive series of veins throughout your entire embark that you can pretty much find blindfolded.

It would make actually trying to look for those things fun again.

Prospecting is only fun if you have to actually look for things and only find it after looking carefully around.  Something like a 5% chance per z-level per embark tile of finding something that could potentially be in the layer as a small cluster, even if it's just microcline, would be nice.

On stone diversity, what I did was turn the environment_spec of all the clusters/veins from 100 to 1000. I still only get gold for a metal (even though I embarked in a site with 4 biomes saying 'deep metal'), but now I have plenty of pretty stones like microline. Which is good, because I love having color coded levers.

Strangely enough, it seems to have made gems much more common than before, though I only edited the environment_spec of non-layer stone (including metal), not gems.

Oh?  Now this is interesting.  I'll have to mess with this for my next worldgen.

[Max White]

I think the current amount of ore would be very interesting when crossed with randomised rocks/metals, a planned feature.

[forsaken1111]

I guess this is one of the big arguments. I enjoy severe resource scarcity as it gives the game an actual challenge, especially if all you have is something like nickle which you can trade for combat-useful metals but cannot itself be used IIRC.

Anyway, I don't personally care how you like to play. There are modding tools available to support any play style really. So long as ridiculous overabundance ala .18 is optional, I'd be fine with it going back in.

I think the current amount of ore would be very interesting when crossed with randomised rocks/metals, a planned feature.

I am looking forward to that.

[Cotes]

I guess this is one of the big arguments. I enjoy severe resource scarcity as it gives the game an actual challenge, especially if all you have is something like nickle which you can trade for combat-useful metals but cannot itself be used IIRC.

Again, no one is arguing against scarcity - just lack of variety. I said I want metals to be far less abundant than they were in .18.

I'm not saying I want to be able to dig up tens of thousands stones of each important metal ore on every site, just that I want there to be something else than an endless supply of tetrahedrite hidden deep in the ground to actually give me any motivation to explore and mine.

[forsaken1111]

I guess this is one of the big arguments. I enjoy severe resource scarcity as it gives the game an actual challenge, especially if all you have is something like nickle which you can trade for combat-useful metals but cannot itself be used IIRC.

Again, no one is arguing against scarcity - just lack of variety. I said I want metals to be far less abundant than they were in .18.

I'm not saying I want to be able to dig up tens of thousands stones of each important metal ore on every site, just that I want there to be something else than an endless supply of tetrahedrite hidden deep in the ground to actually give me any motivation to explore and mine.

I understand what you're saying. Anyway I think it will be less of an issue overall when some more labor-intensive methods of getting metal go in though. Panning for gold and bog iron, for example. I agree that some small clusters of ore should be included which are not expected. It shouldn't be enough to act as a usable source of the metal but it could supplement trade income.

Also off-site mining operations would help.

[ThrowerOfStones]

I guess this is one of the big arguments. I enjoy severe resource scarcity as it gives the game an actual challenge, especially if all you have is something like nickle which you can trade for combat-useful metals but cannot itself be used IIRC.

Anyway, I don't personally care how you like to play. There are modding tools available to support any play style really. So long as ridiculous overabundance ala .18 is optional, I'd be fine with it going back in.

I think the current amount of ore would be very interesting when crossed with randomised rocks/metals, a planned feature.

I am looking forward to that.

You're misunderstanding, though. I enjoy resource scarcity too. What I don't enjoy is boring embarks where you know exactly what everything you could possibly find in it inside of ten minutes of play, and honestly probably found every vein within a few seasons too if you dig smart.

Surprises are fun. You can have surprises AND resource scarcity. There just needs to be a bit more complexity added to the system for determining when, where, and why metals appear where they do, instead of a set number of metals in given areas which never vary and with no chance for clusters of other metals.

Actually, now that I think about it, a simple system that keeps the current system but adds in gem-like clusters of other metals into rock layers would probably fix both. It barely affect scarcity but would provide variety and a reason for exploration which is currently distinctly lacking. People say .19 brought back exploratory mining, but it really didn't, since you can pinpoint what layers have veins in them extroardinarily easily.