But this IS realistic. It is hard to find ore deposits in real life, and they're (mostly) only found in certain regions and locations. Most places on the earth, if you dug straight down, you'd hit soil then water then lots of rock, or just soil and rock.
He's already said he will make options to cover different gameplay wants. I'm trying to understand just what people are still whining about here.
You know this is not how it will be, you know that toady will likely make the mineral scarcity optional, and you know that some people like the scarcity. What exactly are you still upset about?
You'd probably find at least things like feldspar or variations in the stone, however. Right now, you have the overwhelming majority of embarks not even having feldspars (I.E. microcline and orthoclase) and they make up the majority of stones on the earth.
There shouldn't be places like entire mountain ranges taking up a quarter of the world that have absolutely nothing in them - no soil, no vegetation, no metals, not even common semi-precious gems like quartz or even microcline (and only in some places, a layer of flux stone, generally marble). Absolutely nothing but a flat stack of layers (excepting caverns if you leave them in... and we all know how realistic THOSE are) all the way down to the mantle. In an area taking up more landmass than the oceans in a worldmap. Completely and utterly barren of anything but the same layer stones.
I guarantee you that if you start digging down long enough into a mountainside, maybe you wouldn't find gold nuggets or whatever, but eventually, you'd be able to find a rock that looks slightly different from the rocks around it in some way.
Yes, not all embarks are bad, but there shouldn't be such massive areas with such an absolute dearth of
anything inside them.
In other words, I'm "whining" because I want my microcline back.