Additionally, everything was endless - even everything I added from mods, and coal, and especially uranium, etc.
Here's an attempt to rectify that and add at least a little interesting new gameplay: Deep ores.
The idea is certainly nothing original, but I haven't seen one recently.
The mod adds a new set of resources which, when mined, produce standard ores like iron or copper. Unlike standard iron or copper, the patches of deep ore are infinite, and only deplete down to 25% yield. They also take significantly longer to deplete than oil does (at the moment each tile contains on average about 3000 units of ore). To counter this, they're rather difficult to mine (with a hardness of 2) so it takes ages with even an upgraded mining drill. The mod (will eventually) add a deep miner to counteract this, which will need some steel and a couple of normal mining drills, and have a high mining power but a slightly lower mining speed, with no range past its own footprint, so it should be (slightly) slower and (considerably) more expensive at mining surface ores.
Additionally, deep ores rarely produce stone instead of the ore. I might or might not also have them sometimes produce dirt if Yuoki's set is installed, opinions please? As a followup to that, does anyone know if it's possible to produce more than one type at the same time? I presume not, but it would be nice if the stone and the dirt was a byproduct rather than a sometimes replacement of the output.
Here's a work in progress version that only contains iron - I know that's not exactly great, but I've run out of time for today and I thought I'd get some feedback from anyone who reads this subsection
Things to do before the mod is ready to move out of here and be properly released:
- Write a proper mod template instead of this rambling post
- Add Copper (done) and maybe support for other things. Ideally stuff you need a lot of would have a deep ore, but rare things would not and would always be expendable. I'd like to have configs for some of bobs ores and maybe also some from dytech. I will not be adding a deep ore for coal (use oil instead!), Yuoki's interesting blue or green chunks (they seem rareish, don't want too much of them) or gems or anything like that.
- (done) Add deep drill miner - going to reuse and upscale the burner miner as it has a nice animation, I think, but offers of art for this would be much appreciated. any large vertical drill or borehole would be good.
- Potentially, add better ore graphics. Right now I just have a slightly textured black background to differentiate them from surface ores, and it... usually sortof works.
- Get some opinions on balance, play at least up to blue science with it.
- (done, see below) Write an RSO script set for them.