Drawing things on the map (like circles) is definitely part of the features of the game, just enable debug mode for showing where biters can spawn but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't expose it to modding. Perhaps this is an enhancement we can ask for.bobingabout wrote:Green is Gems.
As for the feature... I don't think there's a way to set it to show only a specific ore, as for drawing other things on the map, probably also either beyond the ability of the engine, or at least beyond my modding ability. Although I write a large popular mod, I'm by far not the best modder of the game.
Short answer... I don't know where to even start this.
As for selecting an ore to look for, how about having a GUI button like many other mods (auto trash, and many more) in the top left corner that pops up a gui with a button for each type of ore in the base game and your mod and you just click on one you want. The hard part (if even possible) is to highlight it in the map. Is it possible in the modding API to change the colour of the ore? Ie. You probably set the colour when you define your ores. If there is a way to change this in the modding API after the fact then this is exactly what we need. If this feature is there it should be pretty simple to get this functionality in. You click the ore finder button, a popup comes up with buttons for each of the ores (all this functionality is done by many other mods already), when you click a button, you change the color of that ore to lime green (you will have to change the default for gems to something else or pick different colours, but personally I like lime green for highlighting as nothing else is that colour and it really stands out on the map). Most of this functionality is already possible in the modding API because many mods do it. The only question mark is if it's possible to change the colour of the ore on the map after creation. If it isn't this would be a great request to the devs. I haven't done any modding with ores so I don't know what's available.
What do you think Bob? Something worth looking into I think.