Suggestion for Mining Revamp

[Sevenless]

Personally I'd prefer qualityless ore, with charcoal, smelters and lime being the only determinators of metal quality.

I did enjoy that system from haven, but due to this world being nodeless, that'll require many ingredients to have purity raising methods. How would we get better bricks without clay nodes? Or better lime without lime nodes?

It also raises the ugly truth of needing 4 production chains if you want all 4 purities, and that just sounds like a pain.

As for the mention of all purities in one defended position: How is that any different from farming? You can have all your high value seeds growing at the center of a heavily defended town. Because none of this is equipment based, but grind based instead, no one can just raid a place once and magically get metal purity. Everyone would have to start from essentially scratch. That can be considered a good or bad thing depending.

Anyway, it's just a thought, lots of good points raised.

[Potjeh]

Tree planting would be needed for spiralling clay. I guess we could also use charcoal to purify lime or something.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not intended for one group to have all 4 purity chains.

Anyway, my main point is that metal is the only thing that's isolated from all the other production chains, and that just feels all sorts of wrong to me.

[Sevenless]

Tree planting would be needed for spiralling clay. I guess we could also use charcoal to purify lime or something.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not intended for one group to have all 4 purity chains.

Anyway, my main point is that metal is the only thing that's isolated from all the other production chains, and that just feels all sorts of wrong to me.

I personally think that there should be related chains that work together, but I don't think everything should be inter-related. That's just me though, but it seems really weird that buffing mineral purity is likely to always be the primary source of crop purity as it is in our current system. Haven was too interlinked with clay essentially being everything except farming quality. Farms and animal quality were unrelated, and I'd personally rather see every system be uniquely self fed. That would make the game much more trade based than haven was, because good clay was essentially all you needed in the game to be the king. Here each industry would require effort to raise if they were all isolated.

As for not having every purity type... I see the reason behind designing it that way, but we're talking permadeath competition. Simply saying "oh well we'll have to trade for that super high purity mercury metal" just isn't going to work if the mercury confers a benefit different from say salt. It works fine for your average village, but competitive factions don't have any options since the only people who will have the other types of purity will likely be their direct competition.

Intended or not, the "hardcores" are going to try for it.

[Potjeh]

Well yeah, clay was the base of everything, but you still needed to work on developing all the production chains it was used for. And animals' effective quality was softcapped by fodder

As for different purities, they should be just different, not better. If having mercury is better than having salt, it's simply a balance issue.

On a slightly related note, I'd like to repeat that having purity require resource investment only for raising doesn't really work with hardcapped max purity. IMO it's essential that it takes resources to maintain the purity as well, so there's some strategic decision making on quantity vs purity.