lawremi
commented
10 years ago I'm not sure about a prospector's pick. Seems too magical to me. Ideas like having more hint veins are more attractive. It's good encouraging the player to explore caves, etc. Another idea would be to have ordinary rock blocks yield a small amount of ore according to some chance. The dropped ore would correspond to one of the nearby deposits.
As suggested by Noogenesis I'm posting my ideas on Ore System here. This part is about general stuff.
First of all, my ideas require additional mechanics (machines and tools) that are not in PFAA. Workaround would be to add a config to disable additional features that require such mechanics. Secondly, I'm not sure about implementing my ideas with PFAA Geology policy, but that's what this discussion is about I guess. Thirdly, I would like to suggest adding very basic Prospector's Pick to the mod regardless of my other ideas. It would greatly improve the general feeling of the mod where you actively search for ores instead of running into them blindly.