lawremi
commented
10 years ago The current system actually does have complex mixtures of minerals per block, but every ore block has a "primary ore" that confers its name. Check out the GeoMaterial class for an indication of the complexity. The progression towards better processing is already part of Gregtech and my plans for Chemica. I'm totally onboard with the idea of rare earth ore blocks having very limited yields. I want to make sure though that players can reason on the ore blocks in a simple way. Defining/labeling blocks in terms of mineral compositions may be too complex for most players. This is why even real life geologists have given names to rock types, even though they are all different, within some range.
retep998
tomasbrod
In this system there is no differentiation between stone and ore. Every block has a specific composition of various minerals. Through processing of the block you can break it down into its constituent minerals. Early game processing will be extremely lossy, while expensive late game processing will be able to achieve near perfect separation. It is impossible to get more than 1 block of material from a block, so even if an ore was made out of pure metal with no silicates, you'd still only be able to get up to 9 ingots. By having this composition system, you can have some ores with trace quantities of rare earth minerals where you have to tear up hundreds of blocks and go through a long refining process to get a couple of nuggets (remember that nuggets are actually huge: a gold nugget is over 26 kilograms). This also allows for veins that are low density around the outside but are high density in the middle. This also allows for the mechanic of the player deciding whether or not it is worth the energy and resources to process a low yield ore, considering many methods of ore processing involve expending certain chemicals and materials which may not be worth the tiny bit of metal in the ore, unless it is something valuable like iridium. By having the bottleneck for obtaining rare earth minerals be mining and processing vast quantities of low yield ore, it promotes investment into large scale mining infrastructure and ore processing.