[Suggestion] Better usage of copper in research costs and a small research suggestion

[SeeTwoDev]

Prerequisites

• [ x] I am running the latest alpha version of MineColonies for my Minecraft version.
• [ x] I checked the MineColonies/Structurize wiki and made sure that my feature does not already exist.
• [ x] I made sure that this feature request is not a duplicate of any existing feature request.

Context

• Minecraft Version:1.18.2
• MineColonies Version: minecolonies-1.18.2-1.0.806-ALPHA

Is your feature request related to a problem?

A slight struggle with iron and an overflow of copper

Feature description

Maybe consider rebalancing some of the early researches, especially some of the heavily iron-costed early combat researches. Copper is now vanilla, and serves strangely no purpose while iron seems much harder to get. I think of the many iron clicks researches in tier 1 and 2.

Notes or related things

A small suggestion that totally has nothing to do with having a miner at -52: Maybe add a research to change the very slow ladder to a pole or to add climbing speed to ladders, they spend half their day climbing ;)

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[Thodor12]

Whilst I agree with the problem, you said it yourself, copper isn't used in anything. The researches generally require items related to the research, and seeing as everything is made using iron, you need iron for the research. Note that you can still find sufficient iron, you just need to look in the correct places (around level 0 and exposed on mountains).

Also make a separate enhancement request for the miner, it's not related to this.

[SeeTwoDev]

It's not used for anything indeed, sounds like a great time to use what's been giving to us modders. "Build it they will come" as it were. Why not use this opportunity to introduce new stuff like copper armor, tools, etc. or using it in some schematics. Copper looks great :)

As far as finding iron: at this very moment, with 2 miners at both ends of my colony, one at ideal iron level, -12, and one ideal diamond, -52, i have a total of 75 iron in open requests between one of many anvils needed in buildings and the rest in iron for basic armor(from colt's mod that has parts leather as a cost to save iron), not even iron armor. Why? Cant afford the 6 blocks for a combat academy therefore researches are stuck and guards keep dying. I feel a constant strain on the system through iron. It feels imbalanced. Why does it go from 6 blocks of iron at lvl 2 to 4 shields at lvl 3... thats a massive difference.

Overall i feel like this could be an opportunity for rebalance in the future.

For the other thing, i was told in suggestion chat to add it here :P

Edit: Could this be because theres a mess of caves under my colony due to 1.18 worldgen?

[Thodor12]

I can bring it this up maybe during a stream, there should already be mods that introduce copper tools/armor, you can always add those into your modpack and utilize them. Alternatively we could slap our own together and make it a dependency.

However what you can also do is introduce Tinkers Construct into the mix, we already have support for that mod, you can cast a couple of copper tools and place them into your warehouse or somewhere, and you have to teach someone a crafting recipe to turn broken tools + repair kit into fixed tools. That way you can give your colony an infinite amount of tools