Fixer-007 commented 8 years ago

I did some limited research on minetest ore spawning:

all valuable ores can be mined easily at depths below -256
rarest of all MESE block spawns below -1024 (but is not required, since crystals can be mined past -256 anyway and combined into MESE block)
minetest has 30000 of depth of uniformly distributed ores below -256

Now that's big disappointment for miners, so... why not we add even more layers below -1024? Say at -4000, -16000, -32000 with increased probability of those ores.

@kwolekr mentioned that nobody pushed idea about biome specific ores, now that's great idea that adds more challenge for players, you can make it like:

coal, iron - all biomes (if you are insane, go with coal in forest biomes)
copper - taiga/tundra/glacier // Who uses copper anyway? :}
gold, diamond, mese - desert, savannah (South Africa as a gold and diamond capital of the world).

That will seriously change mining gameplay, since you will need to actually travel/search for needed ores. Especially on server with protector redo used for protection. New players will be confused though.

biome map: https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/3686677/15913099/f8b759ac-2dcf-11e6-84ff-ae61176010b1.png

Fixer-007 commented 6 years ago

Deeper ores?

scottwolff commented 6 years ago

No I put an example, if we are talking about ore depth = difficulty. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DynamicDifficulty See, crash bandicoot, the designs were that if you kept getting destroyed by the boulder the game took this into account and made it less difficult. But for those players that were good enough to avoid the boulder it did not scale down the difficulty thus making the game easier where it needs to be but essentially the same game for all types of players.

It is just a fault in procedural generation gaming's history, it gets to be boring digging lower and lower for these ores: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProceduralGeneration

The only reason I'd do this as a server admin would be to save server resources such as deeper metals to make protectors, because only the most dedicated players that i'd want to dedicate the resources to are going to spend the time and effort digging lower and lower to get materials. But then comes a day where most players are used to digging so low, and what does that mean.

But in the end as server resources get moot because technology gets better, well, what's the point of ore depth if most players are going to get eventually bored anyways?

paramat commented 6 years ago

PR #2107

paramat commented 6 years ago

2107 merged. Keeping open for ores in particular stone types.

paramat commented 4 years ago

Closing due to #2710

minetest / minetest_game

Ore spawn improvements #1168

2107 merged. Keeping open for ores in particular stone types.