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[hughesdylan]

Lo all, Yet another inane question time:

I would like to make the underground a bit more.. exciting. I realize its not terribly realistic, but im trying to get the veins and clusters and such to spawn much more often. It seems like there is a regular pattern, sort of like blocks, to the spawning. I don't even care if they "overlap".

Im trying to re-balance the way ores work, to make them more faulty. Right now you always get a bar of metal when you smelt ore, I've made it so that, for instance, you would only get 1 bar for every 3 blocks of ore you smelt (i realism this isn't percentage but rather completion). This would make more mining be necessary instead of only a bit of exploratory.

The bad thing about this approach is you need lots more ore to make a single bar, hence me wanting to make the spawns more "dense". I could easily change the spawns from.. say.. veins to the huge spawns, but that doesnt seem like a good fix either. Ideas?

[Micro102]

Make the ore veins spawn in 3 directions? Like one vertically, 2 horizontally.

Of course i have no idea how to do that.

[hughesdylan]

Whell, yes, i suppose that would work, but i don't think you can code it that way. i would like "more" veins spawned, not nessisarily on each other. At the moment it looks like the maps are divided into blocks and each block gets one spawn, be it vein or whatever. If that isn't right, please correct me.

[Danarca]

That's correct.
When embarking each region square gets converted into 48x48 blocks, which will contain a major cluster (Like microcline) and perharps some minor veins (Like silver) inside.

[hughesdylan]

Ahh. damn. So i suppose really the only solution would be to make them into large clusters and lower the completion rate of the smelting. thanks :/. Perhaps with the next version there will be more granular control over things like ore. Doubtful though.

[Micro102]

What about reducing the size of these main clusters? would the ore veins be the same? If so then there would be more veins in a map.

[Lancensis]

Clusters, veins, and small groups can't be resized.

Perhaps you could try giving ore veins environment tags that cause them to spawn inside other veins, effectively giving you a double sized one (or an exotic fruit fusion). I think that each environment gets an equal shot at having veins or clusters in it, so you could have, for instance a 48 square block with a Large Cluster in it, with a couple veins going through the cluster, each vein having associated minerals in it, and they having minerals of their own.
If nothing else, it might wreck up the placement somewhat, so you'll at least have an unusual underground. Veins can creep out of their clusters if they don't have room, so if you cram veins, into veins, into veins, you might end up with huge masses of them snaking through the underground.

EDIT: Oh, and hughesdylan, it's probably better to leave threads unlocked even after a question's been answered, so if someone has a similar question sometime later, they don't have to start a new thread.

[Impaler[WrG]]

An alternative is to make bars of metal themselves smaller, you can do this by just increasing the size of most items in the game which will make them require more metal to make.  Furniture will still be three bars though it can't be changed.

[hughesdylan]

I was locking the threads because i didn't plan on paying attention to those threads any longer, and i didnt want to seem ungrateful. In the future i will leave those open.

The cascading vein idea is a good one! it will require quite a few new entries though, i will test this and get back to you guys. Basically i would just have the more rare ores inside of the rare ores, inside of the uncommon ores, inside the common ones, and then have the common ones spawn in large clusters.

I'm not sure if this kind of hierarchical mess would work, or explode, but hey this is dwarf fortress so those arent mutually exclusive.

[Rysith]

The cascading vein idea is a good one! it will require quite a few new entries though, i will test this and get back to you guys. Basically i would just have the more rare ores inside of the rare ores, inside of the uncommon ores, inside the common ones, and then have the common ones spawn in large clusters.

I tried doing that going in the opposite direction (trying to introduce small clusters of denser ore in other veins). It seems like the map decides if it's going to have inclusions or not at each level, so I'd guess you'd see some places where you only got common ores, and some places where you got two levels, and occasional places where you got three levels, etc. Having everything be inclusions might help, though I found that what helped more than anything was taking the stones that show up as large clusters (Microcline, Orthoclase, Kimberlite, etc.) and making them veins or small clusters. Each 48x48 level seems to be willing to have one large cluster or up to two veins and some small clusters, so removing the large clusters gives you a lot more variety.

[hughesdylan]

Oh! i did not know that about veins. I was under the impression that it would only spawn one "item" be it a cluster, vein, or whatever. I had several ores set to Large Clusters, so perhaps thats whats messing up my distribution? If thats the case, im definatly willing to set most of them to veins, which is as i would prefer it anyway.

<edit>

<double edit>

Im retracting my ore file for now, its more incomplete than i would like it. Ill post it here in a bit if there is any interest.