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[OneTwentySix]

As it stands I can generally generate a world, pick a site with no real searching, and build a fortress that can produce anything and everything I could ever want, which makes caravans almost completely unneeded.  Instead, what if you made everything much more scarce in general, and then scattered some sites around in world gen with certain resources being very abundant?  You’d follow your geology patterns and so forth, so maybe a “site” might include a mountain range, but it’d be confined to certain areas instead of everywhere.   Players would have to be alerted to this before embarking, and would have to be able to search for it in the site finder to make this fun, of course; a guess and check approach would be disastrous.
 
Even though iron is one of the most common metals, you can’t just go anywhere on Earth and plop down an iron mine.  You might be able to find iron in most areas if you look hard enough, but it’s not economically worth mining there.  Unfortunately, in Dwarf Fortress, the idea of a mine doesn’t even exist; you don’t settle a site for mineral abundance, you settle it and assume there will be minerals present, the only choice being looking for sedimentary rock where metals are more common.  Changing mineral abundance levels on a local and global scale would fix this.  Along with value rebalancing, this change would greatly increase the fun and challenge of the game, and would make a number of neat features possible that could make the game come much more alive.  Here are some of the ways I can think of.

You might start a fort specifically to mine one mineral.  Maybe you’d start a dwarven diamond mine in the middle of a desert, with very little of value around you.  No trees, no water for farming or drinking (or booze production if it ever requires water), and little mineral abundance below you.   All you’ve got are tons and tons of diamonds (and assorted gems that are associated with diamond-rich areas).  You rely entirely on the caravans for everything, and as the game grows, might have to send out patrols to protect the caravan routes or destroy nearby bandit camps, etc.  And so you rely on your gem industry, as well as exporting raw gems if needed.  There might need to be some sort of balance issues to address; you might add in size and quality for gems, which would make it so that you’d have to sort through a lot of gems to find any that would make it profitable.  But on the other hand, you’d have tons of gems available on site to mine through, rather than a small handful.  Still, it should be exciting when you find a high quality gem, because you know it's worth a lot, and the value actually means something strategy-wise, unlike the current game.  Taking this one step further, why not introduce extremely rare artifact-level gems, like the Arkenstone from The Hobbit, or the Hope Diamond, etc.? 

You should be able to have a mining outpost with vast quantities of the more valuable/strategic resources, and have it be profitable on that alone, or at least in part.  It’d also add a bit of depth to the game, and make things like mine carts more useful; instead of small veins here and there scattered across the map, you’d be following much larger veins that would encompass your entire mining operation for decades or more, so it’d be worth installing the mine tracks and so forth; you’d be hauling large quantities of material out of the mountain to be smelted, or sold as coal, and it’d all be in lines following the vein.  This might require some of the realistic mining suggestions from the eternal voting so that you don’t just mine everything in the first year, but it’d improve the dynamic of the game a lot.  If you want to balance quick digging for establishing a fort with slow digging for establishing a mine, maybe make it so that ore squares produce a lot of rubble that has to be cleared out before the next square can be dug, and mine carts can only hold so much; essentially you’d be sending a mine cart back and forth a few times before being able to mine deeper.  This could also address how dwarves can carry huge boulder with no trouble; instead break up ore boulders into more manageable chunks, which can then be loaded in the cart or carried out by hand if necessary.

In order to rebalance values and the new abundance of metals in certain sites, you might need to change how metal ores and bars work.  It makes sense to get an iron bar from a boulder of iron ore, but not from gold, silver, platinum, etc; gold ore contains very little actual gold, though it might have some silver or copper in with it (the largest gold producing mine in the world is actually a copper mine).  Instead for some of these ores, change what you get from them to nuggets, and make it so that you need 20 or so nuggets to smelt a bar; number of nuggets might depend on the value of the site, how close they are to the main part of the vein, or luck.  Adding nuggets means you can also add in gold/gem panning in rivers and streams downstream from their sites, which would be fun; even an adventurer could do that.  All this means a precious metal bar should be worth a lot more and is harder to produce, but you should also be able to get a lot of use out of one bar.  There’s already a quantity system in place for bars and thread, so why not use it.  Make 50 rings from one bar, or use it to gild a bunch of copper statues with gold, or the walls of your dining room.  Or take several gold bars and make a solid-gold throne, fit for a king.  Hell, you could even have the construction of a royal throne be like making an artifact, only without the mood.  Requires XX gold bars, X diamonds, X rubies or sapphires, X dyed cloth for the cushions, etc. , possibly modified by ruler preference.  Putting it (or something like it) together might be a demand from a noble, or a requirement for a king to show up, etc., and would automatically be artifact quality.   As it is now, solid gold items aren’t really significant in any way, when something solid gold should really be something special.

The presence of mineral rich mines would mean there are going to be more bars produced for import and export, so this gives an opportunity to increase the number of bars needed to produce things, which can make metals more valuable since you’d be multiplying the number of bars in cost to produce.  The game used to work this way, but now everything takes a bar, except goblets which take 1/3 of a bar.  Increase it again; you should need a number of bars to produce a quite a few bars of steel to produce a full suit of armor, and a LOT of bars to produce a life-sized, solid metal statue of a dwarf.  This would work better once caravans are established that can provide plenty of bars if you can afford them, rather than just a few as it is now.  This gives a use for common metals like copper; instead of being a relatively worthless copper statue requiring a single bar, you now have a large statue worth quite a bit requiring lots of bars, and you can then gold-plate it afterward (or other metals, but I don’t know if much plating beyond gilding was done during the game’s time frame).  If you go this way, make sure you adjust the learning rate to go with it.  The more bars it takes to make, the more time it takes and the fewer you can make.

If you really wanted to get into it, you could change the metals to have a happiness value associated with appearance rather than value to make gold plating common: “Admired a beautiful gold statue” vs. “Admired a copper statue” even though the gold used in plating it might not increase the value of the statue significantly.  This could also make certain alloys more valuable; making rose gold might not be profitable for trading, but if you don’t have much gold, you can make the alloy and still get high-rated thoughts while stretching your gold supply.  Of course, not having access to everything makes whatever metals you do have more useful in any event.

All these changes improve gameplay, but simply changing the abundance of minerals opens up a lot of cool situations.  Once you have sites supplying resources, and sites using resources, you can set up trade routes, with caravans coming and going between sites on routes.  Bandits can then start ambushing caravans, causing problems on both sides while profiting themselves.  This might force the civilization to establish a fort to protect the caravan route.  Once established, caravans now have another stop on the trade route, making it more profitable and increasing trade.  The trade and security might draw in settlers to the area, and a town might pop up around the fort.   Then, a hundred years later, the mine dries up and the main reason for the caravan no longer exists.  Without the caravan, the need for the military goes down, and eventually starts moving out.  Eventually, the fort is abandoned and people leave the town, and you’ve got a ghost town, where monsters, bandits, or kobolds might move into.

One thing you could also add would be the whole coal miner black lung problem, if coal mines were specifically set up to mine coal rather than every fort mining coal.  A coal mining fort might be kind of fun, because you'd be dealing with tons of dwarves getting sick over the years, and rotating them out and so forth; ultimately, it'd be a harsh work environment and would be interesting for play. 

Ultimately, I think changing resource abundance from global to local would be a great path for the game that would lead to greatly improved gameplay and mechanics.

[therahedwig]

Actually, the resources used to be very rare in 40d but Toady changed it around because it was a bit too rare and a lot of people ended up focussing on non-area specific industries(like crafts, clothing and traps) or went out of their way to find the perfect location to start a metal industry.

Now it's a bit too common, but it probly will be set to a decent avarage once most of the caravan arc and entity pops stuff has been dealed with and we can really start having fun with resources.

Also, artifact jewels already exist, like most decorational artifacts, they are bloody useless.

[jseah]

I've had this idea, but never checked to see if anyone else had it before. 

Also, given a significant number of players of DF want to see it remain a game, I don't know if this will ever be implemented.  Which is sad, proper economics, social structure and civilizations would make DF a far more awesome game than it is already. 

My full support for this. 

therahedwig:
He's not asking for less resources. 
He's asking for specialized resources.  And even more of it than we see now.  We're talking entire embark squares of solid iron ore wandering across the map being the sole underground ore feature. 

A fort set up to mine iron, mines iron.  You don't mine gold in an iron mine. 

A fort meant to protect the trade route shouldn't get ANY mining. 

[OneTwentySix]

I don't mean 40d resource levels, that doesn't add anything to the game, but more specialized sites.  You're not going to find sites in the real world where you can mine any kind of ore you want, with a forest, sand, and other things all present.  Instead, you'll find sites with some things, and none/few of others.  No matter where you are on Earth, you can probably dig down and find some ores; but you're not going to find economically viable levels of much.  Iron is one of the most common minerals on Earth, so you should probably be able to find enough iron for the fortress' use, but you're not going to be using for much export.  Likewise, you might be able to find some assorted gems and some ores. 

Basically, I'd like to see sites producing resources, sites using them, and then caravans moving between them.  Create a situation where it would be beneficial to export bars in exchange for the things you need.  Or alternately, to be able to import large quantities of bars if you want to do a production fortress.  To basically make caravans useful; as it is now, they don't import anything in quantities you might want to use, and your exports are mostly pointless and easily produced. 

Basically, more realistic geology, and more specialization in fortresses so that every fortress isn't going to play the same.  Not solid embark squares, but in the square there might be a vein covering many z-levels, with thousands or even tens of thousands of ore.  Where you'd actually have a shaft into the side of a hill following a vein of mineral, with minecarts coming in and out, or a big pit into the ground digging out a kimberlite pipe for diamonds, or so on.  In adventure mode, you might lie in wait outside a treasure-producing town and ambush the caravan, and so on.  And as the game grows and army mode is put in, it adds strategy since you can conquer sites for tribute or so on, etc.  Toady seems to be going a bit in this direction by tracking site resources, but as it is sites are simply too similar and homogenous.

I disagree with the idea that this makes it less of a game; I think it'd add a lot of depth now and in the future.  And regardless, it could be easily edited in the raws.  And with metals, there would still be other things coming out of mines than the main target; gold, copper, and silver are often found together, for example, and some iron mines produce some gold, etc.  And you'll still probably find random small veins of assorted ores as you go deeper, etc.  I'm basically proposing a basic level of resources across the world at a level a fraction of the 40d levels, and then you build on top of it veins of resources on a large scale.  Basically, this site shows the distribution of various mines, and as you can see them clustered together, you'll see how areas tend to have a bias toward certain minerals and types of minerals: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mapdata/minesmap.gif (larger map here: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mapdata/ ) DF already has the mineral layers, why not take it one step further?

[Kurouma]

One of the things that comes to mind is the Pharaoh or Caesar trade maps, where you could bring up a map of all the trade routes and cities of the empire. You could then click on a city (nearby ones only) to open a trade route between you and them, and only after would you get trade caravans. The cities themselves would have goods that they were buying and ones they were selling; it was up to you to set up the relevant industries. However the Caesar map was a static world with hard-coded requested goods and hard-coded allowed trade partners. The DF universe offers a more fluid, sophisticated way to implement this, which relies on OneTwentySix's idea. Toady has mentioned the crazy overabundance issue in some of the DF talks, by the way, but I don't think he's said anything about localised resources.
Managing trade and specialising your economy ties in with diplomacy, gives depth to gameplay, purpose to negotiations with diplomats, and gives a sense to the player that the world is truly interconnected.

I think this (trade stuff) should be a feature to combine with localised resources. You should be linked up to the 'world trade route' by default, as is at the moment, but with the option to bring up a map screen much like the adventurer quest map that would allow you to negotiate with nearby population centers for trade routes, or even specific trade agreements ("at least 20 iron bars a season for 80 booze") with caravans from these specific cities arriving maybe seasonally instead of the yearly ones.

[Waparius]

This one really depends on getting improved caravans, as others have said. It's a pretty great idea to throw in with the proper caravans, economy and fortress backstory arc though.

It would for one thing completely change the danger-value of sieges. If you're in an iron-mining fort and relying on caravans for your food/fuel supply, you can no longer just close up. (One of my forts has been under near-continuous siege for the last few years with no real problems). A farming fort would...what? Have problems with maintaining metal equipment?

The talk about banditry also brings up another idea for a fun mechanic - allowing the fort to hire out mercenaries or long-distance workers. When a caravan comes into town, instead of just selling items, you designate a squad or two from the militia, and the fort gets a certain amount of credit based on their skills and equipment (and possibly more if they've done anything noteworthy, like kill a titan). The fort loses that squad for the season, and there's a chance that they'll come back wounded or dead, but hiring out guards can be extremely lucrative and there's also the possibility that those guards' skills will be boosted by fighting with bandits.

 Of course there's the problem of supporting the fort in its early years, but that could perhaps be mitigated by starting it out as a waystation, with inns and whatnot to support caravans with a hot meal and a soft bed (a-la the Cooking Megathread). It would be made even easier by making coins work properly, since you could take the merchants' coin and use it to buy equipment off them...

Hmm. Has anybody made a "Caravans/Trade Megathread" yet?

[zwei]

For this to work, you will need to ensure that whole world is somewhat ready for player forts:

Sure, you can have site with minimum of iron and depend to trading to get it, but that other site with abundance of iron has to exist.

Player will need way to find out what trade routes and trade-available resources are before embarking, otherwise he can get suprise few years later similar to embarking to semi-dead world and lacking goblins or parent civilization.

[Waparius]

For this to work, you will need to ensure that whole world is somewhat ready for player forts:

Sure, you can have site with minimum of iron and depend to trading to get it, but that other site with abundance of iron has to exist.

Player will need way to find out what trade routes and trade-available resources are before embarking, otherwise he can get suprise few years later similar to embarking to semi-dead world and lacking goblins or parent civilization.

At first at least, if you can use the site-finder to select forts for a particular resource then the game can plonk cities over other resources and use arbitrary calculations to figure out how much they're producing. If they're sitting next to the ocean they produce fish, if they're in meadowlands they're agricultural, if they're in the middle of a bunch of roads they train guards, etc etc.

With that, then in the site-finder you could easily have a check-box for "trade access" based on proximity to these resources (close, midrange, far, none). I'm not sure how civilisations expand in worldgen but it seems like it would encourage putting your fort on the edge of a given civilisation, since you'd naturally be some distance from certain resources, preferably the ones you want.


Oh, another thing -

There should obviously still be other resources available on a given map beyond the magnetite vein or whatever, preferably deeper resources. That way you still have something up to chance. So when you find a heap of, say, copper in the igneous layer under your ironworks, if you're far away from copper you can start selling it, and if you're too near to make a profit you can still use it to free yourself from those penny-pinchers in RatMurder down the river.

[Andeerz]

Also... I think it's safe to say that prospecting for mineral resources has a large element of luck!  I could certainly imagine with roman and medieval prospecting practices that large deposits of ore could be undiscovered even though it might be under a population's noses.  I wonder if it's still the case today.  I mean, there are still new ore deposits discovered today, no?

Basically, perhaps there could be a city on top of an ore deposit that might just be too deep or just by luck not found, and the economic activities of that settlement might be unrelated to the presence of the ore in the ground.  If this did happen in RL, perhaps we could model DF after that. 

[King_of_the_weasels]

I'm for this for so many reasons, but the main one is the way you describe the large veins, gives
me hope that this would lead to me being able to dig out a nice looking fortress without it being messed up by some stray copper vein cutting through my rooms, forcing me to dig it out and not being able to rebuild until I dig out every little bit.  Also the specialization thing too.   One problem is you'll need lots of miners and you'll only get glass blowers and fish dissectors.

[Waparius]

It occurs to me that the giant ore veins can only make the "MINE OUT THE DAMN VEIN" designation more valuable. It's probably going to have to be prioritised lower than the regular designation-mining to make it work though.

An idea from the tourism thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69696.0) for more caravan-related fun is to have religious pilgrims travelling to various sites of interest. It occurs to me that Pilgrimage Sites from the worldgen could be one more resource for developing your fort. It makes sense that if pilgrims start heading to Mount CreekThistle, where Urist McProphet chiselled the Tablets of Lore for the Earth God, then a town would grow around the place. Especially if a bunch of goblins moved in nearby to take advantage of the ready access to slaves.

[forsaken1111]

I would like specialized sites where other resources are very rare or nonexistant, but some metals are quite common. I support this, and hope it happens. I'd love to have an actual economy and reason to trade.

[rephikul]

You can already do it. Tweak the raw and change the chance good materials showing up. Right now they are all at 100%. I have enough incentive to trade already so i'm fine with stuff being this way.

[Hyndis]

I would like specialized sites where other resources are very rare or nonexistant, but some metals are quite common. I support this, and hope it happens. I'd love to have an actual economy and reason to trade.

The current game is already like that.

Different sites have different mineral wealth. Some sites are steel mills, loaded with iron, coal, and flux. Other sites are gold and/or silver mines. It all varies by a huge amount.

For example, my current fortress is a silver/copper/lead mine. Very little iron, and also moderate amounts of gold, but mostly silver/copper/lead. This means I need to import nearly all of my iron, but I can use silver/copper/lead for all sorts of other things, including decorations.

[Rowanas]

Copper and gold here. Neither hide nor hair of iron or gems, so I trade very carefully to ensure that I get as much iron as I need for the coming season.