Bring back stone - Here's how (+Wood)

Please bring back stone!

As it currently stands, stone is just too abundant to be ignored and currently leaves the planet feeling mostly useless, with the exception of small ore deposits. Having stone be useful could make the whole planet feel useable, and would offer additional options for engineering and resource collection.

--Intro--

Stone should be implemented as a less efficient ore for gathering small amounts of basic resources such as iron, nickel, and silicon (similar to SE1). This would open up more in-depth mining opportunities such as large stone quarries for mass (but less efficient) gathering of resources without having to hop between a million small ore deposit mines, which usually end up being an eye-sore on the planet surface. Currently there is no justifiable reason to spend the time or resources to build infrastructure on a small fixed ore deposit mine, so having a larger stone mining operation could present fun engineering goals and challenges as we build infrastructure to make it feasible to mine at a larger scale.

The main challenge with how stone was implemented in SE1 was an issue of what to do with all of it once you have progressed past early-game reliance on it. The rate at which stone is gathered could be altered from how it is in SE1, where often it feels like you have way too much of it. Changing the drop rate in combination with having more uses for it, would prevent it from needlessly filling our inventories.

I will now propose 2 primary ways in which stone could be usefully implemented into SE2, to allow it to be helpful and to also avoid the pitfalls of it's SE1 implementation.

-- Concrete Blocks--

Once gathered, stone should be able to be broken down into small amounts of basic resources as well as "concrete", just like in SE1 -- This would work well with an ingot system which I also think should be reimplemented from SE1.

The recipe for these blocks would be simple. Concrete (a stone by-product) + a small amount of iron (obtainable from refining stone, to represent rebar) = Concrete blocks

Using concrete as a building material would be great for large planetary structures, as well as reducing player dependency on iron when first building infrastructure. They could also find use anywhere you need extra mass without using metal, such as the ballast of a watercraft. Of course the tradeoff is that it would be less durable than armour blocks, but they would be crafted from more abundant resources.

It would be great (though not as important) to see these mechanics incorporated into other things such as wood. I can imagine harvesting wood from trees for use in wood flooring etc. Wood blocks would also have different weight/durability stats. Due to the relative rarity of wood compared to other resources in the solar system, it could be an influential commodity in the SE2 economy once multiplayer arrives. I would prefer this system of separate material blocks compared to re-skinning the armour blocks (like in SE1) when it comes to these materials (concrete and wood).

-- Terraforming --

Beyond use in concrete blocks, stone could also be implemented into some sort of survival-friendly voxel hand tool for the purposes of filling in unsightly voxel damage and doing light terraforming (leveling an area, building roads etc.) This would allow us to better incorporate our environment into the gameplay, and would also increase our ability to influence the aesthetics of the world around us.

--Conclusion--

I think there is so much potential for stone to act as the cornerstone of the crafting system, filling the role of a dependable way to gather resources without having to have multiple mines. Especially if implemented into the game as I described in this post, I believe it would create additional engineering opportunities as well as make the world more interactive and usable.

I hope to see this game become all that it could be with the support of a great community and the fantastic dev team at KSH!

Thank You!!