A quick and impactful change to ores and mining

Short version: without otherwise changing current ore deposit patterns, I think it could significantly improve gameplay possibilities if there were relatively rare extremely large ore deposits on planets. I’ve read other suggestions, but none quite aligned, and many were over complicated for a game trying to be more beginner-friendly than SE1.

I finally played Classic Survival and did some mining, whereas in the scenario start, there was absolutely no reason to outside of when the mission offered me a convenient pre-dug mine. I was a bit annoyed with the small deposits compared to SE1, but I understand why, considering their frequency.

What really struck me in retrospect, was that much of the engineering I actually did in SE1 was related to mining, and in SE2, I had no reason to do any of that. The tiny deposits aren’t worth the setup time. All that I encountered were from half a backpack’s worth to at most 3.

In SE 1, there were large veins at non-trivial distances, so it felt worthwhile to build mining outposts and to build trucks, trains, or cargo aircraft to carry ore back to my main base. These projects made up probably 70% of my gameplay and were a lot of fun.

So, I propose that on top of the current deposit pattern, very large deposits be added, but very spread out, for balance and gameplay. I’m thinking at least 500x, maybe 10,000x the current size, but buried deeply, and scattered far enough that none are within a few kilometers of each other. This way, people can still have the quick and easy, but also have incentive to build satellite bases and rovers, because you need the iron and the silicon both in large quantities for building your big ships, but they just aren’t in the same place.

To make them adequately easy to find, I suggest that they should get a multiplier to their detection range, which sounds reasonable to correspond to their large size. So, if your hand drill detects iron from a kilometer away, you know you’ve got a big one. And yes, I realize that the normal voxel-based detection method wouldn’t be performant at that range. Since there would be far fewer of these, I would suggest that a list of them be pregenerated at world creation and found using the detectors by searching the list instead of actually scanning voxels. Considering the distance, the list could also be searched far less frequently.

Finding a cobalt deposit big enough to last you the rest of them game but requiring a great deal of effort to exploit would add a lot to gameplay for me, at least.

An additional layer that follows with this but would be more involved and possibly controversial is changing or adding ore grades. Either reducing the efficiency of all ores, or adding different grades of ore. If building a warp drive only requires a tiny bit of gold, but that tiny bit of goal still requires a lot of ore, then you don’t change the jump of jump drivers per deposit or planet, but still create more of an engineering challenge to mine it. And for people who don’t want that, they can still search around for tiny high-concentration deposits. Personally, I’d rather just see one grade of ore, but much less concentrated than current ores. Mining is currently hard enough to be a chore, but not hard enough to make it interesting.