The quartz conundrum

[Khornet]

I believe quartz is currently the most abundant ore (mineral?) in the game. It's so abundant that the game doesn't even return it as a prospecting result - because it's just that common and easy to find.
Most of us, once we get the necessary glass needed for our windows, and the crushed quartz needed for our refractory bricks, will simply forget about it.
However... hiding in those ludicrously large quartz disc deposits are precious small bits of silver and gold... and those are, in fact, the only efficient ways of getting these precious metals (and they don't merely have swag value anymore, but actual practical uses). 
So you're going to get to mining the quartz and

Spoiler

if you're smart you'll figure out that the most efficient way is chaining ore blasting bombs.

You'll acquire stacks upon STACKS of quartz, enough to build a whole castle out of glass, and you'll still have a surplus. And I GUESS you could just throw all of it into the sea and forget about it... but a true Vintarian is always an utilitarian.

So the conundrum is; what kind of additional resource sink could the game introduce as a method to get rid of all this quartz?

Glassmaking

The obvious candidate, which was I'm sure suggested a hundred times before as its own feature. A method to create liquid and food containers alternative than out of clay. The problem is... clay is also a rather abundant resource (with a WAY better resource sink in the form of bricks though), and realistically speaking, it wouldn't take that much quartz to make those bottles/jars.

And, of course, glassmaking/glassblowing would be an entirely new complex mechanic to implement, though I know there's mods that do that already.

Tempered glass

It would basically just be Glass 2.0, and from the gameplay perspective it would simply take (way?) more quartz to make it. Although I know that doesn't make realistic sense, because tempered glass is basically annealed ("normal") glass that's... tempered, as in exposed to a high temperature and then cooled down. 
And finally, what kind of gameplay purpose could that glass have? Well, I frankly don't know. It's tougher than normal glass and shatters differently. Glass doors? Different window types? Late game crafting recipes (craftable translocators)? This?

Laminated glass

Laminated glass is basically two layers of glass with... something in between them. The key word here is "two layers" which already contains the implication of using double the quartz (yes I know that's not how it actually works and you'd just split the normal glass in two, but shhh). 
As for its gameplay purpose, I dare say I came up with something brilliant; since laminated glass has better thermal insulation properties, it could be used for making a "second tier" greenhouse, boosting the temperature bonus for crops/trees inside it from 5 degrees to 10 degrees (value purely arbitrary), when laminated glass is being used as the roof blocks between the crops and the sky.

Stained glass
"Stained glass is glass that has been colored by adding metallic salts during its manufacture."  As opposed to our current method of smelting green, violet and smoky glass out of VERY rare and VERY precious crystal deposits. And finally, this would be a method to allow us to make red, blue, yellow and brown glass blocks currently existing in game, but not being craftable.
So in short, we'd have to smelt normal quartz + some extra ingredient to get colored glass variants, for construction or trading purposes.
Someone else has already made a nifty suggestion topic including very specific examples of what in-game materials quartz could be mixed with for colored results.

Sell it to traders
Well, this already exists, but in a very negligible manner. The furniture trader buys normal glass in stacks of 8 - but the odds of you getting it in their trading rotation, and the fact it's a single trader type, makes selling it frequently a rather unlikely case. I propose adding normal glass to the stock of items bought by the commodities trader (who is currently very under-utilized as a money maker unless you're a Malefactor), and also by adding stacks of quartz and clear quartz to the rotations of items bought by the building materials trader and the artisan trader.

[LadyWYT]

Proper glassware and full range of craftable stained glass colors? Yes please! The main advantage of a glass bottle over a clay one, of course, being that you can tell at a glance what kind of liquid a glass bottle contains.

Ironically, glass was fairly expensive in the Middle Ages(which is the general setting of Vintage Story), yet it's perhaps one of the easiest materials to obtain in the game.

[Kevin Eric Snell]

Or start incorporating more glass into the Jonas tech, with lenses and such

[TFT]

Complex glassworking is held back by our lack of high temperature refining options. Ideally you'd use a crucible since you could mix ingredients inside, so for your stained glass you could put in your quartz along with a powdered metal; but, the only thing that gets hot enough is a bloomery that only accepts one ingredient and is resource intensive. To this end you'd need something like a furnace with bellows, and give it coke to cap out at 1500 C, a few degrees more if you want it hot enough to remelt and cast your leftover steel bits. The new update brought powdered iron oxide who's only use is for bombs, so you can use that and similar crushed and powdered ores to color your glass. Putting rare crystals in a bloomery as your early-mid game source, and you'd use oxides for late game glassmaking. Other avenues would be gem cutting and jewelry making, just encrust anything and everything with quartz jewels.

But you're still running into the problem of what to use all your quartz on. Clay is useful as a major building material and is used in a lot of recipes, but you're not making buildings out of glass like you are for clay except for the odd greenhouse. Except, there is a non glass building block that is/was made of quartz. The ancient blocks which are only found in rare ruins or in the stock of traders. In prior versions the pillar of that set was called a quartz pillar. If those or something like those could be crafted then you have a large architectural outlet for all the quartz you find. Which this mod lets you do: https://mods.vintagestory.at/quartzblocks

[Reade Pringle]

On 12/1/2024 at 9:50 PM, Khornet said:

it could be used for making a "second tier" greenhouse, boosting the temperature bonus for crops/trees inside it from 5 degrees to 10 degrees

This might be the best suggestion I've ever seen. It isn't massively game-changing, but it's still a really cool and realistic feature (which imo is the only important qualities for a vintage story addition aside from balance ofc) I totally endorse this suggestion!