Allow the player to slowly extract nuggets from chunks using rocks instead of a hammer

[Byrnorthil]

When looking through help menu entries for random stuff I happened to notice an interesting descriptor for ore chunks:

Quote

In ground storage on top of stone, smashes into: <nugget amount>

Sure enough, if you place nuggets on the ground and smack them with a hammer they will get crushed in the same fashion as the grid recipe. And it immediately hit me: this could be a great solution for the common pain point of panning for a pickaxe+hammer kinda sucking. I don't think panning should be rendered entirely unnecessary, as it's a very good way for new players to accidentally acquire needed flint and quartz chunks, but I have to agree that needing to pan for 30+ nuggets (very common if you only find one copper deposit) is awfully boring.

So, what if you only needed to pan for the first 20 to make the pickaxe? My suggestion is simple: expand the existing ground-storage crushing mechanic to include using igneous rocks as a substitute for a hammer, but make it consume the rock, take longer, and/or crush 1-2 chunks at a time rather than 4. This way, players would only have to pan for 5-15 nuggets instead of 25-35, which should hopefully go by fast enough that it doesn't start to drag on. All told the process doesn't even need to be significantly faster than panning, it would just be way more interesting than holding left-click+right-click for half an hour, since it involves two resource gathering phases (mining the copper & gathering the stones) and also more naturally ties in to the existing mining system.

Edited May 4 by Byrnorthil

[Heegrim]

Yeah, I agree. It’s kinda devastating for new players to finally get their first pickaxe and go mining, only to realize they have to pan for 20 more nuggets to craft another tool to be able to progress further. 

The chunk smashing mechanic is already in the game and this would fit well as an transition from early game knapping to late game metallurgy.

 

Primitive Technology on youtube smelts iron and smashes the blooms with a rock to extract the nuggets, so we should at least be able to smash copper chunks with a rock.