New rock types and colors

[Stroam]

I noticed there are no metamorphic rock types in the game. Now I don't want metamorphic rocks to be added just for the sake of having metamorphic rocks. I am suggesting they be added with some texture tweaks to the current rocks. The goal of all of this would be to give builders a wider array of natural rock colors to work with. I will put what I'm thinking below in a list form and then after include pictures to get you a better idea of the colors I'm referring to since no one sees colors exactly the same.

Sedimentary Rock

• Gypsum: White - (good for plaster)
• Limestone: off-white brown - (formally known as chalk. Still good for quicklime)
• Mudrock: burnt red - (this combines shale and claystone)
• Sandstone: yellowish orange

Metamorphic Rock

• Hornfels: bands of white, grey, and green - (Used for whetstones)
• Marble: white with black wispy streaks - (Everyone loves marble)
• Quartzite - brown
• Serpentinite - green

Igneous Rock

• Andesite: blue
• Basalt: dark grey
• Granite: specs of black, white, and yellow
• Obsidian: glossy black
• Pumice: light grey - (great abrasive and floats!)

 

Here are actual pictures of what I mean

Spoiler

Gypsum

 

Limestone

 

Mudrock

 

Sandstone

 

Hornfels

 

Marble

 

Quartzite

 

Serpentinite

 

Andesite

 

Basalt

 

Granite

 

Obsidian

 

Pumice

 

 

[Balduranne]

I am 100% behind adding Sandstone and Marble

[tony Liberatto]

You are missing my favourite stone type from TFC. The Conglomerate. The golden colour was just beautiful.

 

[redram]

Anything with pronounced streaks or layers is probably not going to look great at the biome level imo.  I think a lot of these would be better as deposits within more humble stone, like quartz and rock salt currently.  This also has the chance to make them a bit more valuable as a building material, vs if they exist in quantities the size of an entire biome.   I would actually like to see many different colors and patterns of marble.

[Stroam]

I'd have to see each in-game as well but I don't think it'd look bad. If the bands were fairly narrow they'd probably blend together at a distance. Maybe @Balduranne could do a hornfels mockup and post a picture. Most of the time though metamorphic rock should be under a sedimentary rock layer. Might even require a bronze pickaxe. You notice this is only exposed because the water has eroded down to it.

[redram]

The issue with banding is one of repetition.  So in that picture you have a variety of band thicknesses, looks like some over a meter, but it varies a lot.  The variety makes it interesting.  But doing that in-game?  I'd imagine it'd be troublesome.  you'd have to have many texture variants, and they'd need to be uniform at a given Y level.  Seems not worth the effort to me.  Though that's assuming we're talking stripes within a given block.  If you're talking doing it like minecraft where there's simply 4 or 5 solid colors of hornfel and the game layers them, that's obviously doable, and looks pretty ok, at least in a mesa-biome-style situation.  Though if you do it for hornfel there should probably be a version for sandstone as well.

All in all I think this kind of stuff is more striking when it's rare, so maybe for hornfel it could only occur rarely as 'devils tower' style formations, or small areas of cliff like the picture?  Sandstone badlands would be different, but again, I'd hope they'd be rare.

Definitely would love for the 3 general stone types to be present in more balance, rather than granite forming the vast majority of stone.  And then more tiered to tools, so copper for sedimentary, bronze for metamorphic, and iron for igneous.  Would make caves more important for finding ore.  Right now I actually prefer shaft mining in a lot of cases, since such a mine can be easily controlled for mobs.