So I was thinking about how hard it can sometimes be to come across certain resources in this game. This is of course by design, you should have to put effort in to locate these resources, and it makes sense for some of them to be rarer that others. However, due to the random nature of world generation, if you're unlucky you can have a world in which there is no chance to see a particular material in your area, forcing you to spend a ridiculous amount of time looking for certain resources, meanwhile on another playthough you might happen to build a base on top of an ilmenite vein or something by accident.
For me, this just makes me give up from doing certain stuff in the game on a given playthrough: I'm playing with 3 friends and we never found any ilmenite or halite, so no tier 3 refractories or salted foods for us (though I know we could buy salt from a trader if we really wanted to). Now these are minor things, completely unnecessary to progress the game, but still it feels kind of lame to have only 2 options: give up from trying or spend an upredictably large amount of time running around the world with a prospector's pick.
So, I had this idea: what if you could somehow get some more concrete clues as to where a given material is in the world? As an example, maybe there could be a chance for the traders to have info on the location of a material, because they've seen it during their travels or something. Then they could tell you, probably for a price, that e.g. they remember seeing some limestone a bit southeast from their location or something. Of course, this would have to be appropriately expensive so as to not make running around with a prospector's pick completely obsolete. These locations could be even less direct, maybe relying on some points of interest to guide you (some stuff like "go east until some ruins, north of those there's a forest. I'm pretty sure you could find some halite there if you looked hard enough" or somesuch), though this sounds somewhat hard to implement. Now that I think about it a system like this, if possible to pull off well, would be really dope for finding story locations as well.
Also, maybe there could be a new cartographer type trader that would have more info or more resources, and maybe could mark their general location on your map or something.
I think this could help alleviate some of the tedious aspects of looking for minerals, while also not trivialising the task too much, if balanced well. What do you guys think??
