I have taken the liberty of posting this thread to spread around a mod made by one “DangerNoodle.” This mod was PR’d for inclusion in the base game but after another contributor (mugling) made a great deal of goal post moving, question evading, and the making of unreasonable demands, the mod was rejected for inclusion in the game.
The following link is being hosted and maintained on dropbox by Random_Dragon/Chaosvolt, who obtained permission from DangerNoodle to make it available as a mod here on the forums. As the mod updates, so too will this link.
NEW LINK! —> https://github.com/DangerNoodle/mining-mod
Just in case I’ve messed up, here is the older DL link, please tell me if something goes weird with it.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89427928/Mining_Mod.zip
This next link leads to the pull request in which the mod is discussed and eventually shot down. (by mugling)
If you don’t feel like looking at the pull request and getting the details, the following spoiler contains DangerNoodle’s explanation of what exactly the mod does.
This mod is an attempt at an idea I mentioned during an earlier pull request. Currently leaving this as mod content might be the best option in the meantime, but content can be mainlined if desired.
Adds mapgen entries containing mineral veins and clusters, scattered about through normal terrain. These essentially use the overmap method to add random veins in the least intrusive manner I could think of, as I do not think that source code changes would be easy for me to implement.
Veins can occur in both shallow and deep format. Shallow veins will have only a single vein/cluster directly underneath the surface. Deep veins/clusters range from z-levels minus-two to minus-five, but each z-level has only a 75% chance of containing anything. Deep metals occur less often than shallow ones, and have different weights of potential minerals.
In addition to pre-existing rock salt, coal, niter, and sulfur being potential finds, the mod adds native copper, silver, gold, and aluminum. These require you to melt them down into usable material, but are relatively simple to do so, being native metals.
Additionally changes mundane rock to no longer be a source of coal or rock salt.
Even with occurrences set rather high, this makes ore somewhat rare, but reasonably possible to find with some attempt to poke around.
More complex ores that would require actual smelting are planned for the future, but for the time being this is more than enough.
Why am I the one doing this instead of DangerNoodle or Random_Dragon? Well, DangerNoodle rarely visits the forum, and Random_Dragon/Chaosvolt won’t come back (often) unless there are things he feels need to be fixed with his own mods. As such, RD requested a volunteer from Utterly Mad to put the mod up here in the lab.
I hope you all enjoy. Feedback will be delivered to DangerNoodle so he can keep working on this.