Ore Worldgen:
There will be multiple choices for your World in regards of the Set of Ores that do generate there.
Normal , which is Ores like in Real Life.
Balanced , which contains Ores that are purely based on Game Design, Balance and Progression, similar to Angelbobs Mods in Factorio with Bobmonium, Stiratite, Saphirite, Rubyte, Jivolite etc.
Random , where the Game will make up random shit on the fly, give it randomized names made out of random Syllables and you have no Idea what each Ore is, until you experiment with it.
The first two Options are rather simple to explain, IRL Ores are IRL based, Balanced Ores are based on pure Game Design, but Random Ores need a bigger explanation.
So having purely Randomized Ore Types can have several bad balance implications or even gamebreaking implications, and I would not want that to happen.
There will be a Table of Resources that each Ore can contain, things like Iron would be common in the List, while stuff like Uranium would be rare. This Table will then be used to combine Materials together into Ores and their Byproducts.
As for the Names, it will mostly just dump random Syllables together and end it on -ite or -ium. Though I will make it so that two of the Ores start with the same Syllable and add similar quirks, that make the Names look similar for certain Ores on a per World basis.
Given that the proportions desireable for game balance is a very sensible way to build the random components weight table, the difficulty lies more in how to keep the technological gates in place. That is, to ensure low tier materials are available with low tier methods and tools, but high tier materials can only be obtained from high tier methods. – This could be easily handled by using intermediate materials (like Alumina, WO3, TiCl4) as the direct (by-)products of the lower tier process on the ore, that require further processing to retrieve the actual high-tier material from them. --Less easy is the mining tier / hardness question.
I love the idea of semi-randomized materials. Using a variant of one of the name generators for alien cultural places (which want to sound similar) is a nice touch.
Honestly, I’d only play the game-balanced resource world mode in multiplayer, as my friend group includes several people that need to keep a “non-dwarf’s guide to rock” open in another window.
I have a small suggestion that you can refer to the abundance of elements in the earth’s crust to determine the probability of generation of different elements.These charts and data are easy to find online because they are widely used academically.But an ore may contain multiple elements, we need a new calculation method.
