Cool, i was just thinking you would have one 25cm³ block of iron in a “mine” somewhere that you grab and you are set.
My idea is that the block contains some trace amounts of iron in it. Some percentage.
So if you mined say ten cubic meters of the stuff you’d have a pile of stone with some iron in it.
You could visually sift through that pile to pick the “rocks” that looks to have the highest concentration of iron in them and smelt them, remove the slag and get pure iron.
But you would never be able to pick one 25cm³ block that is pure iron amongst many blocks that is just pure stone.
I really like the way you’ve done Marble, Basalt, Kimberlite etc in GT6. You can crush them, centrifuge them and get some trace amounts of valuable minerals out of them.
So that’s what i am thinking here, you don’t have iron ore blocks and regular stone blocks.
What you have is some stone which happens to have some iron in them. More or less so depending on the percentage i talked about earlier.
As a miner, you can opt to mine everything that has even the slightest hint of iron in it and “waste” a lot of energy on getting every bit of iron out of it. Or you can try and go for the richest core of the iron deposit and only process that.
There’s plenty of abandoned mines in the world where miners have gotten the best ore and processed it for profits. Leaving the less rich stuff because it would be economically unsound to process the less rich ore. Only for someone to come by later and pick up the less rich ore, using modern methods to extract the remaining metal in a profitable manner.
The core of the idea here is that no matter what the player looks at, it’s not defined as “iron ore” or “copper ore” but rather “something that is rich in iron”. Something worth throwing in a crucible so to speak.
There’s no in game categorization, you can do whatever with whatever. You can throw a pile of dead crows in your crucible and get out the surviving contents out of them.
Each cube knows what’s in it. If that cube happens to be a transformer for instance, it will contain some percentages of iron, copper, tin, resin, mineral oil, plastic etc. Melting it down would work like it does in GT6. You get varying layers of molten stuff with different melting temperatures.
But you don’t really know how much of that cube has what contents in it. You can look at the “iron ore” to see how much it might contain but there’s no indication that it’s actually iron ore aside from the visuals and its density.