Hiya! I noticed while testing that placing ice platforms over submerged ores deletes the ore. Maybe this is due to an engine limitation, and on other planets it's probably fine, it only seemed dangerous here on Aquilo where starting resources are certainly finite.

This is a deliberate design decision on the Dredgeworks end to prevent mining underwater resources seamlessly with regular surface infrastructure. It's mentioned in the tooltip for submerged ore as "Landfill can't bring it to the surface", but I'll probably update the description on the Dredgeworks end to something that correctly covers more circumstances.

Description now updated on that end with Dredgeworks 0.7.6.

I may also add a feature on the Frozen Reaches end that prohibits ice platform from being placed onto the submerged Aquilo deposits, with a config option to disable this behavior, but I am less certain about this one as it would prevent you from paving over your starting area cleanly once you have most of the chunks extracted. Let me know what you think.

The thought I had was to make submerged ores only minable by seafloor drills, by putting submerged ores into a separate resource category. I wasn't certain there'd be an API solution for it, but glad to see there is! And yeah that makes sense, definitely don't want to allow players to trivialize the challenge

The other reason I don't allow landfilling submerged ores is that the visual appearance of ore submersion is automatic because it uses a transparency effect, which would look very awkward against surface tiles; I could potentially solve this by "hiding" the ore inside a dummy object somehow and then returning it if tiles are removed, but that would require complex scripting for a very niche feature.

Allowing the mining of seafloor ores with standard drills also has the nice consequence that if you're mining a patch at the edge between land and sea, a drill that covers the general area will be able to extract both without having to patch in additional drills for areas that would otherwise be covered.

Yeah I was wondering if that's something that's more for convenience and was by design. Just theory crafting, though this is definitely Annoyingᵗᵐ and so maybe it's fine, but you can creep forward with ice platform + cement to mine out the submerged ores. But yeah I think the only other solution I can think of is having the submerged ores be converted into "underground/covered" ores or something, and yeah that'd almost certainly require scripting.

+1 I'm here for the current solution, and yeah I agree it'd be annoying to prevent people from paving over ore patches late-game when the resources aren't as scarce.