Not a direct 'request' per se, but more a poke at any advice on the matter. I was mulling over the thoughts of a secondary mod for something like Cargo Ships (where Oil rigs are a Thing) and was running into some issues. But then I remembered this mod! My idea (And what I actually could use help with) is if it's possible to have Morphite 'only' spawn in water. So say, having small,high yield deposits under the seafloor that you can start collecting and ship back mainland, which then need to be refined. Though either this way with direct recipes, or an alternative would be a 'chance' system to make morphite feel more balanced. Not sure yet.

Anyhow, mostly rambling and just curious on your thoughts on a potential 'special' use of Morphite!

Interesting idea! I'm not sure of the implementation, but seems you'd have to do something similar like in this mod:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Water_Ores

Maybe a bit more code to only allow spawning in water. I don't think this would be too tough to do though, maybe adding a bool mod setting to toggle this water only spawn behavior!

I still have yet to port my mods over to 0.18, waiting until it has matured a bit more. I'm pretty tight on time, but if this is something you're really interested in throw some more details on this thread. Better yet if you get the code implemented I'd definitely make sure to merge it in! For now I'll add this to the possible future feature tracker!

Edit: Reread the post, unfortunately I don't have much experience in editing collision boxes for entities, or really implementing an ore being able to be spawned in water, and mined via special entity. With that said I really would just start digging into any open source mods I could that do implement this behavior and see how they do it. I have a small feeling it may be easier if there was a liquid version of morphite, and pumpjacks were used to extract it. Who knows! But could be a very cool idea and would definitely help balance morphite as it is actually quite valuable by default I think.

That's what I've been doing, though not 'tried' much as of yet. Discussing with outhers has yielded some interesting results however and at least one other person believes this to be semi-easily do-able with just Prototypes.

From my discussions it seems there's jsut a few things 'needed' to make this work:

---An Ore that can only spawn in-water (I was thinking Undersea Morphite as a possible variant to regular)
---A means to mine said ore (In the case of this, doing much similar to the ore; A miner or set of miners designed solely to be usable in the water, with a land-tile collision preventing them from being placed. If I look into Cargo Ships itself I might find a clue, as the boats are only placeable in-water... so I know that water-only item are able to be made
---Refinement of said ore/ cleaning (For this, I was considering it too be a hook into Angel's Refining, with the Sluicer or Floatation Cell being used to 'wash off' the ores.
---And of course means to collect from the water-miners; In this case, I'd think Bouy models to use as either inserters or conveyor belts, and a tank or some other item to be used as a storage for the item for collection.

The liquid Morphite could also be possible, and Ive seen a mod for underwater pipes.... So perhaps a drill requiring sulfuric acid to 'melt' the 1x1 ore deposit, which produced liquid as an output?

as for 0.18... I've yet to move over either for the same reason. Let all the mods catch up and bugfix issues XD

As for the coding side... I don't have any formal training but a knack for altering. So if i can get a grasp on it I'm sure I could provide code... the problem however is assets.

I'm in no way a good pixel artist/ realist detail, so I would have to reuse assets to even hope for it to look decent xD

well, join my ptx0 Island World server on 18.6 (no password, spectator-only) and see what this might look like.

Tried to join in, unable to synchronise mods strange enough?

hm, what's the error?