I mentioned this in the latest update of the Information page, but since that's a bit of a read, here it is again. A big idea I have for the next update is to add rare ores to the game. The idea here is to enhance the potential complexity of your factory by giving you a useful resource that you would nonetheless want to design your production to operate either with it or without it, because acquiring more may not always be easy. This is something I've wanted to try for a while now, but I decided to wait until I had at least three pretty decent ideas. And with the latest update of my mod from today, now I do.
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Cryolite. You may think that this has been in my mod from the start, but that's just synthetic cryolite. As the name suggests, "the ice that never melts" is an actual mineral, and it used to be mined in Greenland, but not anymore. It is considered to be the only mineral that has been mined to commercial extinction, because the remaining known deposits are too small to be economical, so they just make it synthetically now. In-game, mining cryolite could not only make aluminium cheaper, but actually be your sole source of the stuff, and also be used to make hydrogen fluoride, basically giving you two ores for the price of one. And maybe adding some sodium on the side. There could be a chain like:
Cryolite -> sodium peroxide -> + water -> sodium hydroxide and hydrogen peroxide
Cryolite -> sodium peroxide -> + CO2 -> sodium carbonate and oxygen
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Meteoric iron. I already somewhat added this through the iron-nickel production option, but here it would be something separate. Normal iron would go back to being just iron, and meteoric iron would provide both cheaper iron (because meteoric iron is mostly the metal form rather than terrestrial iron oxide) and nickel. Simple as that.
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Okloite. Named after the natural nuclear reactor that existed in the distant past near Oklo, Gabon. While I was working on the second nuclear enhancement package for 1.0.6, with its addition of americium, curium, and californium, I remembered the Oklo reactor, and how the deposit is known to have contained plutonium and americium in the past. These aren't cheap materials, so the benefits are self-explanatory. The ore would even have some xenon locked up in it.
So, thoughts? Ideas for more ores? Again, this would all be optional, and I'd design them to show up rarely so they wouldn't add too much to map clutter.
