Someone needs to pm the devs to get their attention at best. They may or may not check every single topic in these forums. so Solac, if you want this idea to ring in the ears of the developers. Drop them a line.
I like most of those ideas. Maybe you and a team of NPCs could go mining and you could tell them what to look for and where to mine.
As it was mentioned in the counter-part suggestion, having varying materials will play havoc with your inventory, but variety is always a lot of fun. We also can't forget that there is going to be planet difficulties, the higher the difficulty the higher grade of materials you can find.
I like idea for "surveying and prospecting tools" maybe upgrades for them would be also great like higher range.
End-game "Omni-Miner" That can basically shatter a planet and process out all the stone, metals, and other usable minerals and leave nothing but dirt and ash
I like the idea of ridiculous items like this at end game. However, there should be power/energy, and a tool like this should take a ridiculous amount of it. Either that or it should be a consumable. Kind of like a bomb mixed with a vacuum.
Hmmm, with regards to the OP... Not sure about the idea of giving different veins of the same material different quality levels. Sure it might be realistic but at the same time how much realism can we add before it stops being fun? As for the idea of survey and prospecting tools, definitely going to want to put making a scanner of some kind on my to-do list if they're available. Searching for deposits of rare ores as I dig deeper and deeper... As for the automated harvesters... I don't know. But then as I established on the other mining threads, I'm one of those strange people that actually like digging and getting my hands dirty.
