Deep Veins

Metal arrives by trade or by luck, and the rock your colony is built on gives you nothing but stone. Deep Veins puts ore in the ground: seams scattered through rocky terrain that your miners dig out for Steel, using the same mining work they already do. They come in three grades, and the difference is worth walking for — a lean streak is a handful of metal, a rich vein is a reason to build out that way and defend it.

• Ore where the rock is. Seams grow with the world, scattered through rocky terrain rather than dropped on flat ground — you find them by exploring, not by reading a menu. • Three grades, told apart at a glance. A lean streak is one or two cells of poor ore; a common seam is a solid four or five; a rich vein is six or seven and worth building toward. Size is the tell, so you can read a find across the map. • Mined with the work you already have. No new job type and no new skill — assign Mining and your colonists dig, yielding the game's own Steel into the stockpiles everything else already uses. • Seams run dry. Each cell is a real thing in the world: dig it out and it is gone, so a worked seam empties and you go looking for the next one. Your save remembers exactly what is left. • Tunable under ESC ▸ Mod Settings: how much ore the world generates.