mlieProspecting Mod expands RimWorld’s mining system with prospecting work, early ore indications, configurable mining resource generation, and new tools for finding and extracting surface and deep resources.
Prospecting Mod Features
Prospecting work
The Prospecting Mod adds a new mining-related work activity that lets pawns designate mineable rocks for geological surveys. Once the survey is complete, a small area around the rock is revealed, with the reveal range affected by the pawn’s mining skill. Any newly discovered ore is reported to the player.
Prospecting and mining designations have been changed to make the different activities easier to identify and manage through the work tab.
Early ore indications
When mining rocks or ores near other resources, pawns have a chance to produce small mining “bits” from nearby ores, giving an early indication that additional resources may be close. This chance is slightly affected by the pawn’s mining skill.
The Prospecting Mod includes mod options to toggle this behavior and adjust the chance of receiving these indications.
Mining generation options
The Prospecting Mod includes settings to adjust mining yields, surface lump sizes, deep mining lump sizes, and ore commonality. These options are expressed as percentages of vanilla behavior.
These values only affect map characteristics when a map is generated, so they should be configured before loading or generating maps. Some values are only applied when the game first loads, so restarting RimWorld is recommended after changing them.
Mining yields cannot exceed the stack limit of the mined item. For compressed machinery, ore indication is provided as steel for balance reasons.
Wide Boy
The Wide Boy is an improved deep drill that can mine a larger area of deep resources. Its drilling width can be set up to a maximum span of three cells from the drill.
- Wider drilling area: Covers more deep resource cells than the vanilla deep drill.
- Stone chunk option: Can be configured to mine stone chunks when no resources are found in the selected drilling zone.
- Boost mode: Can use extra power to increase mining speed.
- Breakdowns: Has a chance to break down due to its complexity, with a slightly higher risk while boosted.
- Skill mitigation: Better mining skill helps reduce the impact of breakdown risk.
Manual Drill
The Manual Drill is a wind-assisted deep drill available at the Medieval tech level. It is slightly slower than a regular deep drill and can only mine shallow deep resources below it.
Before it can gather resources, a worker must first use the drill to prospect the contents below it. This gives the Manual Drill two work activities: prospecting and drilling. It also includes an additional research requirement.
A mod option is available to mute the Manual Drill’s sound, with the change taking effect when the next drilling activity starts or ends.
Prospecting belt
The prospecting belt helps locate deep resources on the map when worn. Its detection is not perfectly reliable due to the earlier tech level, and its effectiveness depends on the pawn’s mining skill.
When deep ores generated by the Prospecting Mod are found, a marker is placed on the map to identify the discovered resource. The belt also provides a small bonus to mining activities.
Compatibility notes
The Prospecting Mod can be added and removed at your discretion, but any items added by the mod should be removed before uninstalling it.
The Prospecting Mod modifies XML values when loading, so it should be compatible with most mining-related mods. However, other mods that change similar mining resource values may conflict, still function with overlapping changes, or create cumulative effects. These changes can also affect modded ores.
The original compatibility section was marked as subject to conversion. Multiplayer is listed as having native support.
Japanese translation is included.
When troubleshooting the Prospecting Mod:
- See if the error persists if you only have this mod and its requirements active.
- If not, try adding your other mods until it happens again.
- Always post your log using the Log Uploader.
- For best support, please use the Discord-channel for error-reporting.
- Do not report errors by making a discussion-thread, I get no notification of that.
- If you have the solution for a problem, please post it to the GitHub repository.
- Use RimSort to sort your mods.
Additional credits: pelador, Proxyer, jabbamonkey, Kasmex Forever.
