RFC:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dlFwV-sA6KsycRQxtqd4l3nCH5LCpUS2onY7L0Uec-w/edit

• We need to find out which ores to use

• What should those ores be good for?

• How should be the generation? How rare, which cluster size, etc....

• What should we include? Just ingot and ore, or tools, liquid, etc?...

@CottonMC/contributors This is an important issue, so requesting comments.

When I brought together the original set of materials which I hoped we could talk about, this is what I was considering:

Energy

Coal -> Coal Coke -> Steam -> (???) -> Uranium -> Uranium Reprocessing -x-> (no fusion)
Any kind of passive energy is asking for trouble.
Going from steam to uranium fission still feels like a very, very big gap. But then, irl we literally get 40% of our power from coal still. What's changed is better efficiency.

That meant we needed available items for coal coke, a fluid for steam, and various forms of uranium and probably thorium and plutonium.

Metals

Lead is slow and heavy. Aluminum is light and fast. Silver, Gold, and Electrum all have uses in both magic and electronics. These are all fairly non-controversial. I withheld aluminum for color reasons, but have since settled on a pale salmoney pink color inspired by Immersive Engineering.

Many people have expressed a distaste for tin. For one, bronze is a strictly inferior metal to refined iron, and for another, tin tends to be extremely common and fairly useless on its own (compared to aluminum, which comes in just about right for rarity).

Zinc is virtually unknown in the modded world, so there are no preconceptions about its rarity. We can make it just-common-enough to enable brass. Brass is an excellent clockwork material, and can bridge the mod style gap with magitech.

Steel is pretty much mandatory as the peak of minecraft material science, at least until plastics and carbon fibers.

so: lead, silver, copper, electrum, brass, steel.
aluminum and duralumin (a kind of aluminum brass that hardens with time) would be fantastic additions to enable aerospace and some unique tool mechanics.

Other Resources

Mercury has applications in ore processing, chemistry, and magic.

Yeah, that's about it.

What about Billon Alloy, used in making old coins? It could definitely be used as a magic alloy

I'm not super enthusiastic about making specific provisions for capitalism in minecraft - it's just never been a very natural fit.

Other issues:

• Billon itself doesn't have a really well-defined composition, you could make it from copper or iron or nickel without changing anyone's opinion of it, as long as the silver was still there. I'd prefer alloys with a more canonical metal content.
• Silver is worth more than Billon; the only reason we used it instead of silver for coinage is that people are poor and need smaller change. I foresee the opposite problem arising in Minecraft.
• Silver is more magical than Billon; I can't see the reason we'd dilute the magical parts with unmagical parts.

Concise descriptions of the resources currently supported are in the wiki; we can probably get more out of the discussion in the future by opening individual proposals - like "Add Mithril?" That way we have concrete ideas to rally around.