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Anandamide

Member

Registered: 2018-06-05

Posts: 142

Higher tier mines.

Right now the economy depends on iron. If you have a tree farm, and always make carts into horse carts or keep upgrading with wheels to prevent decay, you can live and farm using only iron for the compost shovels. If your green biome wasn't cut down and was particularly blessed with poplar and maple, you don't even need the farm. You can live with almost no iron, but to do anything cool you need lots and lots of it.
We need a higher tier mine, or new higher tech forging tools that use iron more efficiently, but without breaking "everything runs out". An upgraded iron mine cannot just depend on feeding it fuel and iron parts for when it breaks, because it would go forever. Compost would go forever, save for feeding iron in for shovels, so we can do this for iron with alloys. The advanced mine would require an alloy drill bit made with copper and iron, or maybe even gold. You could also have maybe a diamond tipped drill, and it could be a multi generational effort like tree planting to produce a diamond drill tip. Whatever way, there would be an iron cycle that is fed in by some other scarce resource. If this higher tier mine was powered by a diesel engine, that would be even better because it would be a truly endgame tech and wouldn't unbalance low tech villages. If there was some super alloy though, it could further mirror the current meta, there would be a set of new tools that can also use that scarce metal, so like right now, it would be a choice between making something cool, or efficiently using the resource to ensure your village lives for a long time. The amount of iron that goes into just a diesel engine could feed almost 20,000 people to old age with whole milk if its only used for compost shovels and you till your carrots and corn with stone hoes, if everything was done perfectly.