Prospecting

Prospecting is the activity of searching for and revealing raw material sources. As players develop their prospecting skills they gain the following advantages. Given that prospecting actions are composed of modules, like all other game actions, the options described here below can be combined in any number of ways to construct 'made to measure' custom actions. Many of the options are specialized by terrain type giving foragers a range of skills to develop and perfect as they travel from place to place.

Larger search area
Prospecting actions are directional and limited range. A player can provoke the appearance of sources in a cone in front of them. As their skill increases both the angle and depth of the search area can be improved, developing from a small cone to a large circle all round the prospector.

Improved search action time
Like all game actions, the prospecting actions take time. As players rise in skill they can reduce this time, improving their ability to hunt around for particular rare sources.

Searching for particular source types
By developing specializations in prospecting for certain types of source, players can dramatically improve their chances of provoking the appearance of the type of source that they are searching for, assuming that it exists within the deposit, rather than revealing sources at random in the normal way.

Improvement of source existence time
Each source exists for a limited duration. If the source is not exploited within a given delay (the 'appearance time') it vanishes. At the moment that exploitation begins the time is reset to a second fixed value (the 'exploitation time'). This means that the exploitation time is the same whatever the state of the timer at the moment when exploitation began. A skilled crafter is able to influence the pair of times that apply to the sources that they reveal allowing foragers longer to extract all that there is from the source.

Improve number of sources located per action
As players develop their skills the maximum number of sources that can be revealed by a given prospecting action increases. This obviously has an impact on the chances of uncovering interesting materials as each source revealed has an equal chance.

Control over visibility
Prospectors can learn to make the sources that they reveal visible by, and accessible to, a restricted set of players. The player sets include: the prospector themselves (alone), the prospector plus their group or everybody.

Level of detail of source contents
When sources appear in the scene they have names above them, like the name over a player, describing their contents. The level of detail of this information varies in precision from 'a source', with no further information, right down to the precise description of the raw material that it contains.