I broke into the S.MG secrets factories and all I got is this lousy pic :
So : crafting was done already, mining is already pretty much done. The way it works is that there are some skills involved, which you may or may not manage to get. If you get at least one, you can mine. There are also tools involved, which obviously you can craft, provided you can find the materials and recipes - but you don't need them. You can dig shit up with your bare hands, at a cost of health.
Whenever you find something, you get a claim in the ground, a key in your pocket and (for now) a recipe for developing your claim. Developing your claim is a building process that takes a recipe, building materialsi and at least one relevant skill. Once developed, the claim essentially turns into a chest holding a quantity of whatever it is you found.
You can also sell your claim, by selling the key. Whoever buys it will be able to develop it as if he had found it himself. There are two, entirely separate rolls involved : when you go looking for materials you roll to establish what size and type of material you find, and no more. At this point, any two claims of the same size and type are exactly equally valuable. Then, when you develop a claim you roll again, to see the exact find you get. This roll depends on the relevant skills and the stats of the developer, so trading out claims to specialists is a rational move - if only it can be figured out what actually makes one a specialist.ii
As you can see, qualities are a complicated matter in this game.
In any case : mining is insanely complicated an activity. I do not believe that anyone will manage to figure out how it actually works within my lifetime. (I am also very curious as to how this prediction will fare.) Honestly from what I've seen so far, I'm willing to say that this game beats everything available today on the strength of mining complexity alone.
You know that old story about how Explorer types of players are never catered to, because creating exploring content is the most expensive activity, so everyone just caters to the Growth demographic as much as feasible to build a Social (ie, PVP) demographic out of it and maybe make some money ? Yeah, well... I warn you, if you're the obsesive-compulsive explorer type, stay away. If you make the mistake of trying to go mining in Eulora, you'll never, ever, ever find your way back out again.
You were warned.
PS. Did you notice the spelling ? Yeah, that means you.
———- Function of the claim size. There's seven of those : Tiny (under 10k satoshi, 0.0001 BTC) ; Small (larger than Tiny but under a bitcent) ; Ordinary (larger than Small but under a Bitcoin) ; Remarkable (larger than Ordinary but under 10 Bitcoin) ; Sizable (larger than Remarkable but under 100 Bitcoin) ; Ample (larger than Sizable but under 1`000 Bitcoin) and Exceptional (larger than 1`000 Bitcoin). [↩]
- Note that the find sizes are not linearly distributed, so it is not correct to say that a Remarkable find is worth ~5.5 Bitcoin. It will be definitely closer to 1, but exactly how close is left as an exercise to the players.
Moreover, because raw materials will be found randomly but consumed according to set recipes, necessarily there will exist situations of shortage and oversupply. In these circumstances we expect items to sell at all times at a mark-up over their "value", which will vary by type, and obviously over time. Thus Iron may be worth say 135%, so that 100 BTC worth of iron actually fetches 135 Bitcoins, whereas Bottled Queef Gas may be worth 755%, meaning that a quantity of gas nominally worth two Bitcoin actually trades for 15.1 on the market.
Since NPCs will always buy anything in exchange for its nominal value, it doesn't ever make sense to sell anything under 100%. However, since crafting evolves, it does make sense to store various materials, if overabundant. Within some limits, of course, as storage also has its own fixed costs (gotta build a chest or warehouse or something). [↩]