Metal Resources Preview (Patreon)

So I tend to jump around a lot between working on different future posts (and updates to past posts, I still want to do a few of those); it's a good way to keep up a decent pace of work without getting burned out on any one subject, and also helps give me a better sense of what topics I should be introducing in what order to prepare for later posts. As it happens, I got pretty sucked into reading on mineral resource deposits recently and have essentially finished writing up whole sections of my eventual post on it. Given that it may still be a bit of time before I'm ready for the next main post (I'm pretty confident with drawing out terrain now but I also want to explore some better approaches for making "true color"/satellite view maps and maybe take a shot at simulating hydrology and glacier flow a bit) I figured it might be nice to have some preview of that future work until then.

So here's the WIP text of my geological resources post (Part IXb if all goes to plan) including major mineral deposit types and notes on a selection of major metal resources. As you can maybe tell from the introduction the full post will eventually include discussion of more minor metals and nonmetal resources as well (yes it's going to be an enormous post), but that still needs some more work. The included part isn't final as well; I haven't included any images yet, whereas my eventual plan is to have accompanying maps marking out possible resource deposit areas on Teacup Ae and maybe some additional charts and such that might be useful.  Some of the text also isn't final; The little sections on common ores for each deposit type need to be cleaned up a bit for consistency, and I may also want to add notes on what mines for different deposits actually look like.

Still, hopefully it's readable enough for now and those of you working ahead get some use out of it. Enjoy.