Sarudak wrote:I'm assuming rails are meant to be used only after you have a mob trap providing you with significant iron income just like screw pumps.
Yup, exactly. Making mob traps *the* way to accumulate iron was one of the motivations in my changes to iron mining.
It basically integrates mob traps into the tech tree at the point at which iron mining generally lost relevance anyways and you'd just wind up ignoring iron deposits.
The important part is that at some point, the player will feel the pressure to build their first mob-trap, and hopefully that will motivate them towards building more specialized ones down the road once their cherry has been busted and they realize how much fun it is. The number of people on the BTW MCF thread that post indicating they have never even built a mob trap, or that focus on spawner based ones (I'll be making additional changes to discourage that aspect), is still rather alarming.
This is also why I didn't want to do it for gold as someone pointed out earlier. I feel nether traps are already sufficiently integrated into the late tech tree due to the whole beacon thing, and gold mining is still a valuable way to accumulate it throughout the game. I didn't want to break something there that was already working well, as I generally find mining to be an undervalued activity rather than an overvalued one.
From an in-game perspective, I think it reasonable to assume that gold ore simply contains a higher concentration of the metal than iron ore does. It could potentially use a texture change to either iron or gold ore to communicate that a bit better to the player, but that's about it.
