A core part of Landraisers is the tropical-island theme. Compared to most other sandbox/survival games, where you dive underground to find precious metallic resources as one of the first things you do, I wanted Landraisers to stand out a little bit in this aspect. But if not from the ground, then where can you find these sorts of resources?

Well, given that Landraisers is an ocean-based game, getting the resources from water was the logical choice.

Dredging

My first concept for the idea was dredging. For the uninformed, dredging is a common form of underwater ground clearance. In real life, it's more often used to create harbours and canals, but in the context of the game finding crude ores in the gravel below the ocean's surface seemed like a unique idea.

When you research into dredging, there are three main examples that come up. The ones I chose not to use are pretty unimportant for this devlog, but if you must know then one method is having essentially a giant treadmill with buckets on it that will scoop everything up and dump it onto land, and the second method is mounting a giant drill to a boat and doing it that way. Both a bit too advanced for our humble little island!

The method I chose to focus on was what I like to dub "THE CLAW"

Simple, right? Just scoop it out and dump it where you want it! The player would make and place one of these dredges in game, and then would operate them to receive a random drop from a loot table. As with dredging, a lot of the table would be junk dirt, gravel, sand, etc:

This would ensure the player still got something out of a failed action, even if it's not exactly what they wanted. This was to be your main method of collecting gravel and clay in addition to the metals.

So I set to work designing a pixel art version of it:

Didn't look too bad! However drawing such an object to face left/right would be easy, but what if the player wanted to dredge  from a tile above or below the tile the dredge sat on?

Not exactly the best looking thing in the world, hard to tell what it was at first glance, especially if it was the player's first time seeing one.

The other issue with this idea was, despite making the machine look a bit "bashed together" it still didn't really fit in with the theme - it needed something more simplistic.

Panning

This was the solution! The player would simply craft a Panning Dish and then sit by the shore and leisurely pan away to their hearts content

Now the main difference between Panning and Dredging is that with Panning, you discard the junk material in order to find the precious stuff. This would mean that having junk items such as gravel on the loot table wouldn't make much sense, as no one would be panning and keep everything they scoop out of the water - that's just shoveling.

With a bit of revision, I came up with what I believe to be a good loot table, at least for now. Further revision will come with playtesting!

This has just been a little insight into the creative process for early-game metal gathering, mostly written to procrastinate doing actual work when I can pass a devlog off as "documentation and marketing"

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