PlanetCraft and Planet of Cubes Forum

Gravel should be able to drop quartz when mined with a similar drop chance as flint (10% drop chance).
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Quartz is one of those resources that players would need to have in bulk if they want to make use of it, given how the crafting recipes for quartz can get quite expensive, and people tend to want to build bases or redstone contraptions with quartz which could use up a lot of quartz real fast.
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Yet, quartz is one of the most grindy and tedious resources to obtain in bulk, given how the only major way of obtaining quartz in bulk is by killing lots of hostile mobs for a rare drop, which can make obtaining enough quartz a pain to quite a decent amount of players.
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In Minecraft, players don't have to deal with this tedious grind because in the Nether, quartz ore is as common as iron ore in the Overworld, and is also a pretty common item in Piglin bartering/trading which is good game-design for a resource that needs to be obtained in bulk as it's a very common resource there, so I don't know why PoC players have to suffer with such tediousness and grind for the same resource.
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While PoC currently has no Nether, there could definitely be a better, easier way to obtain quartz, which is why I think making gravel the placeholder source for quartz would be a good option; gravel is a very common block in most parts of the PoC world which would make even a 10% drop chance for it pretty common to come by which also means for quartz are available to players, there's currently little incentive to go out and mine gravel as all they currently get is flint (flint is a decent resource, though has very limited use beyond flint&steel and arrows) so making gravel drop quartz (a highly sought-after resource given how much you can craft with it, and how expensive in quartz the recipes can get) could make players have a better incentive to look for gravel and as a result benefit the use of gravel in PoC.
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A more realistic, non-game related reason why gravel would make sense as a source to quartz is because IRL quartz is an extremely common rock mineral/crystal in various continental stones, especially in granite and sandy/gravely soils, and also since gravel is essentially a pile of stone pebbles and minerals, one would very likely find quartz within a layer of gravel, along with flintstones and various other things.
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As quartz has little-to-no advantages to both progressional or competitive gameplay, making quartz more common would not upset game balance either. One of the only things that would really change in any significant way from a change like this would be that more people would actually be able to utilize quartz to their fullest extent due to it being more easily accessible.