Off topic, but the post mentions needing terrain manipulation for resource gathering.
I always thought animal crossing had a clever and efficient approach to this without any terrain manipulation. You can chop a tree, and it'll dispense logs, but only so many before it essentially has a cooldown. You get the feedback and the finite resources, without expensive terrain manipulation.
Of course that doesn't work for every game, and really works better on smaller maps, but something worth considering. Terrain manipulation is pretty expensive, if your game doesn't need it it's probably better to do without (again, a generalisation)
The blog mentioned that strategy, in the form of gold ore in a gold ore boulder found lying around
It a standard strategy for resource dispensation (though cooldown doesn’t alleviate the infinite resource problem; it just slows it down), it’s just… boring and unimpactful
It's also cheap and easy. You have limited resources to work with in game dev, even more if you care about performance on anything but the most powerful machines. I'm of the opinion that those resources should be spared for what makes your game unique and fun.
If the actual act of resource acquisition isn’t actually meaningful to gameplay, it should probably be eliminated outright. The correct thing to do is simply consider it a resource node with ownership, and grant resource stacks automatically at a given time interval. This is probably the cheapest, easiest strategy while allowing for gatekeeping.
In animal crossing of course, half the point of the game is to kill time peacefully, so it wouldn’t apply. With the game in question, the meaningfulness is unknown
I always thought animal crossing had a clever and efficient approach to this without any terrain manipulation. You can chop a tree, and it'll dispense logs, but only so many before it essentially has a cooldown. You get the feedback and the finite resources, without expensive terrain manipulation.
Of course that doesn't work for every game, and really works better on smaller maps, but something worth considering. Terrain manipulation is pretty expensive, if your game doesn't need it it's probably better to do without (again, a generalisation)