I mining a lot this world and think things below will improve interest to mining cave next world.
1) Identical cave systems on levels 2-5 greatly increase player progress. People know where to build their mine holes to get access to the big halls below to start exploring for more/better resources, that
shouldn't be a thing.I hope that cave levels will be
different next world.
2) Make level 5 mine more difficult, so that only high end players would be able to dig through it. This world I had access to lvl 5 on week 2, found another player in my caves on a 3rd month and five more players two weeks after. I think it'd be nice to have lvl 4 be same resource wise as lvl 5 now (and scale all the previous levels up a bit), and have lvl 5 more challenging and more rewarding.
I think new lvl 5 should have whole bunch of dungeon like systems all over the caves, split by thick 3 tiled walls, so you cant get access to all parts with 1 minehole.Increased hardness on the mine tiles greatly (right now you can easily mine on lvl 5 with 200 str and q150 pickaxe), also increase minimum quality nodes of lvl 5 from 40 to 80 and leave the maximum same as it is now.
1 - minehole in the middle of the area.
2 - minehole between two part of dungeon destroy hard wall.
3 - minehole betwen 3 part of dungeon destroy hard wall.
so you
cant get acess to all lvl 5 with 1 minehole.
Also, perhaps add a new stone type or a special resource for the new strong wall (3 tile wide) so you can find it with rustroot, and add statues of previous world champions to lvl 1-2 mines, that would tell some history about the previous world of hnh. Make those statues liftable and/or give people a chance to discover and copy them so that they can build them elsewhere. Statues will return interest to lvl 1 and lvl 2 cave.