[MOD REQUEST] Resource Quality Tracker

[Enjoyment]

Hello, world.
I'm curious, could someone make a tool for marking resource quality nodes. Or at least, could it be made theoretically.

Prelude.
I assume some people would agree, that finding good quality nodes of base resources could be a pain in the ass. Especially, finding good q water nodes in big lakes - the water is all the same on all tiles and you have no any "landmarks" (like 2 tiles south from shore, as in clay finding) or visual marks of old tries (as in soil finding). So this process is not only boring and time-consuming (not saying you could easily spend a couple of hours without finding anything useful), but also requires a good memory and spatial reasoning. This tool could help a little.

What should tool do?
In basic version. There could be some sort of pop-up menu (like "timers menu" in Amber, or "hide menu" in BDew's) that has 4 positions:
- hide layers (default view);
- show soil quality layers;
- show clay quality layers;
- show water quality layers.
When you enable on of the layers (I think only one could be enabled the same time) - your terrain is overlayed by a colored grid, showing you marked q nodes.

Possible ways of overlaying:
1st method: when activated, your whole map is overlayed with base color, allowing you to change the color of marked tiles (to green or red)
2nd method: there is no pre-made overlay and you could add single marked tiles.
3rd method: there are no pre-made resource layers in tool menu, so you adding them manually, choose a type of resource (shown as icon), name them as you wish and have an option to show/hide the selected layer (most close as "timers menu" works now in Amber)

Possible ways of tile marking:
It is mostly depend on which overlaying method would be using in tool, but I can separate 3 possible ways:
1st way (fits for 1st method): red-yellow-green scale is premade with default values (10 for red, 25 for orange, 40 for yellow and 60+ for green). You can use "mark" tool, to set the q-value of tile, so it will turn the specific color.
2nd way (fits for 2nd method): there is no any color scale, so you can just "mark" tile, set the number in the poped-up window (like separating seeds window) and this value will be shown over the marked tile.
3rd way (fits for 3rd method): there is a pre-made scale from dark-red to dark-green (through yellow) with 2 blank input fields for min and max values. Mostly fits 3rd overlaying method.

That's it for the basic version. Even with this possibilities it will not only ease the node finding process itself but will greatly help in finding those nodes in the future. The main issue may lay in coordinates-storage systems H&H is using, so there can be no way to "remember" the exact positions of marked tiles. Though then it could be still useful for session-long-only searches.

Advanced version
If basic version could be made (even without overlays saving), the next step should be made in the direction of automatization. So when you dig any dirt/clay or collect any water - the "marks" are made automatically.
The main issue can lay at water marking. The possible solutions can be made via creating standalone actions such as "mark landmass quality" (works as "dig" + write the q of last piece of soil/clay) and "mark water quality" (pressing some combination (like ctrl+RMB) while holding an empty (! - check for it to lower needed calculations) container - gather water from tile + write its quality).

Online version
If both 'marks storage' and 'auto-marking' will be made - then (and only then to prevent speculations) could be added the possibility to share your marks and even upload them to one place, which leads us to World Map with quality nodes overlays (based on odditown's map).

That's all for now.
Please, share your thoughts on those questions:
- Do you think this tool will be useful?
- What logical issues it has in your opinion?
- What technical issues it has in your opinion?
- Can you make it? Or do you know someone, interested in creating it?

Thx for your attention.

[loleznub]

You could always just do what I'm sure the majority of players do and download one of the many map stitching tools, stitch your tiles together and input a symbol for a location with what you have found.