Plants/trees regrow, ad i doubt we'll mine out the entire continent anytime soon.
The world is procedural generated, so new land will always rise.. and you'd be looking at several rl years to mine out one mountain, and we probably got quite a few of em. as well as recycling will probably be cheaper at times and done smelt scrap into iron.
I see where you're coming from but im more or less speculating on the what if, such as if someone were to have tons of money and monopolized the whole mining industry. and sooner or later inventions will be created to further increase the rate that a place will be mined dry.
Most of the materials can also be recycled from unused items. So it will not be that easy to monopolize a whole material market.
Yea but who knows what could happen once someone gets a lot of money and power.
Since the map is very large it wont be that easy to own all ressource spots. Also the kings of those lands can always make new rules to forbid something like this.
But it would be an interesting story if somebody tries something like that.
Then the peasants would have to organise to overthrow the king. It's been done before. That's what makes this game so interesting. With the players having so much impact on what goes on, the possibilities are almost endless.
Let them, mechanically at least.
If players are unhappy about a person or group having all of one resource (not that it is likely to happen (even on our starting continent)) let them take it through force I'll give two examples of a player describing what happened to the Iron Barons (a fictional alliance of Barons who 7 years from now own all the iron in the game and all the iron mines) decide which story sounds cooler.
The Devs slap them down
"Yeah so there was this group, the Iron Barons, who worked really hard over six years and managed to between them control all of the iron output in the game, over several continents. They really started hoarding it though and upping the price to ridiculous levels. This was making it hard for anyone without their favour to craft metal objects so Devs stopped them though, that's cool I guess."
Players do something
"Yeah so there was this group, the Iron Barons, who worked really hard over six years and managed to between them control all of the iron output in the game, over several continents. They really started hoarding it though and upping the price to ridiculous levels. This was making it hard for anyone without their favour to craft metal objects so an alliance formed to try and take back the iron supply - we ended up in a war between those who were loyal to the Iron Barons and those who weren't it was pretty cool some people even permadied. Let me tell you about the time we stormed Baron Stroud's mine it was pretty epic...."
EDIT: As an aside if there is a group who want's to control the iron mines of the game you're welcome for the name.
Coming Soon(tm)
2nd option sounds like it would be a pretty fun outcome tbh and i dont think the devs would do anything unless it was to try and egg people on to go into a massive war against those people.
Also, don't forget you will need to employ a shit-tonne of players to mine out an entire mountain in a short time. Each player/character will need rest, food, water.
So, you are a slave driver and work people literally to perma-death. You begin to lose spirit. Your notoriety and infamy and ignominy rises and you lose more and more spirit day on day where people all over Elyria hear about your tyranical rule.
All it takes is one coup de grace after a certain point and you might be insta-perma-killed, especially if your slaves rise up against you?????
It's going to be much harder than you anticipate I think.
you say all that likes it a bad thing XD. I wouldnt mind being known as someone who has a tyrannical rule over his people. and once im dead its ok my son can just take all my money and the system can just keep on going until the family is rich enough to do something even more crazy.