This is a great idea, but I am little bit afraid that the adamantium golems may take away some freedom from the players. This is because in the current state one may choose to go for steel production by early mid game (i.e. quite soon) with the prospect of building steel training dummy and getting one armour and one battle axe.

I do this in case I want to go sort of keeper/adventurer game, where I play as keeper, but keep only few minions and try to make them into an elite team of utter death for my enemies.

Also I do this when I go endless and only recruit imps and at most 2 goblins (assuming I do not die before reaching that point).

M point is: the idea is great, but maybe players should have means to reach some amount of steel without having to go through the tough golems, but having to make other sacrifice (e.g. buy with gold? 1 steel = 1 gold or so) to not restrain some of the fun ways to play the game.

I’m glad to learn about the rework of dreadful geology (though in all honesty, since I was one of the players not happy with it, that’s not a surprise). Certainly it’ll help a bit with planning and provide nice risk/reward feature for rapid dungeon expansion. I’m unsure about there being just pockets of enemies. Maybe said pockets could be semi-rare but at the same time digging out enough of certain resource could provoke off-map attacks the way gold does for bandits?

Steel change I am ambivalent towards – it may be good, it may be bad. I certainly see your reasoning, as it was kind of additional task gobbling up plenty of time and resources. At the same time, however, I liked the fact that it made iron ore relevant even late-game. There was still a point in acquiring it at the pinnacle of one’s power and it had value. Now, it won’t be so anymore.

I do like the harder rock feature, though probably I’ll try to mine it just for the immersion/head-canon reason of it making my dungeon more secure. And who knows, if you’d consider making ants have hard/impossible time digging through it, maybe it really could make a dungeon more secure (at least in case of newbie players as anyone else will likely attack and then completely wipe the ants out without letting them counterattack).

Looking forward to prisoners all the same, as well as to improved pathfinding (here’s hoping it won’t mess with my somewhat dated PC).