Mining mini-game

Since crafting will play an important role, it also means that there must be some way to gather resources. My first idea was something like this:

1- Go to a mine
2- Select mine
3- Enter the number of time points to spend on mining
4- Get resources

Of course, there's a really big problem with this system: There's nothing to stop someone to create 10 characters and mine an incredible quantity of resources in less than 5 minutes... I need to add some kind of process that also require time and not just "time points". That way, mining will really become an activity in itself.

No matter how mining is handled, it will always be boring for a lot of people. I have yet to hear someone say "hey, let's go mining, it'll be fun!". You mine because you have to or because you are working toward some goal, not because you enjoy it (well, some might but I'm sure it's a minority).

So no matter what kind of mini-game I make, it will end up boring for a lot of players. Mining is just not for them I guess. But I need a way to somehow limit how resources are gathered.

So here's the mining mini-game (it might change with testing):

A player with the mining skill go to a mine and right-click on it and select "Mine" (or double-click or whatever). The first form won't have the players actually enter the mine (though doing underground zones is not actually a challenge, the current system can handle it).

A 10x10 grid appears with a nice picture of rock as a background (just for immersion). The goal here is to discover in which location the gold or iron is located. So he clicks a first square.



The number 1 is only to help explaining here. The player didn't discover a resource spot but his mining skill tells him he needs to be searching right.

The mining skill allows a player to mine (duh) but also gives him better chances to find the resource location. So if a player has "Mining basic", each time he clicks a square, there's 40% of chance that he receives an hint as to where to search. A player with "Mining advanced" might have 80% of chance to receive an hint (as always, temporary numbers).

So the player clicks another square at the right of the first one.



As you can see, he didn't received an hint on square 2. However, on the 3rd square he clicked, he now knows that he needs to search even lower. So the resource spot is located at the right of the first square clicked and below the 3rd.



The player received an interesting hint at his 4th click. The square is now yellowish, meaning he's getting closer of the resource, and he receives another hint to look even lower.



After 2 more clicks, the player finally found the resource. Notice how the color changed at the 5th click (it doesn't looks like much, I badly chose my color).

On his 6th click, he receives a notice that he found the resource. The resource is put in his inventory and he can start again to mine another spot. Each click while mining cost him 1 time points (or more), simulating the time it took to mine (here it took 6 time points to mine 1 unit).

To protect against bot mining, a limit might be to set on the number of attempt a player has to guess the resource location (like 10). This way, I'd also limit extreme mining by someone that would still create multiple characters and hit every square without "playing" the game. That wouldn't stop someone that really really really wants to use multiple characters but I feel the problem is pretty much taken care of with this.

Will everyone have fun mining? No. Do I think I came up with something interesting while not too complicated? Yes. Each click simulating the player digging in the rock, I even feel this mini-game is somehow not totally unrelated to mining.