I’m not sure about how resource locking would work, not because it doesn’t seem like an interesting concept, and something people would apply but mostly because many of the resources don’t spawn in the same locations or regions, making region locking effectively useful only for resources like gleam, trees, soil and stone.
These are the cases I find applicable, cover an area around graveyards, allowing for regen to happen inside your claim, how big your claim would need to be? Pretty huge, worth it? Debatable, a one plot of blue gleam, would require at least 26 plots to cover and allow for regeneration, if people don’t find your build interesting and approach it now and then. Trees, soil and stone, are fairly everywhere, there exists areas big enough and in large amounts, but then again, how many plots do you want to spend “protecting” them.
Now on the topic of ores, while certain areas remain plentiful, after a while they kind of dry down, making you need to look for a new spot, and returning to your first spot after four others or something, making it a cyclical rotation between mining spots. Let’s say a spot was deemed to never dry down, how high of a concentration must it have? or would resources be scattered on a 30 plot range, making it something like 110 plots to cover and tons of resources to build walls. If you’re not covering everything, then it allows for people to go around and enter your claim.
If the concern is resources running dry from people over mining it, I believe we should have another mechanism to “protect” endangered resources, either be it through new planets or having settlements have a unique feature. Protect endangered areas (graveyards and forests) This areas won’t be protected from regen and won’t be for people building grief free buildings, but they would allow for resources having enough time to regenerate. Who could enter? Anyone, having a time limit on how many times they could use the space. Once a week? Seems fair. You need more? Trade for it, everyone having a fair chance at it, won’t set the price to high IMO. Are settlement members gonna have any benefit? Maybe they could produce an accelerated regen, meaning their chances at mining it would be enhanced.