This is not true. Resources are not respawned in the same location. You can’t camp on good seams of resources.
World Regen - returning the Wilderness (area outside of Beacons) to it’s original state, and…
Resource Regen - added resources to fully regenerated Wilderness, are…
…disconnected but related systems. They’re also both balanceable independently. We could configure World Regen to be fast and Resource Regen to be slow.
World Regen - aims to reduce griefing, allow players to explore the world as if it was unexplored by other players (no nerd poles, and caves full of torches), remove abandoned builds (with another sibling system), and hence keep the challenge and experience fresh for everyone. We can even balance the way the chunks are selected for regen (remoteness, last visited, last edited, etc) and the rate of regen (only return N blocks, or a % of blocks). The regen actually fills in holes from the bottom and demolishes poles from the top. So it’s more like a natural deterioration system.
Resource Regen - aims to introduce resources into the economy. We have resource sinks - systems that take resources out of the economy (building, crafting, tool degregation). We must have resource generators to replenishing the stocks. There are other ways of doing this. In the past we considered having daily or weekly worlds that could be mined and then taken offline and replaced. But ultimately we prefered the regen approach - as it solved other issues at the same time.
As configured busy / active places will not get their resources regenerated, and you’ll need to explore to find rich seams. Likewise we can control the resource distribution per biome so you’ll need to explore to find all the resource you required. Likewise it might be more efficient to collect some resource on other worlds that our rich in an element.
We can and will balance the 2 regen systen independently.
Whilst discussing this area I think it’s helpful to think about them independently.
However, the system and it’s current configuration aren’t final. Any and all feedback is valueable to get it setup perfectly. (Which it clearly isn’t at the moment.)
(FYI - we created the build timelapses in the trailer by running the regen quickly and playing the captured videos backwards. So we started with the city, regened to the original world state, and reversed the video.)