I picked up Offworld Trading Company some time ago, but didn't get around to actually playing it until recently. It's definitely fun (even though I'm not sure I'm very good at it and haven't spent too much time with it), but it does have one thing that nags me: resource deposits you mine are never actually depleted (unless somebody detonates an Underground Nuke, of course).

Perhaps just because I picked up the strategy genre from the Age of Empires series when I was younger, but I've always found it more interesting when resources can be consumed over time. I understand why Offworld doesn't work that way, especially with the claims system it uses, but I was still somewhat curious how it would play I was also kind of curious if Offworld was moddable; I was (and still am, I suppose) a Civilization 4 modder, and I was curious about Soren Johnson's latest game's modding support. I was pleased to discover that it did, but sadly, there don't seem to be many mods around at the moment. 

A week or two later has produced the Exhaustible Resources mod (link to github)! I figured I'd make an account and post about it here.

All this mod adds is the titular feature: resources now have a chance of decaying gradually over time if there is a building working them. Deposits will never decay below Trace levels, so the land won't become completely useless. Resources have a 10% chance to decay every Martian day; but if you want to play around with this setting you can adjust EXHAUSTIBLE_RESOURCES_DEFAULT_THRESHOLD in Exhaustible Resources\Data\globals-init-add.xml. Setting it to 100, for example, will cause every worked resource to decay a level every in-game day.

Note that this is for Iron, Aluminum, Silicon, Carbon, and Water deposits. (It won't affect water you get from ice, or geothermal vents).

It's not perfectly implemented at the moment-- in particular, I'd like to be more informative about what resources are decaying where (and who owns them); I abused the game's event system a bit to deliver notifications but I have yet to figure out how to trigger an event at a tile. But it works!

If any of this sounded remotely interesting, you can grab a copy of the mod here (direct download from github). You can install it by extracting the zip and dropping the "Exhaustible Resources" folder into your My Games\Offworld\Mods folder and then enabling it in-game from Options - Gameplay - Game Mod.