May 15th 2024 - Confirmed working fine with Breezy Autumn Update (no update required)
Dec 16th 2023 - Updated to support Summer Sun Update

Awesome Quarries adds the ability to create areas of natural quarry that will respawn ores following the games original respawning rules for natural quarry areas.

In order to understand what this mod does it helps to understand how natural quarries ("rough soil" biomes) in Dinkum behave normally.

Dinkum performs four major checks that determine if a tile respawns ores:

• Is the tile empty (no buried treasures or objects on top of it)?
• Is the tile in a "rough soil" biome?
• Is the tile type rocky ground?
• Are the tiles neighbours also all empty?
• There is also some logic that conditionally allows different resources to respawn based on what level of the mine you have been to that I include here for completeness.
  
  

If any of these checks fail ores don't respawn.

This mod fixes the normally problematic issues (1-3) by:

• Updates to the buried object logic to prevent respawning buried items on rocky soil. This means that treasures will no longer spawn on rocky soil, but this also means your natural quarries won't be destroyed by having to dig up treasures. This will not remove objects already buried in rough soil biomes, but will prevent you from continually needing to fix your natural quarries. It intercepts the respawning mechanic rather than removing already buried items.
• Updates to the biome calculation logic so that any rocky ground tile is always considered to be "rough soil". Other mods that just change the soil type will not result in natural quarries respawning ores. You can check the new biome type on the map by mousing over your converted areas. This does mean that bugs that spawn in rough soil areas will spawn in any natural quarry areas that you create since they are now reated by the game as the "rough soil" biome type.
• Allowing the player to hold an object and right click empty ground tiles to convert them back to rocky ground (which then makes the biome type rough soil effectively enabling respawns on those tiles). By default this object is set to stones (since you're making rocky ground) and consumes three stone per tile converted. Both the item and quantity consumed are configurable in the config file. 3 stone per tile seemed a good default but I'll take onboard feedback for tuning.
  

What this mod does not do:

• Make any changes to your saves unless you use the item to change tiles.
• Alter ore respawn rates.
• Remove existing buried items from underneath quarries.
  

Adding / Removing the mod:
Pretty much entirely risk free. The biome types for converted tiles will revert back to what they were in the original terrain generation because these are live calculated from the map seed normally. The tile types will remain as rocky ground until you do something to them. Buried treasures will again respawn under them. The mod has been created with a low impact mindset as I know how much everyone values their saves.

Troubleshooting:
In the config options file

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Dinkum\BepInEx\config\psiber.awesome.quarries.cfg

there is a verbose toggle that will add a lot of logging information to the in game notifications. It will tell you why the mod is not converting a tile when you right click. This is essentially a debug mode I use during development that I leave exposed so you can easily figure out why a tile is not being converted. Most the time it is a case of buried treasures or an object is on the tile (like a grass).

Source and fair use:
The mod is open source (CC0) and available at
https://github.com/ETcodehome/DinkumAwesomeQuarries
Please feel free to use it / reference it / learn from it etc with my best wishes.