Description:
I love mining crystals. I enjoy hunting through asteroid fields and eventually stumbling on that big payday. But in vanilla, crystals' little blinking lights are a pain to spot for my old-man eyes. Then with the introduction of a "cooldown" on crystals spawning in 3.0, crystal mining became extremely un-fun.
With that in mind, I set out to make mining crystals great again.

NOTE/WARNING: This mod could definitely be considered "cheat-y" or unbalanced.  I originally created it because I enjoy hunting for crystals and hate the early-game credit grind and thought others might be looking for something similar.  If you're looking for a version that ONLY has the color/glow changes you can find it as an optional download here on Nexus, or a separate mod in the Steam Workshop.

Features:
+ Changes the color of crystals to the following:

• Bandannite - Very common - White
• Menelaene - Common - Green
• Aguilite - Rare - Blue
• Mitonene - "Epic" - Purple
• Burnite - "Legendary" - Orange
  

+ Added a glow to all crystals so they stand out more in the asteroid field

+ Removes the "cooldown" on picking up crystals:

• Previously, when you picked up one of the rarer crystals (anything except Bandannite), it imposed a multi-minute timer where nothing else could spawn. This turned "hunting for crystals", into "waiting for crystals to respawn".  To remedy this, the cooldown on all crystal pickups was completely removed.
  

+ Complete re-write of crystal spawns:

• Spawns are now defined on a per-Sector basis (this means I can buff/nerf crystal spawns of particular sectors without affecting the rest!)
• Spawn CHANCES are based heavily on how big an asteroid is (larger asteroids have a higher chance of spawning a crystal)
• Overall spawn CHANCE favors Sectors with big asteroids
• Spawns no longer based on who owns a Sector (so taking over a Xenon Sector won't suddenly change what crystals spawn there)
  

Compatibility:

• Will conflict with mods that change crystal spawn rules (objectspawnrules.xml)
• Will conflict with mods that change crystal colors
• Will conflict with Crystal Finder
  

(Un)Installation:
To install, unzip the archive and place it in your "X4Foundations/Extensions" folder

To UNinstall, just delete the folder "Crystal_Rarities"


Credits:
Thanks to Shuruna and their Crystal Finder mod, which gave me the base/inspiration for mine.
Thanks to everyone on the Egosoft Forums and Egosoft Discord for all the knowledge they imparted on me.


BETA:
<No BETA currently in progress>


Change Log:
3.0:

• Added support for new sectors added by both Split Vendetta and Cradle of Humanity
  

2.0:

• Slight increase to range glow can be seen
• Slight increase to intensity of glow
• Complete re-write of crystal spawns. They are based loosely on asteroid size/density, but are on a per-sector basis (this means I can tweak sectors individually).  Currently SUPPORTS Split Vendetta sectors, but they do not have their own custom rules at the moment.
  

1.3:

• Another update to the intensity of the glows on the crystals in an attempt to make them less harsh
• some tweaks to hopefully reduce color distortion as well
  

1.2:

• Attempted to dial down the intensity to reduce glare on the screen/cockpit
• removed save requirement from mod (it is safe to remove from / add to a save at any point)
  

1.1:

• added support for Steam Workshop (changed mod ID and moved loose files to ext_01 cat/dat)
  

1.0:

• initial release