Interesting. In every post I'd seen up to this point there was no mention of a percentage chance of meat rotting, it was just corpses turning rotten and thats it. I still don't like the changes, but reading that the percentage chance is different based on difficulty is at least heartening. A way to negate the rotting through something like a launcher, grenade , or mortar shell that spreads either a cure for the disease or just prevents rotting would be something I'd suggest for vanilla.
And as for deep drilling, since I don't play on savage/merciless, my main sources of plasteel have been deep drilling and the long range mineral scanner. Jade is also a long range scanner resource. Gold I typically get enough of from quest rewards and trading and the deep drills. One mod I would suggest you consider integrating into the base game is deep ore identification so that when the deep ores are visible, hovering over them shows exactly what mineral is under that square.
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