Resources

The amount of resources available on this concept game will depend on the biome. In rocky biomes, metals and other rare earths will happen more frequently than on other places. In sand or tundra biomes it will have more biologics (think mushrooms and plants) and some usual things like iron or nickel. There are also biomes that will consist majorly of gases and that will require specialized buildings to extract those gases. 

In each biome the buildings required will change, so in a tundra environment will have no need to have gas extraction buildings. However in a swamp one it will be needed. 

What is the best way to present available buildings? The building selection bar will present the usual categories (infrastructure, power, mining, industry, etc.) with the buildings allowed on that map/biome. A small toggle button will switch between "filtered" or "not filtered", allowing the player to see the extensive list of buildings available (as researched by tech tree) or just the relevant buildings. Even by seeing the non filtered list, it will not be possible to place a building that does not belong there for a multitude of reasons: first, it's not of that biome; second, it would require construction resources that would not be available on that biome (ex: require wood where biome has no trees); third: depending on other environmental factors that building can be too weak or too heavy to be placed. So, you can still see them but not use them. That comes with a greyed out icon and a tooltip saying something to that effect.

The mineable resources will be divided in several categories: solids, liquids, gases, crystals. Those are resources that represent the most basic tier of the game, where the player gets to a place, builds an outpost and starts mining nearby resource nodes. Those can be transformed or sold as is. 

The next tier will be the transformation tier. Depending on the resource, it could be smelted (think Factorio's iron ore into iron ingots) or splitting liquid water into oxygen and hydrogen gases. Or following the water example, warming ice blocks into liquid water. 

Next tier will make the actual transformation tier resources be used for something practical: iron ingots can be used to create panels, tools, trusses, etc. Water can be purified into drinkable water. Or be used to produce electricity. Crude can be transformed into hydrocarbons (not gasoline yet!). 

And so the gameplay will revolve around extracting resources, refining and transforming them, then selling to other players. It will depend on the biome the player chose to create outposts, supply/demand on that area, and the amount of research put into it. Essentially one player can find a biome full of trees and mount a harvesting of wood and sell planks to nearby players. Other player can invest in research and instead of selling planks he can move on to furniture or to high quality wood paneling for ships. Even another player can be the best plank buyer of the first player and make marvellous wood paneling for a fraction of the cost of the last player mentioned, making the market fluctuate.

There is still another variable that I'm undecided if use or not, which is the quality of the resources. They can be divided into Good, Average and Weak. So a player can be in a biome where trees have Weak wood and that will influence the price to sell, compared to the same furniture from a player who has Good wood. I don't know if this is too specific and too detailed to include in game, as this classification would also impose handicaps on manufacture: for example a Weak wood chunk would need 2x the amount to make for a Weak wood plank. Maybe here is some research items to reduce that handicap, or to improve the quality of the plank from Weak to Average? I don't know. Let me know it the comments.