cdda-arcana-mod VS mining-mod

As for your question, yes, there are mods that make melee stronger. Try Magiclysm and Mythical Martial Arts. They're both in-repo and both make melee way better. Magiclysm adds spells and magic weapons to buff you in melee. MMA adds some new martial arts and traits which make melee way better. I also use Arcana and Magic Items which isn't in-repo but provides some cool enchanted weapons, items, potions and stuff which really help out in melee. Good luck.

here's the link, https://github.com/chaosvolt/cdda-arcana-mod well it adds in a whole new magical aspect to the game, enemies now can drop things called essence, this essence along with other tools you may find while exploring allows you to harness the power of the arcane, you can create small trinkets, tools and items that should help you with your survival, from a brooch that makes you invisible to the undead to a cursed blade that grants an addictive life draining effect to your attacks that can be purified and allows you to recieve a certain kind of power from a special being. granted all of this is locked behind some sort of rare structures and some VERY dangerous opponents. though a word of advice, dragonblood is a very nice mutation threshold :).

If you're not ready to modify the files yourself, that's fine too since I was already going to do it myself, and I can send you the file once I finish, it shouldn't be too long. I was going to make it require material from a different mod called Arcana though. It also adds magic to the game, but in a different way. They both work together, so you can have both in the same game, but you'd have to start over for it to work fully.

I use Arcana Cata++

Fun, not a genre I was familiar with, though Taoism, Chan Buddhism, and the Song Dynasty are fascinating to me so I think I get some of the flavor. How total conversion do you want to get? Is there some stuff in DDA that is counter to this and needs removed or changed in a big way? You might look at Arcana to see how they handle these ideas from a more Western approach if you haven't already https://github.com/chaosvolt/cdda-arcana-mod I'm most interested in monsters and NPCs so I'm interested to know how those can be involved. Let me know if you want contributions on that. Is this still New England or are you taking us somewhere a little more in Asia? I'd recommend to start getting one path working really well so you can start getting player feedback ASAP. Once you have that you've already won, you've got a working mod. I'd love to see this in repo if possible, especially if you want others like me helping https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/doc/IN_REPO_MODS.md

There really aren't many unofficial mods, because the game is open source and so people tend to just add to the game directly. The two big mods I recommend that live outside the default repo are Arcana (magic that fits the vanilla tone a bit better than Magiclysm) and Noct's Cata Mod aka Cata++ (super soldiers and a special boss monster that gives me Resident Evil vibes).

As for third-party mods, in general you need to look for a mod that has both DDA and BN versions, because for most content the JSON drifts too much for them to be compatible. All of my mods for example have BN and DDA versions where required, as do Noctifer's Cataclysm++ mod and DN's Mining Mod.

Mining Mod by DangerNoodle. Adds random mineral veins underground, bog iron in swamps, black sand deposits near rivers, and the like. Also adds some extra items and recipes that make it actually feasible to bootstrap metalsmithing innawoods without having to hope for a car to bash up or a helicopter crash.