Could the mountain reclaiming gems only count gems settled on the ground? Or maybe only gems that are in contact with the mountain or near it, kind of like an anti-great maw guzzler? Late game it feels bad to see gems flying back into the mountain while my runners are coming up empty handed, caused by too many gems in the air from drop-offs/yeets/gem geysers. Also, the bulldozers remove gems from the count when they pick up, but runners don't.
Initially mountain would suck gems only close to it, but that meant that in the late game when gems fly far and stack up near the stash, the mountain wouldn't reach a lot of them and would thus mainly suck up newly spawned gems from the air, which wasn't great. And you're right that gems in runner's hands are counted (unlike with bulldozers), which I plan correcting soon, but it isn't as simple, at least in terms of performance in the current system. But as I optimize the game more, the threshold at which mountain starts sucking rises, making it all feel a bit better.
However the real issue here is the late game scaling of damage force / Rune Of Power+War, which makes ores fly too far out (and gem geyser spam). I will soon be diminishingly capping and adjusting a lot of these systems.
