Prospecting is a broken system being replaced by mods. Let’s fix it.

[Rexvladimir]

Hello Devs,

My wife, my best friend, and I recently started playing Vintage Story. We were really enjoying the game—until we got to prospecting. That system frustrated us so much that both of them gave up on it entirely, and I was the only one left trying. I ended up watching over 3 hours of guide videos just to understand how it works. The first thing I noticed was that every single guide either used debug console commands or the Prospecting Together mod. To me, that’s a clear sign the system is broken.

As you know, there are two readings in prospecting. The first tells you the abundance of an ore in a chunk. The second is a random percentage that most guides say to just ignore. But why? Why are we using a system where half the readings don’t matter? Why not make both equally important?

For example: I was searching for tin to reach the Bronze Age. I dug down and got three samples: Cassiterite, Ultra High, 0.29%. I thought, Great—I must be close. I went 100 blocks north and got a worse reading. Went east—worse reading. Went south—better reading: Cassiterite, Ultra High, 0.37%. I dug out both Ultra High spots, doing local ore readings every ~6 blocks down in multiple directions, and eventually I did find cassiterite in both places. That felt good.

But then I went looking for iron. And iron broke me. I triangulated the highest reading in a small area: 8.22%. Dug all the way to bedrock, sampling the entire way down. Nothing. Tried the next-highest spot at 7.97%. Still nothing. After ~5 hours of this complete waste of time, I gave up, switched to Creative, and started digging straight down everywhere. Eventually I found the ore—100 blocks away from my “best” reading. There, it had dropped from Ultra High to Very High, with a percentage of 6.68%.

That’s not engaging gameplay. That’s just frustrating. Most complaints about Vintage Story I’ve seen are about prospecting. Most guides rely on mods or debug. And I had to resort to Creative just to keep playing, because the system had burned through so many of my resources that I was about to be sent back to the Copper Age.

My Proposal

Keep the system mostly the same, but make the second percentage number meaningful. Turn it into a hot/cold indicator that guarantees the ore is in that chunk—you just have to locate it.

Using my example above:

• At the actual iron location, the reading should have been Ultra High, 100%.

• At the nearby 8.22% spot, it could say Ultra High, 80%, meaning “you’re close, keep looking.”

That way, the second number actually guides you toward the right chunk instead of misleading you. You’d still have to dig down and search locally, but you’d know the effort isn’t wasted.

Why This Matters

If I hadn’t been playing with my wife and friend, they both would have quit and written the game off as trash. If I didn’t have the option to switch to Creative, I would have quit too. Randomly digging holes based on bad readings isn’t fun. A refined hot/cold system would keep the challenge of searching while guaranteeing progress. Source pictures provided. 

TL;DR: Make the second percentage in prospecting a hot/cold indicator that accurately points you toward the chunk containing the ore vein.

[Entaris]

TL;DR is supposed to go at the beginning of the post.

[Echo Weaver]

As I understand it, the percentage is specific to the ore type, e.g. 0.37% is an ultra high probability for cassiterite, but it's not great for bismuthinite. If you have an area where the chunks are all showing "high" for a given ore, you can pick the best one by choosing the one with the highest percentage. Just don't compare the percentage between ore types.

The propick readings don't tell you there's actually any ore there at all, just the probability that ore was spawned there. It's quite possible to mine in a high area and not find any ore at all, though it shouldn't happen very often. Changing the reading based on where the ore actually is would be a big change.

[Professor Dragon]

2 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

The propick readings don't tell you there's actually any ore there at all, just the probability that ore was spawned there. It's quite possible to mine in a high area and not find any ore at all, though it shouldn't happen very often. Changing the reading based on where the ore actually is would be a big change.

I'd say it happens way more often than it should, actually. 

Even though me as an individual player is not a representative sample size, everything that @Rexvladimir said rings true for me.

In particular, the key point that the prospecting system could be improved.

I know that I'm the type of person who can stick things through for lot longer periods than "average" people. My guess is that characteristic pretty much defines the character type of Vintage Story players. But even I feel that the "reward" cycle of prospecting is too long, too haphazard. Basically we've got survivorship bias going on with the current player base, where the only ones still playing the game are the ones who can handle the current game mechanics. There are probably a lot of people who either left the game or who looked at it and never engaged with it in the first place. That itself is wrong - this is a great game that deserves a bigger player base. It needs to take a good hard look at itself though and work through the key issues. This is all fine. That exactly is why this game is still in beta.

Just look at the skill set for prospecting and how a typical experience goes:

• Gear up to metal tools
• Use a command to enable Node search on ProPick if it is not done
• Understand a grid search pattern - only explained really well in one obscure post by @Streetwind three years ago in a Reddit post with 143 likes (EDIT 158).
  (Link at end.)
• Understand Density Search
• Revise a few YouTube videos, because you ain't got a hope otherwise
• Understand vertical mining with use of the ProPick in Node search and hope beyond hope that your reading clips the edge of a field.
  (Spoiler alert - it "often" doesn't. You can go to the Mantle and miss the edge of an ore field by a single block)
• Gather a heap more resources for torches, ladders, new picks, food, baskets/bags than you ever thought possible.
• While doing the rest of seasonal base management, temporal stability at depth management, monster interactions, base building etc.
• Go back to revising Density search because you didn't really understand it.
• Begin to study geology, rock formation layers, ore distribution tables on the Wiki.
  (I have head cannon that Tyron is secretly a former geology teacher, who is trying to trick the world into studying geology mechanics by burying it cunningly inside a video game and never directly referencing this.)
• Engage in panning, farming and trading in order to be able to get enough bronze picks to mine, because you're not getting enough copper to make the leap.

And all of this because you wanted enough metal for a chisel that doesn't break after a few minutes,  to add a bit of base detail.

My personal pet peeve is that you can have a target spread with a hot spot for an ore in the middle, fading out to the edges, and the ore field is NOT in the centre of the hotspot, but instead starts at a "Very Poor" reading on the side (Which side? No-one knows!) This is just not intuitive. I get the point of it. I understand the "chance to find, not a guarantee to find." But it just feels wrong.

Professor Dragon

 

Edited September 14, 2025 by Professor Dragon

[Guimoute]

6 hours ago, Rexvladimir said:

Dug all the way to bedrock, sampling the entire way down. Nothing.

There was very little chance that would work even if the ore disk is there for sure. What you want to do is find an area of high probability density then go explore caves. 

 

6 hours ago, Rexvladimir said:

If I hadn’t been playing with my wife and friend, they both would have quit and written the game off as trash.

It's a bit rich to misread the guide of a single system and call the entire game trash as a result. 

 

  

32 minutes ago, Professor Dragon said:

My personal pet peeve is that you can have a target spread with a hot spot for an ore in the middle, fading out to the edges, and the ore field is NOT in the centre of the hotspot, but instead starts at a "Very Poor" reading on the side (Which side? No-one knows!) This is just not intuitive. I get the point of it. I understand the "chance to find, not a guarantee to find." But it just feels wrong.

It's not wrong. You can win at the dice and lose at heads or tails.

Edited September 14, 2025 by Guimoute

[Zane Mordien]

The system isn't very intuitive to start with but once you get the hang of finding ore in VS, you find that it is everywhere. I don't think they are going to change it, but it would be nice maybe if they added a better in game tutorial so people can understand the system.

7 hours ago, Rexvladimir said:

But then I went looking for iron. And iron broke me. I triangulated the highest reading in a small area: 8.22%. Dug all the way to bedrock, sampling the entire way down. Nothing. Tried the next-highest spot at 7.97%. Still nothing. After ~5 hours of this complete waste of time, I gave up, switched to Creative, and started digging straight down everywhere. Eventually I found the ore—100 blocks away from my “best” reading. There, it had dropped from Ultra High to Very High, with a percentage of 6.68%.

That's just bad luck, but it happens. I've played this game A LOT and I recently was beating my head against the wall not understanding why I couldn't find iron until I realized that iron doesn't spawn in the rock strata that I was at. Where I was at, it could only spawn in the first rock strata that was only 30 blocks deep. The odds of hitting iron there were slim to none even with a "decent" reading. A updated tutorial telling players to check the rock type to make sure it can even have iron in it would help people, although I knew that and still made that mistake.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Zane Mordien said:

That's just bad luck, but it happens. I've played this game A LOT and I recently was beating my head against the wall not understanding why I couldn't find iron until I realized that iron doesn't spawn in the rock strata that I was at. Where I was at, it could only spawn in the first rock strata that was only 30 blocks deep. The odds of hitting iron there were slim to none even with a "decent" reading. A updated tutorial telling players to check the rock type to make sure it can even have iron in it would help people, although I knew that and still made that mistake.

I'll jump in here to note that it also depends on the iron ore in question as well. Hematite tends to be the easiest to find; failing to find it at good readings is generally bad luck. Limonite I've only stumbled across once, by accident, but I can't say that I've seen any real readings for it either. Magnetite I've seen plenty of readings for, but I fail to actually find it most of the time, even at Ultra High readings. The only time I can really recall actually finding the stuff, was in andesite...which it's the only iron type that can spawn there.

[Echo Weaver]

I think I accidentally found a node search hit for limonite while mining for something else. It's marked on my map, but I haven't returned to it. I get limonite and ilmenite completely confused. 

I'm not regimented with search mode to the degree that the Streetwind describes. I use ProspectTogether with its lovely heat map, and that helps a huge amount. I do think something like that should be in vanilla. I think I've always found a deposit in a high probability chunk, but I take my progression more slowly than a lot of forum-dwellers, so I probably have done a lot less prospecting than many of you.

It took me quite a while to figure out what my strategy should be with the node search, and even so you hit all sorts of weird edge cases. I just got myself confused mining for tin because I apparently dug my shaft right along the transition edge between medium and small for a deposit, so when I tried to follow up, I got different readings on the side of the shaft I tested against. Since the area was really low stability, I could only do so much before having to surface to stabilize. Quite a pain.

I think the system could do with some gameplay improvements, but I'm not sure what exactly I'd suggest.

[Rexvladimir]

4 hours ago, Guimoute said:

It's a bit rich to misread the guide of a single system and call the entire game trash as a result. 

When a system is the main gatekeeper of progression, and failing to master it permanently stalls your advancement, it makes the entire game feel trash. Some of you might be too young to remember this, but in Star Fox Adventures there’s a boss fight that requires you to button mash at an almost impossible speed. If you can’t do it, you can never beat the boss and never progress further in the game. That one poorly designed mechanic ruined the entire experience—and to this day, I’ve never finished it.

People resorted to using modded controllers or physically altering their controllers just to get past it. That’s exactly what’s happening here: if Vintage Story requires a mod or debug commands just to make prospecting tolerable, then the system is trash. And if the system that blocks you from leaving the “dirt hut” stage of the game is trash, then the whole game risks becoming trash in the eyes of new players. I am putting up with it because i like everything else but as mentioned before if i was not able to switch to creative mode, I would have also quit. This should never be the case. 

 

 

5 hours ago, Professor Dragon said:

I know that I'm the type of person who can stick things through for lot longer periods than "average" people. My guess is that characteristic pretty much defines the character type of Vintage Story players. But even I feel that the "reward" cycle of prospecting is too long, too haphazard. Basically we've got survivorship bias going on with the current player base, where the only ones still playing the game are the ones who can handle the current game mechanics. There are probably a lot of people who either left the game or who looked at it and never engaged with it in the first place. That itself is wrong - this is a great game that deserves a bigger player base. It needs to take a good hard look at itself though and work through the key issues. This is all fine. That exactly is why this game is still in beta.

Just look at the skill set for prospecting and how a typical experience goes:

• Gear up to metal tools
• Use a command to enable Node search on ProPick if it is not done
• Understand a grid search pattern - only explained really well in one obscure post by @Streetwind three years ago in a Reddit post with 143 likes (EDIT 158).
  (Link at end.)
• Understand Density Search
• Revise a few YouTube videos, because you ain't got a hope otherwise
• Understand vertical mining with use of the ProPick in Node search and hope beyond hope that your reading clips the edge of a field.
  (Spoiler alert - it "often" doesn't. You can go to the Mantle and miss the edge of an ore field by a single block)
• Gather a heap more resources for torches, ladders, new picks, food, baskets/bags than you ever thought possible.
• While doing the rest of seasonal base management, temporal stability at depth management, monster interactions, base building etc.
• Go back to revising Density search because you didn't really understand it.
• Begin to study geology, rock formation layers, ore distribution tables on the Wiki.
  (I have head cannon that Tyron is secretly a former geology teacher, who is trying to trick the world into studying geology mechanics by burying it cunningly inside a video game and never directly referencing this.)
• Engage in panning, farming and trading in order to be able to get enough bronze picks to mine, because you're not getting enough copper to make the leap.

And all of this because you wanted enough metal for a chisel that doesn't break after a few minutes,  to add a bit of base detail.

This is a perfect explanation of what the average player has to go through. Too add on to what you have said, "If you love truly love something, you must learn to criticize it" 

Thank you for seeing the value in this as it would be a net benefit to all as well as keep the core game intact. 

[Thorfinn]

Dunno. I never had any problems understanding it. The problem with most guides and videos and mods I've seen is they are all wrong. Close enough, arguably, but still wrong. As one of the team pointed out, the reading is not chunk based. At all. Anything you see that draws boxes on the map is wrong. Close enough that you can use @Guimoute's suggestion of finding nearby caves, I guess, but sinking a mine shaft is hit or miss. @Streetwind does a great job in explaining how you use the system to play Hotter, Colder. But at core, it's only the chance that the type of rock within a given radius is the right kind of rock to have minerals. And made a bit more confusing because in order to compensate for the massive size of iron deposits, they had to write the ore generator to roll a chance to see whether they should roll a chance for ore.

And as @Zane Mordien and others point out, you have to know what rock layers a given mineral spawns in. You don't have to be a geologist, just look it up in the handbook.

It's not so much hard to understand, as there is a lot of misleading information out there. It's kind of like so much else in life. Just seeing a corn field does not guarantee there are pheasants there. It's just more likely that they are there than on some grassy plains, so the smart money is checking out the corn field first. If you don't find one there, look for another corn field before you start looking where they probably are not.

That's prospecting in a nutshell. There's no guarantee the guys flocking to the gold rush would find gold. They just went where there was the most probability of finding gold and took their chances.

Edited September 15, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Echo Weaver]

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Dunno. I never had any problems understanding it. The problem with most guides and videos and mods I've seen is they are all wrong. Close enough, arguably, but still wrong. As one of the team pointed out, the reading is not chunk based. At all. Anything you see that draws boxes on the map is wrong. Close enough that you can use @Guimoute's suggestion of finding nearby caves, I guess, but sinking a mine shaft is hit or miss.

FWIW, I've actually found dropping a mineshaft in a high+ area to be at least as effective as caving. It's not immediately intuitive, and maybe it wouldn't hold up under a lot more iterations, but when caving you only see what the cave happens to drill through. That's been a great way for me to happen upon coal and more common ores, but my hit rate for stuff I'm actually looking for hasn't been that great. Plus, of course, caves get more dangerous as you get deeper.

I like to cave, at least as much because I love exploring ruins, but when I'm looking for a very specific ore (e.g. for making a tin bronze pickaxe), I poke around with the propick and drop a shaft at a local maximum reading that's high or better. Node search covers a pretty good range. The trick is zeroing in on the deposit when you get readings.

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

And as @Zane Mordien and others point out, you have to know what rock layers a given mineral spawns in

Well, we can only see the first couple of rock strata on the surface, so I'm not clear how useful this is.

 

Edited September 15, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Entaris]

1 hour ago, Echo Weaver said:

Well, we can only see the first couple of rock strata on the surface, so I'm not clear how useful this is.

Certain minerals only occur in certain classes of stone.

Geology

 

[Echo Weaver]

45 minutes ago, Entaris said:

Certain minerals only occur in certain classes of stone.

Geology

 

Right. My point was that I don't know what rock is below me unless I see it, and that's only good for the first layer or two.

[Thorfinn]

Well, if it's granite, you know there's only igneous below it, so there's no point in looking for minerals that form only in sedimentary rocks. The various coals, marble, chalk, if it's true to life, limonite, malachite, borax, etc., can not be there. But you can use that information to know if there are nearby sedimentary rocks hiding under the dirt.

[Professor Dragon]

7 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

The problem with most guides and videos and mods I've seen is they are all wrong. Close enough, arguably, but still wrong. As one of the team pointed out, the reading is not chunk based. At all. Anything you see that draws boxes on the map is wrong. Close enough that you can use . . .

Well if you - or anyone,  - are willing, please write a technically correct guide on how to prospect. 
It would be very well received. Just a suggestion to the community.
EDIT: This is the best currently available:
https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Prospecting

In addition, if prospecting could be better, then let's also look at discussing these root causes.

Thanks. Professor Dragon.

Edited September 15, 2025 by Professor Dragon

[Entaris]

3 hours ago, Professor Dragon said:

In addition, if prospecting could be better, then let's also look at discussing these root causes.

I got you.

 

So, first, we release an update that fully simulates erosion and migration of mineral wealth through an ecosystem. Wind erosion, oxidation, the works.

Then, we tie that into the upcoming river simulation, so the sediment carried by the river is affected by the eluvial that tumbles into the streambed, further eroding and becoming alluvial as it travels through currents during heavy rainfalls.

 

Then, all the players have to do is find the bends and eddies in the rivers (including long dormant ones, as the rivers meander) and pan along the desposits, prospecting upstream until they no longer find alluvial, at which point they begin to search uphill for the eluvial that is weathering out into the river, thereby allowing them to trace all the way to the outcropping veins to source the lode.

 

You want prospecting? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you prospecting. 

Edited September 16, 2025 by Entaris
Cheek

[Rexvladimir]

10 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That's prospecting in a nutshell. There's no guarantee the guys flocking to the gold rush would find gold. They just went where there was the most probability of finding gold and took their chances.

First and foremost, love the name brother, Askeladd would be proud.

Secondly, I understand what you’re saying: in real life, we would just be guessing whether ore was actually located in an area. The thing is, though, we have to balance realistic gameplay with fun gameplay. In real life, wooden tongs would instantly ignite when holding a 1000°C crucible; the scraps hammered off ingots would be saved and reused; it would be impossible for a character to carry 90% of the inventory due to weight; if you were wearing or carrying full plate armor, you shouldn’t be able to swim… and so on. We can make the “in real life” argument all day, but there has to be a line. At some point, fun gameplay has to matter more than strict realism.

For example, I just spent almost 3 hours smithing to finally make my first iron chainmail. That was a grind, sure, but I didn’t mind — because I was guaranteed to get that chainmail at the end of the process. If the game instead made it a random chance what the durability would be after all that time, I’d have a serious problem with it.

That’s why I’m asking you to seriously consider my proposal without survival bias. Think about how you would have felt if you had played the game for the very first time, but with my system in place instead of the current one. I genuinely believe you would have found it more enjoyable — and at the end of the day, fun is what matters most in a video game.

[Echo Weaver]

12 hours ago, Rexvladimir said:

That’s why I’m asking you to seriously consider my proposal without survival bias. Think about how you would have felt if you had played the game for the very first time, but with my system in place instead of the current one. I genuinely believe you would have found it more enjoyable — and at the end of the day, fun is what matters most in a video game.

I'd rather not go too far down the "survival bias" route. All that means is that we're having fun playing the game as it is. I think we can talk about reasonable improvements to the mechanic without treating the folks who like the game as somehow suspect for liking it. 

As I've said earlier, I think prospecting has gone for me the way it's "intended" to, as in I have wandered around taking samples with my propick in probability mode, zeroed in on a high or very high probability of whatever I'm looking for, then dropped a mineshaft and found the ore I want with the node search setting. I think I dropped a couple of shafts where I didn't get any node search readings for the iron I was looking for, then I found it on the third try, and it even turned out to be colocated with halite.

I did read some advice on how to deal with node search, and my big takeaway on how to home in on a reading in 3 dimensions was in retrospect pretty head-smackingly obvious. The other piece of advice I picked up here was that the qualitative result (miniscule, very high) was the primary one as opposed to the %% result (which is not actually percent but something like parts-per-volume), and I'd pretty much already figured that out on my own. The amount of research this took was less than a lot of stuff I needed to look up for that other block game or even for THIS block game (go search for my forum drama on soil quality). This style of game just assumes you're pulling in some outside resources.

At any rate, this gameplay loop seems fine to me. What seems not-fine is that folks on the thread say it often doesn't go that way for them. I think the biggest question is WHY it doesn't go that way. Have I been really lucky? Possibly. As I've said, I've put most of my effort toward one "forever world" where I've been doing All the Things and not been focused on fast progression. I may be an outlier on the forum, but I submit that behavior is closer to what a lot of the average users are doing.

So, how can we adjust the mechanic without throwing away its spirit? Or do we just need to overhaul the mining guide in the handbook?

[Thorfinn]

20 hours ago, Professor Dragon said:

Well if you - or anyone,  - are willing, please write a technically correct guide on how to prospect. 

Huh. That's quite good. I got used to seeing stuff on the wiki that was outdated, so just stopped looking at it, even as little as I was. (I prefer to play games without videos or other on-line sources spoiling the learning experience. Once I think I've got it pretty well figured out, then I'll check to see how close my perception was, but not before. @Streetwind's writeup was kind of an exception to that rule -- it came up in a discussion, so I checked it out before I had developed my hypothesis of prospecting.)

FWIW, since I play without map, most of the mechanism he describes doesn't apply, even though the principles involved stand. Without a map, I'm more about taking samples near landmarks so I can do the hot-cold thing by looking around, looking at colored dots not being an option. And, of course, WS does not have node search, so none of that section applies at all.

I get the "wanting to be sure" thing. Those with limited game time or limited patience would be much better served by a system where it counts actual ore blocks instead of a weighted average of what the stone itself could potentially have. Someone in the past mentioned he didn't have the time to prospect and installed an x-ray mod. Which is fine. I think if people want a VS-Lite experience, a mod is the place for it. To me, that would take away too much of the sense of accomplishment. Make it too easy and it's just an activity. A pastime. Something you do mechanically, instead of having some puzzle to figure out while you are lying there waiting for your brain to calm down enough to fall asleep.

[EDIT]

There are several "prospecting" mods out there. One comes to mind that, instead of telling you per mille (or maybe in addition to, I don't recall) it told you exactly how far away the closest such ore was, and it was up to you to triangulate it, in all three dimensions. There were other, more limited settings as well. No idea if it's been updated. I didn't want an easy button on the game, so other than reading how it was coded, I've not followed it.

Edited September 16, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Echo Weaver]

How does the guide on the wiki hold up? https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Guide:Prospecting
(ETA: Dur, you already linked to it.)

It seems like it has a lot of detail.

One thing it doesn't seem to mention is what those "percent" readings mean. My understanding is that these are NOT percent. The symbol is actually %%. Googling the symbol, I get the answer that it's a modulo symbol, but since the results are all decimals, that doesn't seem right. I thought I remembered from a previous forum thread that it's actually some kind of parts per volume, but I'm not sure of that.

From a practical point of view, my understanding is that higher is better WITHIN the same quality rating for the same ore.

How does the Better Prospecting mod line up with what folks would like to see? I'm happy with the current system, but this looks like a cool approach: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bettererprospecting

Edited September 17, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Kyassady]

the %% indicates parts per million.  thats why the majority of youtubers just says to ignore it....

[Echo Weaver]

52 minutes ago, Kyassady said:

the %% indicates parts per million.  thats why the majority of youtubers just says to ignore it....

Oh, I see. I think it's parts per thousand. The actual notation is 0/00 rather than what's used in the game %%. That's why I couldn't Google it. Seems like one could have used an extended unicode character or something.

[Professor Dragon]

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

. . . since I play without map. . . I'm more about taking samples near landmarks so I can do the hot-cold thing by looking around, looking at colored dots not being an option. And, of course, WS does not have node search, so none of that section applies at all.
.
.
.
There are several "prospecting" mods out there.

Huh. MAD RESPECT to be playing both without a map nor Node Search.

I might consider a Prospecting mod which gives a hot/cold in three dimensions, if one exists. I think I'd recommend that for the majority of the playerbase to be honest. 

Or to build into the game some type of improvement along those lines, such as being able to sample a small square and have it give you a Node like correct answer, but for the full vertical column. Or a true hot/cold reading. Something along those lines. The majority of the potential playerbase simply does not have the time available to sink into this activity. As this is such a core activity, I think in this case there should be a better answer than "mods" (even though it is a good answer).

As an example of where I'm at, I'm 'searching with a Node (6) ProPick search now for Chromite. My best Densitry reading in a bauxite/andesite surface area reading is "Decent" (1.71) in the highest hotspot.
My choices are:
* Sink a shaft, even though the reading isn't a High or Ultra High.  This will burn through a game day (maybe) and the resources of ladders and torches (which I typically leave).
* Write off four in-game days of preparation, travel and Density Prospecting, to this spot, to go prospecting again.

I've been burned many times unfortunately by sinking the shaft and coming up empty handed.

 

Edited September 16, 2025 by Professor Dragon

[LadyWYT]

9 minutes ago, Professor Dragon said:

* Sink a shaft, even though the reading isn't a High or Ultra High.  This will burn through a game day (maybe) and the resources of ladders and torches (which I typically leave).
* Write off four in-game days of preparation, travel and Density Prospecting, to this spot, to go prospecting again.

Honestly, the time expenditure there seems fair to me; it should take a day or two for a proper mining expedition, as well as a decent investment in ladders and optional torches. As for prospecting, spending a few days to collect readings isn't really a bad thing either, especially since the player can be marking down other important resources and things as they explore.

To me, the worst part of the prospecting system is sinking a shaft at High or better readings, only to find out that the ore in question didn't spawn there. With a Decent reading, you could chalk it up to just getting unlucky if you don't find anything, and with Poor or Very Poor readings...well, those descriptions don't really sound like good spots to dig to begin with. Though to be fair, magnetite seems to be the worst offender in regards to failing to spawn even with good readings, so perhaps it's just specific ores that need some tweaking and not the system.

[Professor Dragon]

8 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Honestly, the time expenditure there seems fair to me; it should take a day or two for a proper mining expedition, as well as a decent investment in ladders and optional torches. As for prospecting, spending a few days to collect readings isn't really a bad thing either, especially since the player can be marking down other important resources and things as they explore.

To me, the worst part of the prospecting system is sinking a shaft at High or better readings, only to find out that the ore in question didn't spawn there. With a Decent reading, you could chalk it up to just getting unlucky if you don't find anything, and with Poor or Very Poor readings...well, those descriptions don't really sound like good spots to dig to begin with. Though to be fair, magnetite seems to be the worst offender in regards to failing to spawn even with good readings, so perhaps it's just specific ores that need some tweaking and not the system.

I'd agree with all of that.

And Magnetite was the final straw for me.