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

[Echo Weaver]

3 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Primitive Survival isn't really a fishing mod. It has fish in it, yes, but it's not really about fishing. It creates "fish" ex nihilo, and is basically traps. There was a fishing mod that had a fishing pole (which must be hidden at the moment -- probably not updated) which also created fish instead of catching the ones that were swimming around.  From hints over the years, the intended fishing mechanic will catch the ones you see. I think that's waiting for the fish to be developed, though.

You ninja'd me .

Primitive Survival doesn't have fishing lines that you hold and wait to respond, but otherwise it's the same classic fishing mechanic you see in the other game. I used it when I first started messing with Primitive Survival, but now I find it so anti-immersive I don't use that feature. The pit traps are da bomb though.

(Yeah, this is a distraction, but the primary topic is going so well?)

[Thorfinn]

2 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

(Yeah, this is a distraction, but the primary topic is going so well?)

One might say, "Swimmingly."

[Teh Pizza Lady]

27 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

I used it when I first started messing with Primitive Survival, but now I find it so anti-immersive I don't use that feature.

I have a hungry Blackguard for a roommate. I have to sneak meals when she's out checking the trot lines. I'm sorry, but you can pry my free fish from my cold, dead hands.

Edited October 20, 2025 by Teh Pizza Lady

[Facethief]

Man, we’re gonna hate fishing when it gets added if people complain half as much as they did here.

“We need catches to be guaranteed, or it’s just a waste of time!”

“Dude, you do realize it’s not called catching for a reason?”

[LadyWYT]

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Every single game has a target audience, and the games with widest appeal tend to be shallow and generic. If a mechanic is not to your liking, then mods are your friend, not a way to wave you off for the people who don't see the need for it to be changed. If a mod becomes popular, then devs have more reason to implement something similar into the base experience, and also have a working example of the functionality which reduces uncertainty that would come with implementing a completely new and untested feature.

Truth.

Incidentally, I went and poked around on the mod database earlier to see what options there even were for prospecting. Prospect Together is by far and away the most popular, with a 200k+ downloads and easily in the top handful of mods(that's putting it mildly). And as already noted, all that mod does is allow players to share their prospecting data with each other in multiplayer, in addition to adding a heatmap grid to the vanilla system(which already has a heatmap, but the mod's grid might be easier to understand for some players). 

Better Prospecting? It's not even close, sitting at roughly 30k downloads. I had to scroll pretty far just to find it, and none of the mods I scrolled past to get to it were related to prospecting at all, save for Prospect Together, ProspestorInfo(which was rendered obsolete by 1.19), and Block Overlay(which is basically an Xray mod/mod to locate specific blocks/entities, and not so much for prospecting itself). 

Block Overlay easily has about twice the downloads that Better Prospecting does, which leads me to wonder if players who just want to find ore easier aren't just using this one so they can go straight to the ore instead of needing to hunt for it, which Better Prospecting still requires the player to do. Judging by the comments on Block Overlay's page, it seems this might be the case for some players, but many are also using that mod just for testing various things in the game. As for Better Prospecting's comment section, it seems that the mod still didn't make ore finding easy enough for some users, as some were complaining about the increased durability cost for the added propick search modes.

In any case, I think it's safe to say that based on mod data, the prospecting system as a whole is fine, and tracks well with the overall difficulty implemented in the overall game design, but adding an option for players to share prospecting data in multiplayer is a good idea since there's quite a lot of support for that feature. Changing the entire system to be easier is much better left to the modded realm, so that the smaller subset of the playerbase that really wants to play that way can, without changing the entire game for everyone else.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Incidentally, you do not need to prospect for tin if you are playing defaults. Tin is an Extremely Rare (?) surface deposit, so it's pretty easy to bump into it as you are collecting seeds. Plus, there are merchants that sell tin nuggets (cassiterite) and even tin pickaxes, It also drops in cracked vessels. Plus, you can make it all but omnipresent by setting it to Very Common, or, alternatively, have much better luck prospecting by simply cranking the global deposit rate all the way up.

As a side note, I also have to wonder how many of the complaints stem from players who jumped into the hardest difficulties(Wilderness Survival and Homo Sapiens), without understanding what they were actually signing up for? Those gamemodes disable the map, which means prospecting data won't be recorded at all, so they'll either need a very good memory, or need to manually record the data themselves at the prospecting sites via signs. Likewise, those gamemodes disable the propick's node search, so they have no way to actually figure out what ore is there, aside from digging and hoping they stumble across it. Outside of those difficulties, multiplayer itself disables node search by default, so if the players in question only play multiplayer servers that kept that default, they're going to have a harder time finding ore even if the overall difficulty is set to something other than Wilderness Survival/Homo Sapiens.

[Bumber]

16 hours ago, Rexvladimir said:

You need a tin pick to mine iron, not copper. To get tin, you have to prospect—so now you’re trapped in a cycle of gambling with your tools for a chance at progress. Down to your last tin pick? Welp you have two options: keep a tin pick on hand, only use copper picks due to cheaper cost and faster gathering until RNJesus finally blesses your poor soul with some iron; or you are now back to looking for tin, to then smelt it, to then rebuild your supply”—thus meaning you are forced to put your goal on hold because RNJesus didn’t bless you this run. That’s not rewarding gameplay—that’s punishment by design.

What's the problem with keeping a tin bronze pick on hand? You should expect to need multiple picks for clearing stone to begin with. The others can be copper or not; more an issue that copper has low durability and speed.

And, of course, ore bombs and bismuth bronze exist. One can just happen upon the required materials while mining, spelunking, or trading.

Edited October 20, 2025 by Bumber

[Echo Weaver]

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Incidentally, I went and poked around on the mod database earlier to see what options there even were for prospecting.

This surprised me, despite the fact that I'd already looked up these mods for this conversation. I just never really looked at the number of digits in the downloads .

I will say that ordering by most downloaded seems to have issues. When I ordered by most AND least downloaded, Prospecting++ was first both times. Pondering more, I think the issue is that the search was clearly updated some months ago to put a higher emphasis on word-matching in the title of the mod. I noticed immediately when my search results started making actual sense, but it isn't immediately obvious to me the best way to balance out that requirement with the requirement to order by something like download count.

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Better Prospecting? It's not even close, sitting at roughly 30k downloads.

It looks like there are three mods that are closely related and inspired each other -- Absolute Prospecting, Better Prospecting, and BetterER Prospecting. The latter is for 1.21, and the other two haven't been upgraded but seem to work on 1.21.

If you are generous, you could total the downloads for all three and get 63k.

There are also a couple of mods that give full prospecting readings on 1 sample rather than 3. I can definitely see the appeal of that.

12 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

As a side note, I also have to wonder how many of the complaints stem from players who jumped into the hardest difficulties(Wilderness Survival and Homo Sapiens), without understanding what they were actually signing up for?

That's an interesting question. When I looked through the options for my first game, it was not obvious to me that Homo Sapiens would be more difficult than Survival. It just looked like it wouldn't have the horror and lore features.

Not having map for prospecting sounds rough.

Edited October 21, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[Thorfinn]

Wilderness also sets surface tin to never and surface copper to very rare. It's always a shock to see how fast you get the 40 nuggets in default mode. Usually by sunset, sometimes before noon.

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

That's an interesting question. When I looked through the options for my first game, it was not obvious to me that Homo Sapiens would be more difficult than Survival. It just looked like it wouldn't have the horror and lore features.

Not having map for prospecting sounds rough.

I mean, I'm not saying that's what's happening, but it's not something I can rule out either, as there have been some newer players through the forums that did pretty much exactly that--picked the hardest gamemodes, and then were shocked it was so hard. 

Though I also expect it's just players who have gone looking for iron(probably magnetite specifically), dug at a high reading, and been disappointed because it's the first time they didn't find what they were looking for. Which is understandable, but digging at a different location usually produces better results. I think in this case, it's not really the fault of the prospect system itself, as much as it is a mismatch of what the system is and the particular player's expectations. The current system is simple enough to understand up front and jump in and start using, but also complicated enough that there's plenty for the player to study in order to figure out what ores are easier to find, where they appear, how big are the clusters, etc. Most stuff that's required for progression is pretty easy to find with a bit of digging; the hard-to-find stuff tends to be things like gemstones, cinnabar, alum, etc., which are mostly just vanity ores at the moment. In some cases, like alum, there are easier to find substitutes like cassiterite.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I mean, I'm not saying that's what's happening, but it's not something I can rule out either, as there have been some newer players through the forums that did pretty much exactly that--picked the hardest gamemodes, and then were shocked it was so hard.

Yeah, I totally agree that could be happening. I think Homo Sapiens probably attracts people who are interested in survival but not horror. They might not be looking for extra difficulty. I guess the correct way to do that is to create a Survival game and turn lore off in the options, but that's not necessarily obvious to a new player.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Though I also expect it's just players who have gone looking for iron(probably magnetite specifically), dug at a high reading, and been disappointed because it's the first time they didn't find what they were looking for.

This is probably most of it, though. I see so many wildly different statements going back and forth about advancement speed and difficulty from well-informed forum regulars. Expectations vary hugely.

[mayushii]

On 10/16/2025 at 4:20 PM, Echo Weaver said:

I really don't see the value in insulting people who like the current system. I like it because it's a decent simplified simulation of real prospecting, which I'm pretty sure is the goal of the design. I'm not trying to play my game faster. Prospecting gives me another incentive to explore. I don't think any of us are disagreeing that RNG is involved. The question is whether this is a bad thing.

What's bothering you about the conversation here? You feel that your gameplay preferences are not being taken seriously? Are you insulted because everyone in the thread didn't jump in and tell you you're right? That's never going to happen. We have a huge diversity of play styles on the forum, and there is essentially no suggestion that isn't going to get pushback. Come to discuss, not to proselytize.

It's not intended as an insult to point you to a mod. Your concerns aren't unique, as evidenced by the other folks expressing the same dislike on this thread. The whole point to a moddable game is that we can make adjustments to suit what we enjoy.

As an example, I never play without Player Corpse. I easily slide into over-caution, and if I run the risk of losing difficult-to-obtain items when I die, I will just never carry around those items. Moreover, my caution generally means I don't die trivially, so it's likely to be someplace dangerous to return to, increasing the chance of dying on my way back to my body and otherwise timing out before I can get my stuff. My only other vanilla option is to retain all inventory on death, which I find trivializes death. Player Corpse allows me to drop my stuff but set it to never time out, which is the balance I want -- it gives me a death penalty that I want and avoids risk paralysis.

What I don't do is tell everyone who prefers the risk of losing items on death (or, y'know, Thorfinn, who is in a class of his own) that they're wrong. I just play the way I want to play.

If you want to talk about being offended, I find it very offensive when folks come in with a perspective on the game and then actively deny that anyone else's perspective is valid. 

If you feel insulted by my posts, I have no clue how you function in your day to day life. I never felt insulted by this, you did. I have no clue where this word vomit projection came from lol.

I never said they are wrong. I am disagreeing with the design itself, not the people's right to enjoy something they enjoy. I am sorry if my posts came off as otherwise. I in fact said MANY times in this thread that this way of playing the game is valid and can stay the default. You are like an LLM actively hallucinating things at this point, I won't be replying to you again.

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, mayushii said:

If you feel insulted by my posts, I have no clue how you function in your day to day life. I never felt insulted by this, you did. I have no clue where this word vomit projection came from lol.

I never said they are wrong. I am disagreeing with the design itself, not the people's right to enjoy something they enjoy. I am sorry if my posts came off as otherwise. I in fact said MANY times in this thread that this way of playing the game is valid and can stay the default. You are like an LLM actively hallucinating things at this point, I won't be replying to you again.

Well that escalated quickly, considering I'm quite sure this is the only thing I said to you along this vein. I was reacting to this:

On 10/16/2025 at 12:13 PM, mayushii said:

Again I think you and many others here are defending what is essentially tedium due to poor game design and RNG. Disagree all you'd like, there's really no arguing with the RNG part.

This sure looks like an insult to me. We can disagree all we like, but it's still tedium, and randomization is bad.

If you didn't intend it to be read that way, then I apologize for misreading your intent. 

For someone who lead with how they weren't being offensive, you were eager to crank your insults to 11 and accuse of hallucinating after one post where I very civilly responded to a misreading of your intent.

[Professor Dragon]

Ta dah!

Chromite found using the in-game Prospecting system. (Propick Node Search = 6)

I can finally make Sturdy Leather, and hence backpacks worthy of my quests.

Professor Dragon.

[Entaris]

14 hours ago, Professor Dragon said:

Ta dah!

Chromite found using the in-game Prospecting system. (Propick Node Search = 6)

I can finally make Sturdy Leather, and hence backpacks worthy of my quests.

Professor Dragon.

See? Prospecting's fine. 

[Copious Kobolds]

"It's supposed to be hard" and "It's supposed to be realistic" aren't justifications for obtuse game design.
Bears are hard. You can learn from your mistakes by fighting them differently. Avoid them. Use water. Kite. Climb cliffs.
Hunger is realistic. You can learn that your current food situation isn't enough by reading your health bar.
Prospecting is obtuse in a way that many players cannot correct simply by observing. The number of guides giving out false information that some of you rightly pointed out are proof of this, not proof that "you're just doing it wrong."

I say all this because I love every other aspect of this game and I want it to be better. Everything else in this game is "Hard" in a way that feedback is immediate. Prospecting is not.

Edited October 31, 2025 by Copious Kobolds

[Echo Weaver]

On 10/30/2025 at 9:10 AM, Professor Dragon said:

Ta dah!

Chromite found using the in-game Prospecting system. (Propick Node Search = 6)

Awesome!! I haven't actually seen any readings for Chromium at all. 

[Teh Pizza Lady]

22 hours ago, Entaris said:

See? Prospecting's fine. 

Ironically, it really is.

[Rexvladimir]

On 10/31/2025 at 5:57 PM, Copious Kobolds said:

"It's supposed to be hard" and "It's supposed to be realistic" aren't justifications for obtuse game design.
Bears are hard. You can learn from your mistakes by fighting them differently. Avoid them. Use water. Kite. Climb cliffs.
Hunger is realistic. You can learn that your current food situation isn't enough by reading your health bar.
Prospecting is obtuse in a way that many players cannot correct simply by observing. The number of guides giving out false information that some of you rightly pointed out are proof of this, not proof that "you're just doing it wrong."

I say all this because I love every other aspect of this game and I want it to be better. Everything else in this game is "Hard" in a way that feedback is immediate. Prospecting is not.

You Do be speaking the true true and as a wise man once said

"Sometimes the small true true is more important than the Big True True."

[Zaldaryon]

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Let's bring this back to the topic, everyone. Feel free to disagree, but please keep it constructive and respectful towards each other.

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