No bauxite sand

[bushmins]

Hi. Any tips for finding bauxite sand? I got fed up and went into creative to fly around. Spent a good hour flying many thousands of blocks in every direction. I found the orange areas on my map but they only have bauxite rock, no sand. I'm trying to find the sand to find Fire Clay. I watched a video of someone finding a large area of sand and they found the clay.

[MKMoose]

Welcome to the forums! If it's fire clay you're looking for, then you can find it in bauxite gravel as well, so there is no need to search specifically for bauxite sand - there's a chance that the areas you've already found have some fire clay deposits as well. They should be quite easily noticeable as green-ish patches amidst the bauxite.

Alternatively, if you're not having any luck with fire clay deposits in bauxite (or if you're in very cold climates which don't have fire clay), then you may also:

• create fire clay by combining blue or red clay with powdered calcined flint (often the go-to choice in the early game),
• find fire clay underlaying bituminous coal or anthracite deposits.

You can also consult the page for fire clay in the handbook and navigate from there for additional details, but feel free to ask here as well if something's unclear.

 

And for completeness, if you're still interested in finding bauxite sand regardless, the only pointer I have is that you will probably have more luck in hot climates where deserts are more common. Hot climates can be found by traveling ~20k+ blocks south, assuming default world settings.

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! As @MKMoose already noted, you'll have better luck just by making some calcined flint powder and combining it with one of the other clay types to get fire clay. Fire clay deposits can spawn naturally in bauxite biomes, or under black coal/anthracite deposits, but there's no guarantee of finding fire clay that way either.

It's also worth noting that as long as you are playing with lore content enabled, you can sometimes find fire clay as cracked vessel loot--the forage type vessels, I think.

[bushmins]

Thanks for the tips. My bookmarks are full up with links to the wiki and youtube tutorial videos! A lot of it is a bit out of date but still usable. I kind of got fed up looking, I really did fly around hundreds of thousands of blocks, and dug about a great deal in creative. I decided to setup a new world and found the sand and clay almost straight away. I imported the few meager buildings and farm lands I had already made (Really handy tool) so didnt lose my hours of play time.

While I have your attention, I have a question on world creation options.

I've set tooling duribility to 150% as well as some other options to make things a bit easier. I'm confused on the options for the below. Just so you know; I tried playing with the numbers but with the small increase I set I didnt see much difference. So would like the experts knowledge :D

Food spoilage rate. Does a higher % mean food spoils faster or lasts longer?

Mining speed. Does a higher % mine faster or take longer to mine? I'm fairly sure a higher % means mine faster.

Land coverage scale. Does a higher % mean more water between land mass?

 

Thanks again for your help.

[dakko]

3 hours ago, bushmins said:

Food spoilage rate. Does a higher % mean food spoils faster or lasts longer?

I was confused on that too, so did an experiment.

Smaller numbers mean food lasts longer: 150% = berries good for 1 day; 50% = berries good for 4 days

[pigfood]

IME, Fire Clay is now rare enough that it's not worth pursuing. While calcined flint for crafting Fire Clay is rather expensive in terms of collecting flint / fuel, it's still a lot less effort.