Rework ore spawns and propick.

[thewayman]

This is a hard one to say, but I couldn't find ANY tin at all. And the other forms of bronze required T3 to break gold/silver I found some gold but can't mine it. Right now I love this game so much but now I have not found enough copper or any tin to progress to the bronze age. So now I am stuck, and I keep doing stuff like mining and looking for ores so I am almost out of copper. I am now reverting back to flint. This is quite the disappointment, and idk how much longer I will play. I feel like copper should be pretty common. After all it is just copper. I don't mind tin being rare but I haven't found any in a 4k block radius using the propick. Which btw hasn't helped me at all personally it feels like a time sink more than anything. I run up to places used it and got back "no ore nodes nearby" I have it only radius of 8. Going to be honest I can't would love to just mine and use the pro pick to hunt as well. All the videos I watched online didn't really say much but it is a huge factor of luck and if I just "happen" to hit the right rock and get lucky. This needs to be looked at or a lot of people will end up quitting. I wont even if I have to start using flint again... just sad...

[Streetwind]

This is a somewhat common issue that new players face. The issue doesn't lie with the way ore spawns and the difficulty of finding it, though; both of those are quite adequate. An experienced player can consistently find the ore they are looking for without much impacting the durability of a single propick.

The issue is that you have to learn how to use the propick as a player. For example, I can immediately see from your description that you're doing it wrong. And this part is a big, big learning curve, because it takes a lot of steps to get that consistent positive result I mentioned earlier. And fewer of those steps than you think actually involve hitting a rock. You have to understand that the propick has two modes, and both are useful; in fact, the primary mode (density search, the one you didn't use) is the more important of the two. Next you have to understand how to interpretate the information you receive; and then you have to use that understanding to plan out how you want to go about searching. And then there's ancillary information to consider, such as the fact that not all rock types host all ores, which informs where you should even bother searching in the first place.

It's a bit like fighting wolves with flint equipment and no armor without taking damage. To a new player, this sounds ridiculous, because if you just stand in front of it and hit it with your weapon, you're dead before you can say "oh no not again". But experienced players kill wolves in the stone age all the time. It's just like that for prospecting... except that prospecting is harder to learn than fighting wolves safely

Perhaps the VS team can think some more on the topic of how to lessen the giant learning cliff that is prospecting. Having both propick modes active by default from the start, for example, which is something I've repeatedly suggested. But I personally would not want the actual mechanics to change much, if at all. Because once you figure it out, prospecting is actually quite rewarding. You can make a whole profession out of it on a multiplayer server, creating ore maps and selling promising locations to other players.

In the meantime, try looking at this thread. I wrote a guide about my personal approach to prospecting there. Other people also chimed in. There's even a video tutorial, if you'd rather watch that than read a giant wall of text.

[Feone Varen]

I'm of the opposite opinion here. I'm not intending this as a rant about the game, rather a counterpoint to the post above.

The current system is really unintuitive, unimmersive and unfun, it should be changed.

It requires you to read a wiki/watch videos to get started, completely breaking any immersion or sense of discovery within the game in the process. Going through the readouts is like reading spreadsheets, except without any useful tools to keep track of this data. Again really unimmersive and tedious. Gotchas like ores having rock restrictions add extra frustration because there's little indication of this.

The only positive aspect you mention there is finding the ores, which isn't really part of the system and rather just the general accomplishment of progression in game.

I'd also say that a system that's central to the game being complicated/tedious enough that most people don't want to bother and rather ask others to do it for them isn't really a positive.

[Erik]

The ore and prospecting system is certainly the hardest part of the game for new players to understand and I think that is down to the presentation of the data provided by the propick. The propick has two modes like Streetwind mentioned, a node search mode which searches for actual ore blocks and a density search modes which searches for the concentration of ores in the general area. The node search mode is rather useless, it is only partially useful when you already are in a area you know to contain a lot of ores, helping you to track these down a little easier.

Copper is the easiest metal to obtain, but a lot of new players don't realize how easy it is to obtain: Directly under surface copper nuggets there is always a copper vein, which can be mined and processed if the player has acquired a copper pickaxe and hammer.

Tin and iron however require prospecting. The density mode will give you values of how much ore of certain types there is in the area, if there is no tin, move 100 blocks and prospect again, until you find tin. When you found if, there are usually higher concentrations nearby if you prospect around the area where you detected it. This is not really obvious to the player, but the concentrations are distributed among the world like a landscape with hills of high concentration and large areas of no concentration. It would be a way better representation if these concentrations were actually added as a map overlay that is revealed around the player in a certain radius when he prospects, so the player also gets a sense at which distance the values change and doesn't have to manage a lot of waypoints for documenting ore.

Once you have found a high or medium concentration of the ore you are looking for, actually finding the ore blocks in the ground is rather easy, thanks to the way ore generates: in thin flat disks. You will just have to dig a lot of vertical shafts down and you will eventually hit a disk, often even on the first try. This also means that strip mining is useless, as the chance of hitting the flat side of the disk is rather small. Tin disks can be rather small, but thankfully you don't need much tin, as only tiny amounts are needed to make bronze. Iron can appear in quite huge disks, which is also nice.

I personally think the ore system is not that bad, it just needs some tweaks in the presentation, like the ones I mentioned. I would also like to see alternate ways to reliably obtain ores like tin by exploring caves. Some ore geodes on the wall of caves that can be crushed down to nuggets would be a nice way to get quick access to small quantities of these resources, especially to smoothen out the progression into the bronze age.

[AngryRob]

you know what breaks t3 rocks besides bronze? ore mining bombs. So it's not completely hopeless, there is a way to get bronze if you can't find tin. 

[Aryan van der L]

The pro pick makes no sense what so ever, it's a chance indicator of ore in an prospected chunk. So it is a gamble most of the time since there is a chance there is no ore.

We were looking for gold (its in quartz under ground) you can't find it with the pro pick.

 

We were getting so frustrated trying to find this stuff so I installed a scanner mod.

Halite deposits don't get detected where they are at all.

Quartz and gold never show up on a chunk prospect so finding gold is just luck.

 

I used a scanner mod and we finally found stuff we were never going to find without it (see the attached image).

We are missing out on loads of stuff in the world since there is no reason to go dig for 3 hours and burn through all your iron/copper or run into a cave with nothing but drifter hoards.

 

The whole prospecting thing needs a rework to make it more usable and user friendly,

And make it so you can spot the hidden underground ruins with rust spots top soil or sounds or something.

 

[Maelstrom]

I agree that prospecting is the hardest learning curve of this game.  BUT, I think it's also quite realistic.  I (and quite a few others) don't think it needs a total rework but could use refinement (which Tyron is doing as developing priorities permit).  Once I learned how to use the pro-pick density mode I have never failed to find the ore I'm looking for.  As things stand I think the current mechanic fits this game almost perfectly, it just needs some refinement to be more user friendly.

[Yozo]

I suggest you create a ne world and put it into creative. Give yourself a pros pick and keep going until you find some - BUT make sure to put it into  DENSITY mode first by pressing F. Once you hit decent (ignore the %), press F again and put it into proximity mode. Now dig straight down and every 10 blocks deeper you go, check for ore. find something? Mine 10 blocks INTO that direction and try another with your pros pick. Nothing? Go back and keep going down. Did it go from small amounts to medium? Go another 10 blocks in. did it go to small again? Go back to where it says it was medium and dig up, down or side ways. Pros pick again. etc.

I always hit something like this.

[VaelophisNyx]

On 9/20/2023 at 2:08 PM, Maelstrom said:

BUT, I think it's also quite realistic.

I'd counter that it's unrealistic in that we have no indicators for the most part of where ore or valuable rocks could be that you would IRL
Plants grow in different soil compositions IRL, that reflect the local rock composition greatly

areas with things like Hematite or Magnetite have TONS of tiny speckles of it in every little pebble native to the area IRL

there's not enough pointers that don't require obtuse, opaque use of an immersion breaking tool to warrant it being how it is.

[Phicksur]

I am new to the game, but have YEARS of playing other survival games, and believe I can offer a somewhat objective opinion on the matter.

The guides within the game are adequate for helping a player survive. I have not really looked at the wiki or the website and have been able to survive just fine, at least into summer. I haven't played a map beyond that yet because I am still learning the game. My understanding is winters are a bit brutal, and I would like to be comfortably well-established before hitting that point.

That said, I agree with the folks who are saying that the tutorials are not useful PAST survival. Perhaps using the in-game merchants as a sort of tutorial system like:
"Oh, you're still using a stone spear? You should upgrade to copper. You know how to get copper, doncha? Just find ye some gravel, make yourself a wooden pan, and pan the gravel in the water and sometimes you'll get lucky and find copper ingots in there. They're also lyin' around, so you can just stumble on some. When you get 40, come back and see me and I'll let ya know what you need to do if you canna figure it out for yerself."

A similar mechanic can be used for the tool usage. When a tool hasn't been used in a particular way, the game will keep track of it and merchants will mention it to the player. If I hadn't read here about pressing F, I would probably not have figured it out, and still don't know how it works but I am guessing something like the following:

"Don't know how to use a prospecting pick? Well, let me show you how it's done. When you hold it normally and whack a rock with it, you get an idea of what ores are close to where yer standing, but if you hold it like this (Press F), you get an idea of what ores are directly beneath you. You can always switch back and forth holding it different ways (Pressing F again) to switch between the info you get. Got it? Great. Go whack some rocks!"