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Rarity of Halite (Salt) in Desert Biomes


Copperman

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Hello again it's me. Well after my success with Tin I set my eyes on Halite!

Unfortunately I was unable to ever find better than Very Poor Halite readings at 16% to which I found nothing. My next idea though was the desert.

The wiki specifies only a desert 13000 blocks south will suffice and foolishly I thought that might mean were I to brave such a journey I would be drowning in salt.

Alas, after a harrowing and lengthy journey all the way to 15,000 blocks south I arrived to find multiple deserts devoid of any salt. The wiki suggests it would be directly under the sand and gravel on top of the rock, and well no matter where I searched I found nothing.

So I wonder - what is the rarity of these lake beds in the specified desert? I'm starting to think I probably wasted my time making that crazy journey and it's only a matter of time before a rogue drifter or hyena sends me back 😅

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It's not so much the distance you must walk that matters; that varies with world settings. What really matters is that you found a proper desert in a near-equatorial climate, not just a dry area filled with sand and gravel. If you see a cactus, you know you're in the right place. (I'm going to assume that you found such a desert, given how far you walked.)

The next thing you need to know is that halite lake beds do not show up on the prospecting pick, because they're not generated by the ore map (like regular halite is). And since halite is a rock type, not an ore, the secondary (node search) mode of the pick won't find it either. That means the prospecting pick is completely useless for finding salt lake beds, and you need to search by vision only.

They always generate precisely two blocks below the surface, so your best bets for spotting them are steep hillsides, cliffs, gorges, and cave entrances.

Perhaps seeing it in a visual tutorial will help you know what to look for? :)

 

Edited by Streetwind
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Hey, well that video is helpful. I have decided to try the strip mining at the sedimentary layer. I DID find some halite in a mountain, but in the end I gave up haha

Hey on the plus side as im strip mining for halite I found yet more Tin. Lucky me!

As an additional question, I know that the salt lake deposits will not show up as a node for the Prospector Pick, but will salt domes read?

Halite.PNG

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Salt domes do, yes.

Not big on the idea of completely strip mining for lake beds, since they're both large and barely under the surface. Just occasionally poke a couple z-levels into the ground and then move on for a little ways and repeat. The only reason he even found that deposit he "uncovered" was because he saw it in a cave that was just out of sight.

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I can't give exact percentages because I've not done a lot of halite prospecting, but I suspect your struggles have a fundamental relationship with what the permille reading actually represents.

My understanding is that it roughly translates to "A random rock in this area has an <x> permille chance to be this mineral."

...Except that halite deposits aren't scattered about randomly in modest clusters like most ores. Instead, you have *thousands* of blocks of halite in a single deposit.

Imagine if you took all the copper ores in several chunks and combined them into one super deposit. *That* is what you're trying to find. Instead of being able to mine a vertical shaft and pretty much be guaranteed to hit copper, you're instead trying to hit that one, admittedly significantly larger, deposit.

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Hello again, I have yet still to find the Halite, however by total chance I caught onto the trail on an ASTOUNDING 24.8% "Poor" Halite reading

I feel one of the pieces of documentation we as players lack is the true meaning of percentages for each ore (Example: 2% copper is terrible, but 0.2% Cassitertite is amazing) so it is important to me to share my progress. I now know for sure that my 16% Very Poor was NOT the upper limit of how good Halite readings can be. Wish me luck friends

223111.PNG

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And this right there is why I keep saying that printing out the number in the prospecting results is actively counterproductive, and the game would be better off without it. :PWe don't need documentation on what's effectively a piece of debug output; we need it gone entirely.

If all you had to go by was the adjective, then you would not be wondering. You would have seen that you got a "very poor" result, and you would have known, instinctively, that that could not be all there is. Of course it goes higher than that. If it didn't, no one would bother to label it "very poor". Instead you fixate on this number and get confused by its potential magnitude.

Let it go. It tells you nothing the adjective doesn't already tell you. There's nothing additional here to understand. No grand secret that will improve your chances of finding ore. It's simply the same thing again in a less straight-forward, less helpful format.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I was pretty meticulous about it yeah, dunno. That server got deleted and updated so it may be a moot point in that specific issue unfortunately

As a sort of addendum to my past struggle. On a separate world when hunting for copper I accidentally mined straight down into a dome

I guess ultimately the best advice is to stop looking sometimes.

Halite Found.PNG

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