Ragman

I found this post by googling vintage "story prospecting needs rework". My current play-through has been a nightmare. I have spent a whole real life day of 8+ hours trying to find iron. I have been prospecting and digging in the highest spots I can pinpoint after prospecting. My previous play-through over a year ago I got lucky and found Iron but this time it's been a complete waste of my time. The prospecting system IS garbage. I don't understand why people would defend it. It's not engaging or fun for the average gamer, it's a complete waste of time. Imagine coming home from work to then go and look for iron only to achieve nothing. As the op says. There needs to be a guaranteed hotspot where a node is 100% guaranteed to be within the chunk of the reading. Also, I am not a geologist so constantly needing to alt tab my game to google what "pentlandite", "magnetite" or "spharelite" means is not immersive or fun. Just show "magnetite (Iron)" in-game or something to make it less tedious. It's actually confusing to google pentlandite and it saying that it's an iron/nickle ore and then in the game it's nickle. It's also not fun to dig down 100+ blocks since you also need to bring 100+ blocks of dirt to get back up to the surface which requires you to constantly make more shovels to dig dirt since tools break so quickly early game. If ores where guaranteed this wouldn't be a problem but because they are not then I have to dig straight down all day and strip mine to find the magical "huge disc" or iron that doesn't exist. Today I have probably dug up about over 2000 blocks of dirt and and gone through 30+ flint shovels.