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quercus_munitor

So today i made a bucket..

11 posts in this topic

Hi ther,

Long time lurker and fan of this mod.

Today I made a minor breakthrough in my prospecting business: I finally found gabbro in the bottom layer in one of my many drilling activities.

Needless to say the layer sported the infamous and elusive garnierite and I've only just prospected the upper parts of the layer.

Obviously finding garnierite means unlocking the tier 6 metals which was the goal of this world. Hence I made myself a bucket..

I honestly can't say that I've had this much fun with any other mods that I've tried. This one really does grant you that feeling of achievement by not serving everything on a silver platter but by letting you work hard and determined to get to experience all the diverse aspects of the mod.

Kudos to Bioxx, Dunk and everyone else who's been working on this mod so far.

On a slightly related note I want to discuss a bit the methods employed in finding garnierite in a newly generated world.

The first method of prospecting I used when starting TFC was very basic spiral stairs from the surface to lvl 10. Initally these spirals were evenly spread out in a mesh of 30x30 cubes. This proved to be a rather effective way of getting readings of all ores, but turned out to be a rather time consuming (and tedious) way of finding just that one ore I was in need of.

I quickly realized that getting to steel tools was a trivial matter. Therefore i developed the concept a bit and hypothesized that a change in the surface rock type would increase the chance of a change in the rock type of the lower layers. I am however very much inclined to say that there is no direct correlation but that there instead exists a predetermined combination of rock layer types. Either way, this led me to start doing two or three spiral staircases to determine the rock types somewhere random in the area with a specific surface rock type. To be sure that no change happened I also did a few surveys in the boundaries between changes in the surface rocks.

As mentioned getting steel is a cakewalk with a bit of patience. I then looked to what everyone else did to find gabbro in deep layers. The method of just going to layer 60 and dig straight ahead for kilometers on end I did try. I found it extremely tedious and repetitive and not really to my liking. The effectiveness of this method is also something I would like to question.

Having a plentiful supply of tier 5 metals I went on to be a lot more and determined to find deep gabbro. I abandoned the spiral system and went for a basic 1x2 hole from the surface and just to the top of the third layer. Not caring about ores the only point of interest became the third layer rock type. I went with the hypothesis and prospected quite large areas (around 5kx5k) before finally stumbling over a surface layer of slate, which I hadn't run into yet. Below that I found what I was looking for at last.

Obviously this could've all been bad luck on my part as I've no idea how rare gabbro as 2nd or 3rd layer really is statistically. The thing though that I'm quite interested in, is a discussion of wether the known 'plow-in-a-straight-line-at-lvl-60' is really an effective way compared to the described method of just doing a few drills over large seemingly uniform layers to the top of layer 3 to get a general idea of the composition of the three layers. I.e. is there a statistical difference in time consumption, tool wear and eventually success between straight line mining and generalization based on surface drilling?

I think that's all for now :P

tl;dr : This mod beats tetris

post-2398-0-34365900-1358694110_thumb.pn

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Did you branch off those (?, 60) exploratory tunnels into seperate mines?
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Did you branch off those (?, 60) exploratory tunnels into seperate mines?

Of course I tried that. The problem though is deciding on a layout of branches. Doing random branches whenever you feel like it serves no purpose to methodically search for a specific rock type hence reducing prospecting to pure chance. On the other hand, if you decide on a set distance there's the tradeoff to consider between getting 100% of rock type changes and time needed to basically break rocks in front of you. You could also decide to only branch off at rock changes in your main tunnel, but seeing as these changes in layers do not necessarily follow the cardinal directions you'd probably be better off just having a set system. The way I see it the efficiency of branching off a main tunnel drops significantly when you're prospecting thousands of square kilometers.

Besides, if seeds are generated with sets of rock layer compositions and if deep gabbro in your seed is only found in a few of these you'd be wasting alot of time tunneling through areas which you could potentially have elimited as not-gabbro bearing by just knowing the two upper layers. This is partially the basic problem with blindly tunneling. Secondly there are just too many unknown factors on the path to succes when using that method: You've got absolutely no idea how far the current layer is, wether you're mining through it lengthwise (bad for efficiency) or what's ahead of you.

Tbh the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that surface prospecting has a lot shorter path to succes, luck aside.

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You are wrong about one thing: The three rock layers have nothing to do with each other. They used to, before build 49, but now were one rock layer ends or begins has nothing to do with where another rock layer begins or ends.

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Congratulations on tier 6 dude! I remember when I made my first bismuth suit of armor! Good times, my man... good times!

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You are wrong about one thing: The three rock layers have nothing to do with each other. They used to, before build 49, but now were one rock layer ends or begins has nothing to do with where another rock layer begins or ends.

Just gonna quote myself here, because I can.

[...] Hypothesis bla bla [...] I am however very much inclined to say that there is no direct correlation [...]

I'm well aware of the spatial boundaries of rock layers not correlating with each other. The fact that they don't however is a rather trivial challenge to handle though. If a surface rock type doesn't change for kilometers it should be obvious that the chances for the deeper layers to not change as well is rather small.

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Just gonna quote myself here, because I can.

I'm well aware of the spatial boundaries of rock layers not correlating with each other. The fact that they don't however is a rather trivial challenge to handle though. If a surface rock type doesn't change for kilometers it should be obvious that the chances for the deeper layers to not change as well is rather small.

Oh... Ok, I understand now. Sorry! I'm going to try and read this again to the point were I understand it and come back to you

So now I have read it again, and I still don't understand what you are saying is this part:

I developed the concept a bit and hypothesized that a change in the surface rock type would increase the chance of a change in the rock type of the lower layers. I am however very much inclined to say that there is no direct correlation but that there instead exists a predetermined combination of rock layer types.

What do you mean by "a predetermined combination of rock layer types"? Because I thought you meant that stone layers correlate with each other like they used to in 49 world gen... Clearly that is not what you meant so if you could reiterate this whole quote I would greatly appreciate it.

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What is set in my mind is that smithing fever where five of us melted down two double chests worth of sphalerite using two bloomeries and on five anvils made all that zinc into all sorts of ingots and sheets. Just to free up for good haul of newfound magnetite.

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What do you mean by "a predetermined combination of rock layer types"? Because I thought you meant that stone layers correlate with each other like they used to in 49 world gen... Clearly that is not what you meant so if you could reiterate this whole quote I would greatly appreciate it.

Well, look at it this way: We know for a fact that there are 23 different rock types. We know for a fact that there are 3 seperate layers everywhere in the world[1]. This brings us at a total of 12k something combinations or 500 something if the first layer is known. The problem I have with the knowledge about the 49 change in terrain gen is that I'm not looking at 500 different combinations in regards to the upper rock layer. Hence what I'm suggesting is, that there still exists some sort of bias towards what rock types can generate untop of each other, possibly determined by the seed.

Admittedly the few 100s of holes I made in my current game is probably not a conclusive set of data. But from what I've observed I've at best looked at 50 or so different layer combinations which is somewhat lower than it should theoretically be.

In regards to the boundaries of a rock layer you're somewhat on the right track: A change in rock type does not neccesitate a change in the lower layers and vice versa. However; and this is a big however, there's from what I can tell still a very great tendency to this still being the case.

These are all considerations I'm doing with the specific purpose of being alot better at surface prospecting: If I can determine with a very high probability that the layer I'm standing on does not carry gabbro below; or that there is a very low chance that it does I can react to this in a much more effective and targeted fashion.

It could be that I'm shooting in the dark here, but I'm trying to come up with a much more sophisticated method of finding specific ores in contrast to what I consider to be rather crude methods i.e. mining in straight lines at 60.

[1]This may not be the case in oceans, don't know that for sure

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That makes more sense.

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Wow, sounds very interesting.

...and prospected quite large areas (around 5kx5k) before finally stumbling over a surface layer of slate, which I hadn't run into yet...

Does this mean that you dug your 1x2 shafts in just one large 5kx5k area that had the same surface rock type? Then when you got to the area with surface slate, the third layer finally changed? Like you said, might need a little more testing...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that it's most effective (and less time consuming) to dig a 1x2 shaft to the third layer - if it's not what you're looking for, your best bet is to go to a whole different area where the surface rocks have changed and try there instead?

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