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WingedRayeth

Gold Panning

18 posts in this topic

I'm getting started into this because I need ores. So far it seems to work pretty well to get the native nuggets, though now I'm curious what the limitations are on it. I know one of the posts said that you'll need to move to a new chunk eventually, but I'm wondering just when that might be.

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Even with surface nuggets being visible now, panning seems to be the faster option for the early game. I'm sad that panning works equally well everywhere now. It seems intuitive that if you find nuggets lying around then panning nearby should provide the same type of material.

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Yeah, I'm not sure the reasoning behind it, but it seems more useful than finding nuggets. In my current wold I only found 5 copper nuggets, but I have been able to pan quite a bunch now. It seems you can get quite a few nuggets too, I'm on my second chunk in my current world, and I have about 30 nuggets from panning alone.

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It does sound like it's the go-to method of getting early copper now.

 

I hope in the future once they've remastered the sluice mechanics it will work like a mobile version of that - scan a large area around with a chance of providing a small piece of that ore.

 

It would make it more of a prospecting tool than an automatic free (but slow) source of copper/gold/silver.

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there will be a message if you over pan a chunk

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It does sound like it's the go-to method of getting early copper now.

 

I hope in the future once they've remastered the sluice mechanics it will work like a mobile version of that - scan a large area around with a chance of providing a small piece of that ore.

 

It would make it more of a prospecting tool than an automatic free (but slow) source of copper/gold/silver.

 

It's actually going the other way around. The sluice will be a larger version of the current gold pan. The logic behind not making it scan the environment around it is to A. Prevent infinite of a hard to fine ore by just plopping a sluice down next to a vein of it and B. Reduce the amount of lag that was caused by the sluice constantly scanning the area around it.

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It's actually going the other way around. The sluice will be a larger version of the current gold pan. The logic behind not making it scan the environment around it is to A. Prevent infinite of a hard to fine ore by just plopping a sluice down next to a vein of it and B. Reduce the amount of lag that was caused by the sluice constantly scanning the area around it.

 

 

So why couldn't you write in a cap on metal nuggets found in a specific sediment bed or stream, that's actually coorelated with nearby mineral deposits?

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So why couldn't you write in a cap on metal nuggets found in a specific sediment bed or stream, that's actually coorelated with nearby mineral deposits?

 

Because you can fill your pan anywhere now, not just in river/ocean biomes. It doesn't make much sense for you to get your gravel from chunk X, but then when you actually sift the gravel in the water, the game scans chunk Y for materials.

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What about scanning the area on pickup and tagging the gold pan with the possible metal types? To prevent people placing new gravel in an area with rare metals you could have a separate subtype for naturally spawned gravel vs. placed gravel. Then you could do something similar with buckets to load up a sluice.

 

- You get the metals from the area near where you picked up the gravel, not where you process it

- Prevents infinite production because you can only use the gravel that naturally spawned there

- Only need to scan the area when the gravel is picked up

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Adding tags like that would make it so that gravel wouldn't be able to stack in the player's inventory. Plus it's an overly complicated system when the currently implemented one is honestly working just fine for its purpose.. which is an early way for players to gather materials when they can't find any nearby.

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I meant tagging the gold pan with the gravel in it, which already doesn't stack. Or using something like a bucket to pick up gravel for the sluice, which could be tagged the same way.

 

The point about not making it overly complicated makes sense though.

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There would have to be a tag on the gravel block as well to determine whether it was naturally generated or placed. And the only way that blocks (not their item versions) can have these tags is to turn them into non-ticking tile entities, which are fairly resource heavy compared to their boring block counterparts.

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You don't have to make them tile entities, you could use two different block IDs or block subtypes for natural vs. placed gravel. Then you make the natural gravel block drop an item of the placed gravel type when broken.

 

Sorry to keep posting about this, I just wanted to clear up what I was saying. I get the idea that you're not interested so I'll stop. I just liked the idea of using the gold pan and sluice as a prospecting tool, which is gone now. I guess it's not really necessary since you can see ores on the ground now.

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I've been getting ores at lightning speed (sometimes). I'll find the intersection of chunk boundaries (4 is best, but at least 2) near a water source. Then a simple "floating" thatch wall keeps me safe if needed, and I have four chunks to draw from in one spot. Like ice fishing. Ever since I figured out  you can sift your pan on the same gravel block you filled it (just keep right MB held down), my rate has improved 2-fold. 

 

I have noticed that some chunks just have nothing. I'll pan to exhaustion and still have nothing. I recall reading that each chunk has at a 100% chance of platinum, but I don't even get that. (maybe there's a 100% chance that it has platinum, but a low chance of actually getting it, so it seems barren with my limited sample size?) Then I'll move one chunk over and get over 20 ore: copper silver and gold. I did notice at one site that the ore was spawning a few blocks away, outside my protective thatch shelter. I don't think that's what's going on all the time, because I scour the area now since that experience. Maybe they're spawning underground? Maybe some chunks just have no ore?

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I'm really(99.99%) sure that gold panning has nothing to do with what chunks have what metal and is just a random thing

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After increasing my sample size a bit, I am more sure of my parenthesized assumption. Some of the chunks yielded nothing, while some of them seemed to yield nothing, but would ultimately spit out one or two platinum. It now seems from my experience that each chunk has a chance to yield copper, gold, and silver, and will always yield platinum. However, given the presence of the ore, each pan is most likely to yield copper, less but equally likely to yield gold and silver, and unlikely to yield platinum. It almost seems custom tailored to Black Bronze, since in a chunk where all metals are present, I will often get near the proper ratio for BB, about 6 / 2 / 2 plus some junk plat.

 

Seems like with 100 pans in a chunk, you'll get around 6 / 2 / 2 / 1 each of copper, silver, gold, and platinum, with a deviation of about 4 each. It doesn't seem to matter what other ores are present. So if a chunk only has platinum, you'll get 0-3 total ores for your effort. But if a chunk has platinum AND copper, you'll get 0-3 plat, AND 4-10 copper.

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I'm really(99.99%) sure that gold panning has nothing to do with what chunks have what metal and is just a random thing

 

Good thing you didn't say 100% sure. :P From the 78.10 Changelog:

 

  • The goldpan now operates on a grid similar to crops. This grid determines the types of metals available. Chunks have a 75% chance to contain copper, 50% silver, 25% Gold and 100% Platinum. This amount is only determines if the chunk can provide these metals, the chances to actually retrieve these metals remain the same.
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After increasing my sample size a bit, I am more sure of my parenthesized assumption. Some of the chunks yielded nothing, while some of them seemed to yield nothing, but would ultimately spit out one or two platinum. It now seems from my experience that each chunk has a chance to yield copper, gold, and silver, and will always yield platinum. However, given the presence of the ore, each pan is most likely to yield copper, less but equally likely to yield gold and silver, and unlikely to yield platinum. It almost seems custom tailored to Black Bronze, since in a chunk where all metals are present, I will often get near the proper ratio for BB, about 6 / 2 / 2 plus some junk plat.

 

Seems like with 100 pans in a chunk, you'll get around 6 / 2 / 2 / 1 each of copper, silver, gold, and platinum, with a deviation of about 4 each. It doesn't seem to matter what other ores are present. So if a chunk only has platinum, you'll get 0-3 total ores for your effort. But if a chunk has platinum AND copper, you'll get 0-3 plat, AND 4-10 copper.

 

I won't show the exact numbers, but just to give an idea: Before the grid was implemented (every chunk could give every metal) There was about a 2% chance of copper and less than 0.5% chance for platinum, with silver and gold between that for every time you used the gold pan.

 

Those percentages are just barely altered with the implementation of the chunk grid.

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