mayaknife

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Yeah, I know. I find myself asking myself that a lot.

I really don't know. The wiki is mainly user edited, and it doesn't seem like many people have been maintaining it recently.

You have to get permission to edit the wiki, which discourages people from doing casual edits. Since most people who contribute to wikis start with casual edits and then work their way up to more significant changes over time, having a permission barrier pretty much kills participation in any wiki.

By the time I get to the steel age I have an excess of one or more of the lower-tier metals like bismuth, tin or zinc. I use them for tools which I tend to go through quickly anyway, like shovels, axes and prospector picks. I know that higher-tier metals wear out more slowly and make some tools, like pickaxes, work better. But I've always wondered if the higher-tier metals also made prospector's picks any better. Have I been missing out on finding ores because I'm using cheap metals for my propicks?

I decided to check it out.

In the current game I have an excess of bismuth. I haven't deliberately mined bismuth since I found my first copper deposit, but I've been running into so much of the stuff that I've filled a chest just with the ore that got in my way while mining for other things. So I took a bismuth propick and a steel propick down into my nearest bismuth mine, dug out a fresh face of rock so I'd know it hadn't been prospected yet, then began prospecting on each rock block which was immediately adjacent to a block bearing bismuthinite. I started with the bismuth propick then carved out another fresh rock face and repeated the process with the steel propick. I found no statistically significant difference between the two: the bismuth propick detected ore 23 times out of 35 while the steel propick got it right 24 times out of 35.

Now it's still possible that higher-tier propicks work better on higher-tier ores, so I repeated the experiment with magnetite. In this case the steel propick did show a significant advantage: it detected the magnetite 23 times out of 35 (66%) while the bismuth propick only managed 17 out of 35 (49%). However, as I continued the advantage narrowed a bit: the steel proprick stayed at 66% but the bismuth propick came up to 57%. So I suspect that their abilities really are the same and I just happened to have a run of bad luck. However, I'll have to add more sample points the next time I'm mining magnetite to see if that's true.

That's too bad, really. It would be nice to be able to improve the propick's abilities. Next up on my list is to start going through recipes to see if there are any of those which improve prospecting ability. I doubt it, but it gives me a reason to fiddle with recipes.

I don't see a good reason to make a "real" grid.

I don't actually do a real grid, either, that's just the easiest way to describe it. Like you I dig one long main corrider and then run branches off of it. If the branch is more than 40 or so meters long then when I get to the end of it in I dig over to where the next one should be and then dig that back to the main corridor. (Yes, I'd rather dig 20 meters than walk 60. I'm not sure that qualifies as lazy, but it must qualify as something.) But I don't hook up all the intermediate prospecting points with cross corridors.

16 to 17 hours I'd estimate. I didn't record the times, but I started some time shortly before noon and quite shortly after sunrise the next day. I got lucky in finding ores, was transitioning quickly through the various tiers, and didn't want to stop.

I did get up to go the bathroom, but all my eating and drinking happened in front of the screen.

Personally, I wish we didn't have to sacrifice the underground areas in favour of the mountains, but given the choice, I'd go for the mountains

If the underground areas were more interesting then I'd miss them, too, but as they are now they rarely contain anything useful. I did have a seed where I found every metal except nickel in one huge cave system, but that has very much been the exception for me.

if anything its a huge annoyance having to navigate around all the "useless" items.

Why do you have to "navigate around" them? Just treat them like a different rock type and either ignore them or dig right through them, whichever makes the most sense.

I think "depth", for this definition, should be the distance to the nearest sunlit block. I don't imagine it to feel believable to have extreme ore abundancies in the easily-reached base of a very steep mountain.

I guess it depends upon what you mean by "extreme", but I find it quite believable that ore veins would be visible in exposed mountain and ravine cliff faces. That's how most ore veins were discovered in the real world in the early days of mining.

My experience is that higher-level metals are never found in the top layer of rock. They are almost always in the second layer down and, less frequently, the third.

Nickel can only be found as garnierite ore and garnierite can only be found in gabbro. Since gabbro can also host native gold and tetrahedrite (for silver), it's my rock of choice. So I look for gabbro in the second layer.

What I do is I start building a road in one of the cardinal directions. Every time the type of surface rock changes, I extend the road another 150 meters or so into the new area, so that I'm well away from its edge, then take a "core sample", which is 1x2 staircase going down, until I hit the second rock layer. If it's gabbro then I start prospecting on a 20x20x20 offset grid, otherwise I head back up and continue my road. (Actually, I usually continue my core samples down to lava, then post a sign at the top describing each rock layer and any ores/minerals that I detected. That way if I later need something specific I know where to go to get it. But that can get a bit tedious if you're just searching for something specific.)

So far I've never failed to find nickel and and silver in the first gabbro layer that I mined using this method. I've not been so lucky with gold, though. In my experience gold in gabbro is pretty rare and I typically end up finding my gold while wandering through deep caverns or while mining for something else. There are seven rock types in which gold may occur. I haven't yet figured out if one of them is more likely to have gold than the others.

Isn't it funny, I went looking around after this, and I just started digging a pit to get some dirt to fill a hole I had made while trying to pan for minerals, seeing that I broke my last pick, and I found clay finally, and not just a little bit, but a whole mess of it.

I had something similar happen in my previous seed. Had to travel a couple of hundreds of meters before I found my first clay. Later, while digging around my home, I found clay within about 50m of my spawn point. Damn grass!

Oh sorry, my mistake.

After much soul searching I've found it within my heart to forgive you. For penance you must whip yourself thrice with each of your Almighty tentactles.

I don't think mayaknife was saying we need to be able to combine them, just that the game shouldn't crash if someone attempts it, and I agree.

Correct. I would have been surprised if it actually worked. But it shouldn't crash.

I've found that individual planks can be placed as small beams of wood in an 8x8x8 grid within a single block. Very nice.

But is there a way to place a plank as an actual plank? For example, I'd like to use planks as wooden siding for an exterior wall. Is that possible or am I stuck using blocks of planks?

I've played TFC with four different seeds now, and I've never seen anything better than copper in the first layer of rock.

How do I refill my thirst bar in the beginning?

I usually carry around a wooden bucket with water in it. When I get thirsty I dig a one-block hole in the ground, empty the water into it, jump in the hole, climb back out, then scoop the water back into the bucket. It's a bit of a hassle but has the nice advantage that the water in the bucket is infinite so I only need to carry one.

I placed a block of birch planks on the ground, chiseled the top twice and front once. I tried placing a single birch plank on top of the block and nothing happened. But then I tried to place it upright on the ground in front of the block, in the space exposed when I chiseled the front of the block, MC crashed.

Crash log.

Apparently the bug has been with us since at least build 72.

It's your birthday in my b72-76 world. :-)

If you were that hard up, you could simply take a bucket of water (not necesarily a metallic one) and throw it on the lava :3 vanilla ractions between lava and water are still the same.

I'd still have to do something about the lava which is undoubtedly under the ore. I know how to mine in lava. Done it lots of times in vanilla. But sphalerite simply isn't worth the effort. That stuff's everywhere.

Yeah, like I'm that hard up for zinc!

I found gabbro on the bottom layer on a b74 world. But now i cant find anything on lvl60. Since the dirt got lowered did the sweet spot get lower to ya think?

It looks like the dirt only goes down about 4 blocks deeper than it used to. I don't think that's the reason you're having trouble finding gabbro.

Finding Gabbro has never been a problem for me. I thought it was one of the most common rock layers.

In my last two worlds I found lots of gabbro as the top layer, but finding it in the lower layers, where there's a chance of it containing garnierite, was something of a challenge.

I'm wondering if there's a bug in TFC's use of random numbers.

I planted 20 willow saplings in a large field. A couple of days later they all sprung grew up, within seconds of each other. Whenever I chop them down and replant, the same thing happens. No growth for a couple of days, then they all grow at the same time.

I've been seeing something similar with chickens. When I enter a chunk with a bunch of chickens in it they all lay eggs at the same time. They may not start laying as soon as I enter the chunk, but once they start they all do so within seconds of each other.

I don't remember tree growth or egg laying being so synchronized in vanilla MC.

I am wondering is Nickel more rare now?

Because it felt nowhere near as rare as it used to before these rock layer changes were made.

I've always found nickel to be rare - rarer than gold, even - primarily because it only occurs in one rock type and never when that type is the top layer. No other resource in the game is that restricted.

Here on Earth nickel is more abundant than copper, gold, zinc, lead, tin, silver, bismuth and platinum. I find it particularly amusing that nickel is about 1,700 times more abundant than bismuth in the real world, while in TFC I find myself tripping over bismuthinite everywhere I go.

In real life limonite is a principal ore of nickel. Given that it doesn't produce nickel in TFC, I assume that Bioxx has deliberately kept nickel rare to make the upper tiers more difficult to attain. Perhaps the TFC world wasn't pelted with iron-nickel asteroids during its youth the way Earth was.

It's "Edit"->"Use Full Editor"

Ah, gracias.

You should add [solved] in topic theme then.

Hah! Good idea. How do I do that, though? I don't see any controls for it. If I try editing my original post I don't see any way to change it there, either.