Have you had enough flipping over rocks in search of measley small cassiterites? Do you want get down to the REAL mining? Have you scrimped and saved miniscule amounts of tin and finally managed to take your first tentative steps out of the stone age? Great! Now let's get you into the dirt and start PROSPECTING! You will need: A pickaxeA prospector's pickA shovel (probably)Ok. You've probably found a likely biome with loads of starter ores. (If you're not sure, the place where you found the small cassiterite/bismuthinite/sphalerite ores is a great place to start) Now, you wanna know how you find larger veins of these ores.It's EASY! As you wander through this biome, simply right-click on the ground with your prospector's pick (or 'propick' for short) With any small amount of luck, you'll get a hit. You're looking for ANY type of sample. (Traces, Small, Medium, Large, and Very Large). Once you get this, you're 95% done! Here's how I find ores: 1)Right-click the next block in your path (keep moving forward in a straight line if possible. If not, turn toward a direction where you can walk forward without having to scale a cliff or swim through a lake.) It will likely tell you the same thing. If you found a Medium sample, keep checking each block until it changes to a Small sample or a Large sample (it may say 'nothing found', in which case, check the block to the left or right of it, or the next block in your path, but keep moving FORWARD)You're looking for the point where the largest sample becomes smaller. 2)When you find the block where the sample size changes, turn around and COUNT BACK 12 BLOCKS. (You may need to start digging into a hill to proceed) 3)Turn left or right (perpendicular to the last path you were on). Start moving forward and right-click each of these blocks until you, once again, find the block where the sample size changes. 4)Again, turn around and COUNT BACK EXACTLY 12 BLOCKS. You are now somewhere above (or below, if you are now underground) the vein. 5)Dig down until you find your ore! (If you've gone 12 blocks down and have not found it, it may have been above you, or you miscounted) This method works well deep underground, where ore veins are enormous, too. Now, you may have found only a small amount of the ore you suspected was there. Don't worry! The starter metals close to the surface often spawn in small, scattered formations. Dig into the walls around you and, eventually, you will uncover more. Good luck, and happy prospecting!

Hello TerraFirmaCrafters! I was just wondering if anyone knows if sulfur, once obtained, increases the propecting skill of the player. Following that, does anyone notice how hard it is to get it to level up? Leave comments below -iPotato

Hey guys! Just getting into TFC. Super fun I'm having a heck of a time location a Hematite deposit though. I found a "very large sample" and proceeded to mine for several hours but just cannot locate it for some reason. I'm doing basic "triangulation", and have dug up and down several levels. Im at level 108, but have dug down to 100 and up to 115. Any pointers? Thanks!

Hey guys, Perhaps this might be a bit of a silly question, i tried to find the information i wanted to know, but all i could find on the Pro Pick is how to use it and the radius it works with. The thing id like to know is what determains the readings of traces - small - large - very large. The reason im asking is cause i had some issues locating ore, despite the fact that i looked up many tutorials and wiki pages related to it. I had this one vien of bismuth that kept saying small, so i converted that world into creative for the sake of research. And saw that the vien i was looking for was only 3 ores (or 4 cant recall but not more) in size, and the tunnels i made where actually 1 block away from the ores in question. Taking the previous explanation into account id say the pick also looks at how many ores there are with in the radius it uses, so the question basicly comes down to how many ores determain the readings. Would be nice to know and to be noted on the wiki, so we can determain more easy if its worth looking for a certain deposit/vien early game or maybe move onto a other location. Thanks in advance for any information on the matter.

Hi folks, I'm still searching for Cassiterite, and finally (!) happened across two precious small surface ores. They were spaced about 20 blocks apart, in a Dolomite area (?!), atop a small, flat hill. (I literally gasped when I read the tooltip. I've been looking for ages.) I immediately got to work with the propick. Nothing of interest (except tons of Lignite and a smattering of other stuff)at the surface anywhere within about 50 blocks of each of the samples I found. So I dug into the cliff about 15 blocks beneath the flat hilltop. After a little bit of haphazard prospecting, with no results other than the copious amounts of coal, I dug a long prospecting gallery straight through the hill. Still no Cassiterite on the propick. I opened up three cross galleries, spaced 24 blocks apart, each themselves 48 blocks long (24 in either direction). Now my system precisely and completely covered a 72×72×24 area centered at y=151 beneath the midpoint of the two surface samples, which were spaced apart about ⅓ of that.And yet still no Cassiterite, even after propicking every single floor block in each of my three cross galleries and long main gallery. So I dug down another 24 blocks, just into the middle layer of stone (which is Andesite), and did the same. Still nothing. And nothing again a further 24 blocks down, over 50% into the middle layer. I've now completely covered a 72×72×72 cube, and not a single hint of Cassiterite on the propick. There's plenty of other stuff down there: Lignite, Saltpeter, Hematite, Native Copper, Jet, Bismuthinite, and even Bituminous Coal. But no Cassiterite. I suppose there is the unlikely possibility that every single space I've propicked just happened to randomly choose to report either nothing or something other than an extant Cassiterite deposit nearby. But the odds against that have to be enormous, with every single centrally-located block (within 12 of a main gallery) getting included in over 48 propick searches, and all outlying blocks (along side galleriesfurther than 12 from a central gallery) getting included in 24. Does anyone know the precise game mechanics of surface ores? Are they supposed to always indicate an underground vein, or are there sometimes false positives? The wiki says they're supposed to indicate a vein somewhere between the surface and, at furthest, the upper part of the middle layer. I've more than covered that. But what about distance on the x–z plane? If you consider each surface sample to be off-center by about ⅓, technically the coverage beneath each ore is lopsided: 24 blocks in one direction, 48 in the other, and 36 on either side. Should I expand my area? dig deeper? Or should I just consider it a false positive and move on? Gracias. Edit: I understand and respect the devs' embargo on publishing magic numbers and gameplay mechanics, so I'm not necessarily looking for an algorithm. But I think it's fair to ask whether surface oresalways indicate underground veins or whether there are false positives. And if the former, I think it's also fair to get a relative sense of how close to expect underground veins to be on the x–z plane (e.g., "directly beneath", "pretty close by", "within a few chunks", "anywhere in the area of that stone type"), similar to the relative description of depth listed on the wiki.

Has anyone had any success using a gold pan as directed by the wiki? When it comes to underground prospecting, I have gotten the hang of the sluice and of course the prosp. pick but I would really like the gold pan as a third prospecting tool. If an underground (long range) sluice yields Ores A, B, and C, and (short range) gold panning at the same point only yields Ores A and C, I would like to infer - after a sufficient sample size - that I am more likely to find Ore B in the area outside the gold pan's range but inside the sluice's range. I'm not expecting a clear process of elimination (and how could you with the inherent "fuzzy" nature of sluices and gold pans), just an increased likelihood that my inference is accurate. I would prefer if prospecting were a skill that the player could strategically develop with experience and patient prospecting as opposed to mindlessly grinding through endless branch mines in various rock layers in the mid-game. When I didn't have much luck in survival multiplayer, I started a creative world to test and learn more about how to gold pan. I set up shop underground immediately above a very large copper vein that I uncovered for my test. On the surface of the vein, I built a 1x2 channel with gravel at the bottom an a water source block on one end. I then switched to survival mode and repeatedly gathered the gravel from under the source block and sifted it for ores in the flowing water at my feet. 32 units of gravel later (which make up several gold pan units each), I was empty handed. For the sake of comparison, I then created a sluice in the same space and it yielded lots of ores and gems over the course of 32 units of gravel. Despite my search, I haven't found anyone on this forum claiming any success with the gold pan aside from using it to fill the sluice. According to the change log, gold pans should be working so I must be doing something wrong. Could anyone kindly point out how I can use the gold pan as the "sluice light" that it's described to be in the change log?

Yes i want to cheat my way to a easy-to-get supply of ores. Is there a mod/ texture pack that turns all types of stones into glass? Or anithing transparent that may allow me to see where the ore clusters can be found. I realised this is a bit difficult since the original minecraft layout is set to show a block , only if it's exposed on atleast one side. I checked X-Ray mod and tried to delete the stone textures, doesn't do anithing for my problem. My explaining why i want this: I love tfc very much but i really, really, really (really*infinity) hate wasting my time and metals on prospecting for ores. This is one part of tfc i can do without. That's because my general goals in tfc are building, agriculture and exploring (nature and posibilities). If anyone is so kinde as to give me a link or advice as to how to do it , i would be greatly thanckful