How to use the prospector's pick to find ore veins. I know this has been done, but I want to make more walkthrough videos and I'm still getting the hang of it. So I thought this would be a simple and easy one, but still helpful for beginners. I hope this turns out helpful:

Hello, so I'm not posting this in the conventional bug report format because I almost doubt it is a bug, and that someone will give me a reasonable explanation as to why it's happening. Anyway, I've been playing TFC quite a bit recently, never really noticing anything to weird about the Prospectors Pick (ProPick) and just as of recently I've found it giving me potentially incorrect readings. Just today on my server, I was using it to find a vein of saltpeter, and I was getting very close to it underground. I was checking a block which I thought was very near to the vein as I was getting "Very Large Sample" leading up to this block. I thought I was just getting a false negative on this block at first, but after clicking over 50 times It definitely wasn't picking up the vein of saltpeter. Every single block surrounding it was giving me a "Very Large Sample", and even if it was somehow further away from the centre of the vein, you would think this block would at least read as a lower tier of sample, such as "Large Sample". After this happened, I noticed it happening way more often, and found that some stone blocks, you matter how close you are to the ore vein, just don't give a reading on the vein. I don't know if this is even a realbug, or if I'm doing something wrong, or even if the problem even lies in the Prospectors Pick at all. Maybe it actually has to do with the block that gives this false reading? I'm sure someone will give me an explanation with some mathematical equation somehow describing that it is possible for an ore vein to be Very Large, and then not be seen at all on the block right next to it. I've definitely done some more testing and found even when I can fully see thecentreof a vein, I can still find blocks (sometimes in clusters) right next to it that give me no reading at all, and then behind those blocks, further from the vein, I caneasilyget "Very Large" or "Large" readings. Even just an explanation as to why this is happening will put my mind at ease, because this is actually very frustrating when searching for veins of ore, as I find these random falsereadings more common, always throwing me off the track.

This post contains some observations about sluices that you might want to discover on your own before clicking the "spolier" button below. I used to assume that the sluice scanned a 100x100x60 area (approximately). This certainly seemed to be the case for my first proper mine and the small ores my underground sluice found I later uncovered in my survey of the area. In my second mine, I was excited when my underground sluice alerted me to the presence of magnetite and I went to work in the 100x100x60 area. Countless pickaxes and prospector’s picks later I had surveyed this massive area and found nothing. I could have set up another sluice in the stream of my tears but I hacked the lying little vermin to pieces with my axe instead. There was a lesson here and after cooling off and a few deep breathes I continued and excavated a larger area. I eventually found the Magnetite. You wouldn’t believe how far away from the sluice it was. When the wiki says that the sluice scans an area roughly 100m around itself, it’s not kidding. 100m is not the diameter (as is the case with the prospector’s pick 25m diameter) it’s the radius. As disheartening as it was to realize that you could very well mine a 100x100x60 area – that’s a lot of blocks – and find absolutely nothing, I was even more discouraged when I wrapped my head around the staggering range of the sluice. Was this area a cube? Was it a half-sphere? What it constant or did some unknown factors increase/decrease the range? Assuming the worst – a 200x200x60 cube – I grabbed my calculator and chuckled when I found that I would need a minimum of 192 pro pick “cubes” to cover the volume of the sluice “cube”. Prospecting with a prospector’s pick and sluice was like cabinetmaking with a chisel and chainsaw. Terrafirmacraft is all about prospecting and it is hard. At some point your grunting stone age adventurer is going to look down at the ground and wonder how he or she can get those precious ores that are so crucial to advancing in the game. This is the wonderful puzzle that the developers present us with in TFC and they don’t make it easy. If I wanted a game of luck or mindless grinding with a pickaxe, I would look elsewhere. I would prefer a game of skill and TFC is so engaging that I am willing to develop my prospecting skill for the hard-earned rewards. Ok time to get serious. I have 4 prospecting tools in the game – 3 when you consider that gold pans aren’t working as intended: (1) my knowledge of which ores I will find in the rock layers I inspect; (2) my 25x25x25 prospector’s pick; and (3) my sluice. Using all three tools, I start by finding where two different rock types meet and digging down three layers. Caption: Basalt on one side of the line and Marble on the other. On one side I find Basalt, Rhyolite and Quartzite. On the other side I find Marble, Rhyolite and Conglomerate. Next I dig down to just above the third layer and build my sluice right on the line between the Conglomerate and Quartzite. Caption: You can see the intersection of the three rock types. I need to dig a few blocks higher to be above all the conglomerate and quartzite stone. I will later face the other direction such that quartzite will be on my left and conglomerate will be on my right as I build sluices. In this position, I can rely on the fact that: Bismuthinite (Bismuth), Limonite (Iron), Magnetite (Iron and Platinum) will only be on the Conglomerate side of the Sluice;Sphalerite (Zinc) will only be on the Quartzite side of the Sluice; andCassiterite (Tin), Hematite (Iron), Copper, and Gold will only be within the thin sliver of Rhyolite that sits upon the other two rock layers. I fire up the sluice and cross my fingers for Limonite or Magnetite. 42 blocks of gravel later, I find 3 Cassiterite and 2 Copper from the Rhyolite layer, 1 Sphalerite from the Quartzite side, and 1 Tetrahedrite that could have come from anywhere. I then leveraged the fact that I didn’t find any ores that are unique to the conglomerate area by building a second sluice a further 98 blocks over into the conglomerate side. The inference is weaker but if the second sluice finds any conglomerate-specific ores, they are less likely to be in the area between the two sluices than they are to be in the area unique to the second sluice. Let’s throw that logic out the window and fast-forward to when I later built another 2 sluices for a total of 4 sluices in each corner of a 98x98 square and uncovered two large magnetite veins in the process. They were along the segment between one sluice and the next. Forget logic, the magnetite is right there in the square and these sluices better find it. Both veins of magnetite were near the back right corner of the square that lied on a horizontal y=65 plane. 22 blocks of gravel later the back left sluice finally detects the magnetite (a distance of 60 blocks) while the back right sluice remained silent and defiant despite the magnetite being a mere 6 blocks away. I pumped 66 blocks of gravel into the back right sluice before giving up. I felt like pointing to the ore and telling the sluice “Bad dog!” If it can’t detect the magnetite that’s right under its nose, I have little hope for using it as a tool for locating ores. Caption: You can see the Magnetite embedded in the second layer of Shale rock in the background and the oblivious sluice in the foreground. I don’t know what to make of this puzzle. How do you recommend that I use these tools? Should I pump gravel into a complex and unreliable system of sluices? Should my pro pick and I embark on a tortuous game of marco polo in the sluice’s general area? For now, I’m just relying on my observation that higher tier ore genesis in TFC seems to occur right between the second and third layer of rock, hidden in large veins of various minerals. Harvesting everything around y=60 seems cheap to me. Finding my first vein was exciting but now I’m just grinding through blocks and blocks of rock. It’s no longer a puzzle that demands prospecting skill. It’s no longer exciting. I can’t see what the next steps would be for me to improve my prospecting skill. Could someone kindly give me a nudge or point me in the right direction?

From what I know the prospector's pick once was 25x25x13 and people was complaining it was too hard so now it's 25x25x25. I'm not sure but now it's even more harder to look for ores, every time I get to find something there are other ores messing up because of it's HUGE range, and also if once I could stay on one layer and look for ores (I can dig 6 ores up and down with ease) now I need to do a lot of up down digging. Since the prospector's pick is so wide ranged now maybe it will be good to make it more specific, maybe sense up to two ores at once, maybe have mods like for chisel. Unless the point was to make it harder, I don't understand the change. Anyone? I read this long ago (0.5+ year ago), so why did it changed in the end?