More Sluicing & Panning

[lakeel 5]

as much as i find pro-picks useless >.> there only useful once your ore vein is gone and your looking for leftovers.... plus the scanning of pro pick is almost completely unfollowable its also disrupted by useless nearby minerals. in my mine i pro picked toward the ceiling and said there was a large vein of ore. well i dug up 1 block and it said nothing of intrest. so i pro picked the wall left of it and it said there was ore, so i dug a tunnel that way 5 blocks and pro picked again. it said there was nothing. then i picked around the only ore was down. so i dug a few blocks pro picked around, no ore. then after spending an hour digging a labrith of tunnels looking for this ore that just keeps changing location i never found any ore no matter where i dug.

another time when the local ore mine was depleter we pro picked around and there was only useless patches of sulfer nearby and minerals, well we didnt bother mineing them. and leter i got bored mined for then found them (3 blocks of sulfer) and pro picked around again and it showed there was a giant vein of ore nearby that would have easly been found in any direction but those useless minerals blocked the whole signal of the far bigger ore vein

third. using a sluice are almost useless as well. i set up 32 sluices in a sluice plant i was workign on. filled all of them up to full. all i got our of it was 8 crappy gems and 2 small bismuth ore comign from a ore vein that no one has been able to find. each sluice holds 50 tries to get anything. 50 x 32 = 1600 that 1600 attempts for ore and gems, and i only got 10 items, thast 1 item per 160 tries. using 1 sluice you would haft to fill it up 3 and 1 fith times to get 1 item

also small ore dispite its smaller size and ore content still takes up the same amount of coal as ordinary ore. it take 10 small ore to make 1 ingot. thats about 1 stack of coal that instantly disappears in about 15 seconds

so yeah >.> this mod is becomeing more tedious than fun

[EternalUndeath 1,208]

complain complain complain

Actually you just don't know how to prospect properly.

As for small useless crap overshadowing important ores, yes that is an issue.

But if you knew how to properly use the prospecting pick, you wouldn't have been nearly as frustrated as you seem to be. This is one of the aspects of TFC that I actually like quite a lot. Because I guarantee you that if someone threw you into a real mine it would be weeks before you found anything valuable, and even then on accident. But someone with enough acumen to figure out a decent RL prospecting technique could probably find a decent vein, on purpose, in just a few days.

For example, if you had looked up more about prospecting in TFC then you'd have known that just checking a few blocks away doesn't mean jack all. You'd also know that more often than not, you will receive a reading of nothing even if there is ore nearby, the same way an RL prospector will not find little samples of ore in every single little bit of rock he looks at.

First you find the limits of the vein. Then you find the limits of the largest portion. Then you excavate in to pinpoint and finally honeycomb the area to intersect with the ore. Not difficult.

[sdbaynham 57]

Someone worked it out and like 35-40% of all blocks will always say "nothing here" regardless of what's nearby. And of course, anything in the range might show up no matter how meaningless it is. Regardless, here's how I propick, and I think you should consider doing it this way if you're just totally clueless:

When you first find your ore sample, pick a direction and start digging. Generally the direction you were already digging will take you deeper into the sample, but it doesn't matter which direction you pick.

Find the edge of your current sample, mark it, turn around, find the other edge, mark it. Find the midpoint between those two edges. Mark it.

Start digging perpendicular to the line you already made. Just as a side note, if you find a higher sample than you previously had, just keep digging in that direction, but essentially you're "resetting". You're going to find the two edges of your new sample and find the midpoint of that instead.

Once you find two midpoints in a row, that's your centerpoint. Actually, the "real" centerpoint is what you'd find after finding three midpoints in a row. But 2 is close enough. Chances are really good that you'll have already found some ore by this point, but maybe not. If you're still not sure what to do, the proper vein is either above or below the black dot in the diagram. The thing to do is to go to one of the edges of your sample. Chances are real good that near the edges of your sample there's a spot where the floor has a heavier sample than the ceiling, or vice versa. That'll tell you whether the sample is up or down. Once you find out, go to the center and dig up or dig down. Good luck!

EDIT: As for the mod being more tedious than fun, I think there's some really tedious aspects of the propick. I hate having an entire section of hallway that says "nothing of interest" when I know for a fact that ore is nearby. And both ends of that section of hallway have samples. It's just kind of obnoxious. That said, the propick as a whole works great once you know how to use it and the hunt for ore can be a lot of fun once you're using it right.

[Sasqaucth 45]

You can vanilla strip mine, and take all tedious work out of the propick... as it can show areasof INTREST not exact locations, and im with eternal, someone said make the sluice more accurate.

[Sasqaucth 45]

ugh, you're telling me. Shoveled 2.5 imperial tons of sand last month to level out the ground for my pool. Took up about a cubic meter.

...oh gods, the blisters...

Don't remember how much dirt was shoveled, just it had to be enough when compacted to flatten and raise the front yard of the house to a point.

[Jasnatdic 85]

The propick isn't useless, it does EXACTLY what it is suppose to do. It tells you that there is a sample of ore which indicates a vein nearby. In RL there is no magic device that tells you exactly which way to dig for ore, the propick doesn't either, and it shouldn't.

Neither should a sluice which is on the surface, off of a river, tell you what ores are 450 feet below it. I would rather see the sluice determine what ores to find based on the rock layers and the ores possible in those layers with a preference to surface ores, IE starting ores.

I believe the intended method for finding ores is finding the stone that the ore can possibly spawn in and then prospecting it looking for ores, and in that belief I also think it should be the only way to find ore other than dumb luck. Otherwise Bioxx might as well just put technology in and mining radar.

[Sasqaucth 45]

Agreed, but you were a bit harsh there. i think the point is none of us want a Runescape prospecting system, and would like it to be skill to find ores and such.

[bsb23 303]

One thing about the propick that would be nice to change is that instead of relying on how many ore blocks are within its radius it could instead show a concentration value. If there were a lot of a certain ore that concentration would rise obviously but the concentration would also rise as you got closer.

[Scooterdanny 285]

Hmm, while i support this approach Bsb, i think that the devs are being steadfast with their current idea of the Propick, it's fairly easy to use, if you use a system like what sdb suggested.

[Just_Another_Guy_:) 1,066]

One thing about the propick that would be nice to change is that instead of relying on how many ore blocks are within its radius it could instead show a concentration value. If there were a lot of a certain ore that concentration would rise obviously but the concentration would also rise as you got closer.

This.

I actualy think the propick makes the things a little too easy by telling you exactly what's the ore. i'd say 75% of TFC players didn't know TFC minerals existed in real life, until they found the mod; then, how could them, by finding some of the ore with the propick, tell exactly what's that they just found? I think that you should "learn" about the ores by obtaining them, either with the sluice, gold panning, loose rocks or directly mining them. Until you discovered the ore, while the propick will tell you that you found that ore, it won't tell you it's name. The message would be "found very large samples of something...". If you found yet another ore near the first one, it would change to "found traces of another thing...", or "found medium samples of a third ore", or -in the rare case you find a fourth ore- "a small sample of yet another ore? wtf!". After some time, this will reset, so if you found this incredibly rich 4 ore vein, went back home and came back later, you would find their names were changed -instead of tin being "something" and iron being "another thing", tin being "a third ore" and iron being "something"-

[Scooterdanny 285]

Well, i only agree with that statement Just_another_guy, if steve can "learn" the mineral, by obtaining it, and inspecting it, because real miners are able to discern what ore is present, but only becuase they have foreknowlage of it, i myself did know about 60 percent of these minerals, and i knew all of the metals, although their whereabouts, i confess, i was ignorant of.

[sdbaynham 57]

If there's one change I'd make to the propick it'd be reducing the rate of the "nothing of interest" messages. If I could make 2, or if I couldn't get that change, it'd be to make the search area a sphere instead of a cube. That way it'd be easier to use the footprint of the ore to determine vertical distance and direction.

Anyway, back to sluicing, this is starting to annoy me:

Neither should a sluice which is on the surface, off of a river, tell you what ores are 450 feet below it.

It's a good thing no one has recommended a change to the sluice search distance, or the sluice processing speed, or any of that crap. No one has suggested a change to the small ores that come out of sluices. Literally the only thing being suggested here is that in addition to what the sluice already does, it spits out useless ores at a higher rate than small ores. That's it! If you can't respond to that suggestion, then go find another thread to argue with made-up suggestions. The amount of strawmanning going on here has reached the insane.

[Scooterdanny 285]

just going to put this here...

Bioxx said:

Any threads suggesting a change to the Prospecting Pick to make it easier or more accurate will be summarily terminated. In any system that I implement, I try to do justice to the folks that do these things for real. Prospecting takes years to learn and master. As such, prospecting in TerraFirmaCraft is a skill. It CAN be mastered. In fact there are quite a few people who have already discovered how to use it to great effect.

This is the nature of TerraFirmaCraft. Not everyone will be good at everything. This is by design. I don't WANT everyone to be masters at everything. Please accept this. Thank you.

[bsb23 303]

An idea that would make me fine sdb's idea and a way to make just_another_guy's suggestion work.

First off sure the sluice can drop flakes however these flakes aren't going to be labeled with a name like "iron flake" so the sluice doesn't become overpowered. You would have to study this flake and in the end it would give you stats of the flake, just the stats, the veteran miners will now these stats or have them written down so once they get these stats they know what they have found, while newbies will find these flakes pretty much useless, they still should be pretty rare though.

Then the propick should drop these flakes also, the more it drops the higher the ore concentration, so now multiple ores can be found at once, false negatives should still be possible though.

[Sasqaucth 45]

Thaum***** Research, Abort, ABORT ABORT!!!!!!

[bsb23 303]

Thats a negative captain this research system is completely different than that of the T word. Rather than it being an annoying, tedious system required by the game this research is completely optional. With a large chunk of something it will tell you what you have but if you want to hunt these metals down for easier collection, you will need to examine these small flakes to see what you got. Really you could just hunt random ores without knowing what it is but that still causes problems

[Sasqaucth 45]

Noted, still busy work added to a busy work game.

[bsb23 303]

Unless you don't want to do busy work in which case you won't have to. Or if you have all the tools you need and know plenty about these metals.

[Just_Another_Guy_:) 1,066]

Thaum***** Research, Abort, ABORT ABORT!!!!!!

I was about to like this, when this happened:

kinda sad ;_;

back on topic, i like that research system. And yes, you can randomly hunt for ores, only for realizing those 20-30 chests you got full of ores are all useless ores, gems, and late game ores used for the kind of steel you don't want to end up with. XD

[bsb23 303]

Exactly!

[Sasqaucth 45]

Lol'd at guy. and understand how you guys feel this is believable, but i don't like games that don't say: hey, here's what you got, you found this, this is this go find it.

[EternalUndeath 1,208]

I DEEPLY dislike this research system, and I will tell you why.

I do not under any circumstances want Steve to learn anything about his world.

I want to learn things about MY world. If I find magnetite, and I don't know what the fuck that is, I do not want TFC giving me hints on the matter and going 'Oh magnetite is this this and this' after a little progress bar does its thing. I want to have to drag my ass to google or wikipedia and do some actual legit research. ACTUAL research. Not in game research. ACTUAL research. I will repeat this for as long as necessary.

And I will continue to take any suggestions that separate my knowledge from steves, and crucify them with blunt rusty nails shaped like penises.

I have spoken.

[bsb23 303]

You have this research system confused with the previously suggested research system. In this case you get a small "flake" by the mentioned means and all you know about this flake is its luster and color, its too small to really know what it is from a glance. So you test it a little to find some info out. Maybe you will test if it's magnetic or what its mass is. If you really aren't sure you could perform more tests like finding the melting point or finding its malleability and ductility, this research will reveal nothing more than what you would find from the test, you have to find out what kind of metal it is either from knowledge or testing or maybe somehow a lot of dumb luck.

[Scooterdanny 285]

I'm of two minds about this one, i like both ideas, because i enjoyed researching in the mod that shall not be named, and i also like playing with my actual knowledge, as the metals i am familiar with in real life

[Sasqaucth 45]

Eternal, grab the nails >_<