It would appear there is actually no ore in my entire world

[CogMonocle 0]

In several hours of using sluices, whilst running around picking up rocks, followed by an extensive search in creative mode using a prospecting pick, I've been incapable of finding a single trace of metal anywhere in my world.

I'm using build 52e of TFC, Player API 1.4 (though I assume that wouldn't matter), and Forge Universal 4.1.4.274, which was listed as the latest stable build when I downloaded it.

If you guys want I can post a download link of my world to see if anyone else has better luck than I.

Edit: I also made a new world and had similar results.

Edit2: A ton more dicking around on creative has indeed yielded one bismuthite vein. Is it supposed to be this scarce? The getting started guide implies sticking a sluice down anywhere would typically yield at least some results; do most people need to go searching for a good spot before using one?

[Cidd 5]

Getting ores at the beginning is hard, very hard. You cannot rely on on surface rocks and sluicing alone. Until you start getting used to the prospector's pick you wanna make sure you save your ingots to make pickaxes and prospector's pick. but after finding just 2 or 3 veins, you will have so much ores its insane. I personalty gave up on searching through caves systems as they rarely have exposed veins and even the pro pick doesn't pick up much ores. My personal technique was to chose a spot dig a spiral stair case down and use the pro pick every 12 blocks on my way down. When u find even a trace of any ore ( expect for cryolite and cinnabar which are redstone and useless for now) I stop digging down and start digging in all four direction until i find the direction that the propick tells me there are increasing amount of ores you need to be in the middle of a very large sample to be very close to the vein and then u can dig up of down (bring ladders) to find it

[GismoT 50]

you kinda miss his point, i think

i think this is a bug, or your special seed. with build 52d we had a huge map (40+ players) and we had no iron (neither magnetite etc)

next map, the area we chose as a spawn was from layer 50 down to 12 full with ores,

both can happen

a good way to check is mcedit, it may be buggy (not updted to 1.3 yet) but it works to manualy search

[Cidd 5]

oh I see well if that is the case maybe you could try updating to 52 e and load a world

[danagor 3]

umm... i haven't checked my world for high tier ores... i should go into creative and far away from my SpwnPnt and check...

Good thing i did... i just dicovered that my world had no Gabbro!!! meaning i won't never ever find Nickel wich will cap me into the steel age... no nickel no black steel no blue or red steel...

I'm getting tired of renewing my world so often... cheking every world gen in creative to make sure you'll get all the ores you need to het red & blues steels is time consuming and boring as hell...

Oh well let's hope for some tips on how to know if your world gen is good or not...

And here is Crysyn's answer to my question:

"... for a good world there is no real way to just 'tell' its a good one.. I mean the first one we tried to do with everyone was 80% water... we spent around 2-3 hours until we gave up and started over? What this did do for us though was make us just be happy to have land of any kind "

meaning that if you spawn on a world that is mostly water aint good thanks Crysyn i appreciate it

Edited 27 Sep 2012 by danagor