Higher level ores - Am I doing something wrong?

[Duncan 6]

I seem to have mastered the tricks for finding tier 0-1 ores, and now have stacks of all of them. So I made a bunch of bronze picks and propicks and set out to find iron (and/or gold, nickle etc.). I tunneled for about two hours through basalt, at layers y50 and y90, and then moved to another area. I found layers of conglomerate, shale, dacite and claystone and dug many kilometers of tunnels in each. So far I have found no metals at all in any of these stone types.

Am I doing something wrong, is this normal or am I just unlucky?

Also is there any information to be had about the relative commonness or frequency of ores? Is it better to look for hematite or limonite? Is basalt more likely to have ore than dacite? Are they all the same?

I have made a bunch more picks but I don't want to just plug away at the same technique that hasn't been working for me.

[Salvatos 10]

They definitely get harder to find (last I heard; lower you are = larger but more infrequent deposits). In regards to higher then tier two metals, I've normally only ever really found minerals, with the exception of one hematite vein, prior to my current world. Though with my current world I've hit several massive deposits of coal, Hemitate and Limonte and other misc minerals all relatively close together. So not sure if the ore gen got tweaked, or if I just got lucky with a nice seed. But you're probably just being unlucky ( I know the feeling all to well (some previous version not helping there)), I'd just say keep at it, try different chunks and probably try and different Y lvls too.

If you really want to know the generation, you can look at http://terrafirmacra...mentation-ores/

there they got some techniques for testing the ore composition, and posted the data. You could look at the various data there, but I'm fairly certain that it is now dated with new ore/world gen.