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___Frank

Everything I’ve learned from prospecting with a sluice in Terrafirmacraft

7 posts in this topic

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.

 

Posted Image

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.

 

Posted Image

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; and
  • Cassiterite (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.

 

Posted Image

 

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.

 

Posted Image

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?

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I did a guide on using the propick, but I honestly never used the sluice to prospect. It would be interesting to make some research.

 

As for ore generation, it's planed to be reworked for buil 78, so I guess they want to make it less predictable (lvl 60 will no longer be the key to find ore)

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I tried prospecting with sluices too, and couldn't figure out a way to make it work. The only use I ever got out of it was to hunt for rarer stuff like gold & nickel, to see if it was worth going over the whole area with a propick or not.

 

I've had more luck finding different metals by just building long straight tunnels and using the propick every 32 blocks.

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@aliceingame: I had read your guide on the propick and it is excellent.  Thank you for introducing me to the framing technique of for preparing your guide. I used to have a hard time locating smaller veins but I now draw a line or curve (with redstone torches) connecting all the "traces" readings and then take a path perpendicular to its tangent in order to frame the smaller ore vein.

 

Is build 78 the same thing as beta 3?  I would hope that the new ore mechanics would come with new prospecting mechanics but the developers have too much on their plate as it is. I'm looking forward to the new builds. I personally don't find that there's all that much incentive to climb the tech tree but then again I always found the early game to be the most interesting in TFC.

 

@VegasGoat: Why do you sample with your propick every 32 blocks?  I've been leaving 24 blocks between each of my propick samples and taking multiple readings at each of these points.  Do you find that 32 is more efficient?

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the "beta 3" name could be a bit misleading, but I can give you a quick idea of the changes for 77 and 78.

77 - Introduce longer stone age, with kiln and pottery, no more plank from axe. New bloomery/blast furnace system, new crucible for alloy. I think it should also include the new damage type mechanism. On a side note, there have also been some updates to animals and lot of bugfix.

78 - Update to 1.6 and world gen update. I heard they will change ore generation, but maybe add new plants/tree or even biome (I know they are working on palm tree and moss, but for biomes, it's just what I think could happen, nothing confirmed).

 

 

As for the propick frequency, here is what I think. On a line, if you hit the block 1, you have reading up to block 13 ( block 1 + 12), so to have a 100% coverage, you have to hit block 26 (that scan 13 + 12 = 25, + itself = 26), so exactly what you said, 24 blocks beteen every block you hit. What I would do, is to hit 4 block in a row (to prevent false negative), space 24, hit 4 block.

 

However, if you want to dig branches, I would go toward vegas goat option. From your main tunnel, every hom many block do you branch to scann larger area ? If you let 26 block between each tunnel, you cover 100% (assuming you hit the wall for your reagind, it's wall + 12 block on each side). However, ore vein tend to be ... big. So if you make a tunnel every 32 blocks, you have an unscanned space of 6 large (32 - 26), so the only vein you could miss, is a vein that is maximum 6 blocks wide. And still, you have scanned 80% of the total blocks.

 

So the question is, what is the biggest size of vein you want to risk missing ?

 

In my opinion, you should leave at least 26 block between two tunnels, but no more than 32 seems to be a low risk for me. You could go up to 40, but I would feel a bit risky about it.

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What aliceingame said, regarding using 32 blocks. It's not likely you'll miss a vein. I also do it because I put a torch every 8 blocks, so I check for ore when my number of torches is a multiple of 4.

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Thank you for explaining this aliceingame and VegasGoat!

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