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AwesoMan3000

How do I find gems faster?

7 posts in this topic

First I want to say I'm new to the mod, and well done on the work so far. And that this is also my first post (I joined the forums so I could edit the wiki, evilface.png)

So right now my focus is finding all the types of gems. I know since I've only played for 2 real life days that it isn't top priority and my copper supplies are running drier than the sun but it would be cool to have a collection of different gemstone types. A whole hall dedicated to them would be pretty cool later on.

In creative, I've tried dropping a bunch of Tnt minecarts (vanilla) down until bedrock was reached, and I got two inventory rows worth (a bit more because some stacked) of mostly chipped gems. I got a few flawed s and about 5 normals which wasn't too bad. I also got one flawless (an emerald) and two exquisites (one was a beryl).

Buuut I don't have any iron or TNT in my survival map yet, so I'm just wondering how do you get gems faster without deconstructig entire mountains for them?

Can't wait until the sluice is fixed because that'll definitely get me a lot of gems. And then this post is pretty mundane...

And again sorry for being a noob

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Welcome to the forums!

 

Gems are simply a random drop every time that a raw stone block is broken. Other than diamonds, which can only be found while mining kimberlite, there really is no way to increase the rate at which you get gems.

 

It should also be noted that there is no way to legitimately obtain vanilla sand in TFC, so it is actually impossible to craft TNT in a survival world. If you wish to do any sort of large scale explosions, you will have to use a Powder Keg: 

 

http://wiki.terrafirmacraft.com/Barrel#Powder_Keg

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Tested that earlier today and got about 5 gems from it. Shame it was in creative.

I am aware about the lack of vanilla (and also vanilla-coloured) sand, but can't you craft it out of the TFC sand?

Guess I might test out the actual chances of getting a gem out of a stone block. It appears that mining out all of the stone blocks in a natural boulder has an about 10 percent chance of giving a low grade gem when mined (I got my first and currently only survival mode gem that way, a Flawed jasper) and of course better gems are rarer.

Tomorrow (IRL) I'll dig different sized quarries and return the results on this thread. From previous results digging straight down has returned one low grade gem (once I got a generic sapphire which was kinda lucky) about 25 percent of the time, and lava is rare, but at the same time caves are taller...

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You cannot craft vanilla sand out of TFC sand unless you are using a 3rd party mod like Minetweaker to create that recipe. There is no config options in TFC to do the conversion.

 

I'm guessing that you got extremely lucky in finding gems so often, because according to the code the drop rate is absolutely nowhere close to 10% when it comes to finding non-diamond gems.

 

Chipped - 0.2% (1 in 500)

Flawed - 0.1% (1 in 1,000)

Normal - 0.05% (1 in 2,000)

Flawless - 0.025% (1 in 4,000)

Exquisite - 0.0125% (1 in 8,000)

 

If a gem quality is successfully chosen, it simply picks one of the gem types from the list at random. So there is a 1 in 500 chance that a chipped gem will drop, and then there is a 1 in 12 chance that it is jade.

 

Edit: It should be noted that where the stone block is located has absolutely no effect on the drop rate. All that matters is that it is a stone block. It does not matter if it comes from a boulder, or if it comes from a cliff-side, or if it comes from deep underground. There is absolutely no distinction between these in the code. A basalt raw stone block is a basalt raw stone block no matter where you found it.

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so like I detached a stone block by removing 6 neighbouring blocks and breaking it elsewhere? But at that it would be pretty mundane because you could have broken it there.

Exquisite gems being almost as rare as a shiny Pokémon also strikes me. I've been as lucky as to find three in one creative world, which is more than my grand total of 2 flawless gems. Whereas I've only found one "legit" shiny poke.

Also, I was referring to crafting TNT out of the TFC sand, but I'm guessing that's impossible at the same time.

The explosion size of a gunpowder keg is around 30x30x30

30 cubed is 27000 blocks of rock

so the chances of blowing out a gem from stone would actually pretty high. I found around 5 from one test and they were all low quality.

Thanks for the help and I'll do a bit of testing out stuff tomorrow.

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Oh, can you not pan gems from sand?  I'd thought that that was a thing...

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You can if you had a sluice, which is currently getting an overhaul and is uncraftable for the time being D:

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