Deep Sea Mining

[kotakji 0]

Hi All,

 

First, great mod, I've been playing for several months and have been really enjoying it.

 

Having grasped the basics of the mod and been able to advance to the point where death was unlikely (I have a personal house rule of restarting if I die).  I have been recently trying to give myself some personal challenges to further press myself and decided a deep sea mining adventure was in order.  I allowed myself a season from start to gather supplies and then headed out to a point in the ocean wherein no land was in sight to build a self-sustaining platform/tube down to seafloor. After a few miscues requiring restarts, I've finally been able to make it past the first winter and start some real mining.  It is at this point that frustration finally led me to register to ask the most basic question- do ores actually spawn in the ocean floor?  I've been turning the seafloor into Swiss cheese looking for a sign of ore and even using ladders to run lines away from my platform along the sand of the seabed in 200 blocks each way to use sluices, and not even a stray galena ore has shown.  I ran my core drill down to bedrock, and the five pro picks I've run through have not detected even the smallest sign of anything.

 

So, with all that said, have I fallen into some trap wherein the Ocean biome doesn’t spawn ore to improve performance, or am I just not particularly lucky and should just keep at it?

 

Thanks for the time!

[Kittychanley 1,002]

What stone type are you mining in? The ocean biome shouldn't have anything to do with you not being able to find ore... but if the current ocean floor you are digging in is in a stone type that doesn't spawn much ore, that would explain your struggles.

[Thrainn 2]

That brings me to an interesting question: how deep are oceans? Are they deep enough to only have one single stone layer to bedrock?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

That brings me to an interesting question: how deep are oceans? Are they deep enough to only have one single stone layer to bedrock?

 

There's an issue with terrain generation that doesn't let us set stuff like oceans in the bottom half (0-126) of worlds, so for now both deep ocean and ocean biomes have their lowest ocean floors at y=127, which is high enough that there will always be at least the middle and bottom stone layers.

[Terex 108]

I don't see the point of doing anything with oceans tbh. 

[kotakji 0]

Thanks Kitty,

 

As you mentioned, the bottom of the ocean has a stone layer that starts at Y:125 with two layers of sand on top of it.  Immediately under my platform is a thin layer of basalt, followed by Phyllite and Gabbro as the next two layers down to bedrock.  I did work my way out to where the basalt top layer switches to marble and just managed to get a sample of Sphalerite.  So it seems all is not lost!  Thankfully the marble and basalt contrast so much that you could see the change in the seafloor color even from all the way from the surface.

 

A related question: with literally no prospecting skill, am I going to realistically have to be within a couple squares of an ore piece for the prospector's pick to get a hit?  I started this game with the earlier build that was resetting prospector skill and thus I didnt have credit for the mining I did when gathering the materials to head out to sea. 

 

Terex- I'm not suggesting anything needs to be done with the build with oceans (although I've seen some nice suggestions for more diversity as a side project).  Rather, I'm looking for a new challenge- which I certainly found!  I brought with me 160 oz of each food group except milk, and just narrowly missed starving to death before my first platform-grown crops yielded food the next summer! 

 

 

[Maga 99]

A related question: with literally no prospecting skill, am I going to realistically have to be within a couple squares of an ore piece for the prospector's pick to get a hit?  I started this game with the earlier build that was resetting prospector skill and thus I didnt have credit for the mining I did when gathering the materials to head out to sea. 

The way that the prospecting skills works does not mean you need to get any closer to the ore to get a reading. The ONLY thing that a higher prospecting level does is give you fewer false negatives. For example, you might be standing in the middle of a copper mine, with ore all over the walls and using your propick several times you might still get a "You find nothing of interest" message. A higher level of prospecting means you get that message less, so instead of needing to use your propick on an area 5-10 times to be sure you know what's there, a master would only need to use it once or twice.

[Udary 20]

I've found ore in oceans, not as common as on land, but it's there.I have a copper mine, which is mostly under the ocean and the entrance is 2 blocks into the beach. Don't dig up too high, when the sand caves in, followed by half an ocean, you're in trouble