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Shiyokensha

Surface propick

5 posts in this topic

Hi! I'm a new player of TFC, I really love this mod.

I'm playing my first world, I just made the copper Anvil and full set of copper tools, a nice house with some cows and sheeps, and a big zone to farm. I made long travels to South, mostly because I have no fruit trees and I live at -17000, where I suppose no fruit trees will spawn.. Very cold place, but love it!

My big doubt, I have plenty of copper, bismuth and gold, so I'm looking for tin, zinc or silver, just to start with bronze, and, looking into the wiki, "ores scattered around the surface are samples of what ore veins are located at max 35 blocks down", so what is the point of using a propick on the surface? I mean, if there is an ore underneath surface, you will see ores scattered around, you can use it to know where to start digging and once you're underground to know in which direction you should go, that's my point of view, but a few days ago, I read a guide to find ores, where kitty said to use the propick every +-20 blocks on the surface, and then my doubt started, why is this action recommended?

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Blanket picking the surface to locate ores is just 1 strategy.  If you have the right rock types, it's not really necessary.  As far as tin, zinc, and silver, just pay attention to the wiki page on stone-ore spawns, and eventually you'll find the nuggets.  Make sure to read and absorb the wiki page on stone types and the ores that spawn in them.  You should have no trouble finding sphalerite/zinc.  Tin can be a bit harder in theory, but I've never had any problem.  You don't need much so even a poor vein is sufficient.  silver will be your difficult one, as it's only found in two stone types.  You'll just have to search until you get lucky and find a surface layer of gneiss or granite, or find some silver nuggets on another surface layer, because it has gneiss or granite below it in the mid layer, and close enough to leave nuggets on the surface.

 

Back to blanket picking, that's usually most useful in the case of "minerals" (as opposed to metal ores) because minerals don't leave nuggets on the surface.  kaolinite, saltpeter, sylvite, coal, redstone, lapis, borax, and graphite are all minerals that don't leave nuggets.  Of those, by far the most important is graphite, because even though it shows up in four stone types (twice as many as silver, and four times as many as nickel) it's a rarer deposit in terms of how often it shows up within it's stone types.  So between being a rarer deposit, and not showing nuggets, graphite is one case where blanket picking can be very helpful.  Otherwise you just have to get lucky and see it exposed in a hill/mountain side. 

 

Kaolinite is just as necessary as graphite for crucibles and blast furnaces, but it shows up in twice as many stone types, and seems like a more common deposit in terms of frequency.  You should run across exposed kaolinite by chance long before graphite, so even though it doesn't leave nuggets, you should not need blanket picking to find it. 

 

If you ever wanted to find kimberlite/diamonds for any reason btw (it's useless in the base mod), my experience is that it is the rarest of all deposits, and blanket picking will be very helpful.

 

Personally, I only really use blanket picking for graphite and saltpeter.  In my experience you'll find 8-10 times more saltpeter blanket picking than you will just watching for it exposed.  You also have a much better chance of finding borax and sylvite, just so you can say you've seen them (they're minimally useful)

 

Now, maybe you've been lucky so far and been able to just find nuggets, dig down, and run into the pocket.  Over time you'll find that's not always the case.  Veins have many different characters - some are very dense, and some are very diffuse.  Some hug the top or bottom of your stone layer.  Over time, by the behavior of your propick you will learn to identify these vein types without even seeing a single ore block.  This is when the propick really shines - when you can figure out by the results you've run into a diffuse deposit, that's not even worth your time to find.  And then the excitement of realizing before even breaking through the dirt that you've found a dense, easy to mine deposit.

Edited by Darmo
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Thanks a lot for your answer!

Didn't think about the graphite prospecting, I was looking for it in the middle stone layer under my house, is quartzite, so I have been tunneling, but this is a very pick intensive method... Maybe I should look only around surface with the propick. Found kaolinite exposed first day in this world, so graphite is my main goal for the crucible.

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If you have a graphite-bearing surface layer nearby, it'll be far faster to blanket pick that, vs strip-mining the middle layer.

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hi this is my first time playing tfc but i found graphite while i was mining tetrahedrite  just below the surface, maybe 6 blocks down.  my propick said it found traces so i started diging down going about 10 blocks and testing again till it said very large vain (though its spread out a lot). i almost missed seeing this vain as when i was mining the tetrahedrite  only 1 block on that level told me i had graphite in the area. It was random chance that i checked the right block to find it . So it might be a good idea to check even when your not looking for it at the time.

i just got into the copper age and haven't found tin yet.  3 days of play into my first tfc play through

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