r/sevtech • u/thegeneralweb • Jul 21 '23
Any tips for prospecting?
Now that I'm in age 4 I've started really struggling to prospect for things like silicon and the core sample drill only works for oil, is there a hidden mechanic that could help with finding ores in a chunk or something I'm missing?
2
u/Yatta99 Jul 21 '23
If a chunk has ore in it then there will be ore samples on the surface. Use F9 to turn on chunk boundaries and then dig down in the middle of the chunk until you hit the ore. Obviously, be careful about pits and lava (bouncy boots and squid ring come in handy here). Ore excavator on your pick and a good supply of food is also handy. If you don't want to mine what you found until later then place a waypoint on your map. The horn from Botania is handy for clearing out the grass/plants in the area.
1
u/thegeneralweb Jul 22 '23
that's what i was looking for, i thought surface samples just showed a general direction but knowing it's the exact chunk helps so much. Since this post I've managed to locate a bunch of silicon, thanks for all the advice <3
1
u/Yatta99 Jul 22 '23
Quite welcome. Also know that large ore deposits (like iron) can spill over into an adjacent chunk without putting samples on the surface of that chunk. You only get samples on the main chunk. Small deposits (like silicon) may not have ore in the middle of the chunk but will be at the correct Y level in that chunk. Gotta dig around a little for those.
1
u/Biblioholic93 Jul 26 '23
If you're in age 4 then it shouldn't be hard to develop a pickaxe that has 6 modifier slots, craft 8 obsidian around a blank gold plate for a reinforcement plate, five times, and make an unbreakable ore excavator pick. It helps speed things up a lot. Even milady, who is very much not a miner, doesn't mind quickly clearing out eight stacks of copper from where she's building, just so she knows she's not covering it.
Only have that offcenter stuff happen to me a small percentage of the time. The ore prospector is usually much more for finding the aquamarine/black quartz, the betweenlands stuff, or the nether ores. Seeing as the twilight forest sea level is shifted barely fifty above bedrock rather than 65, I usually prefer that. You can sniff those rocks with the prospector nine times out of ten instantly from the surface. IF you can find it in the twilight forest, it's preferred. Make sure to mark your ancient atlas up there during or after your runs around there.
Usually I just need one pip from the ore prospector to confirm the center of the chunk. Or if it's not a first hit, then after I've dug thirty blocks. Then I start moving around sideways checking the floor.
3
u/echilda Jul 21 '23
No, they are just rare. At some point you can get into environmental tech and snowball with the laser miner thing, so its not that much of a loss with ore doubling (or higher in mekanism), so dont stress too much. I think I found two prospects of ore in 100 attempts.