Melgui wrote:This regional map shows my area. The blue X is where my claim is, the red X is where I have already prospected.

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ImageShack.usI get no minerals both times. My questions are:
*I heard that there are mines inside caves, do I have to prospect every single cave to found them?
*Am I prospecting correctly (in terms of distance)?
*I am the only hearthling in the surroundings lands (close to southern map end), is it not supposed to be some unclaimed mine somewhere?
I made a
thread about this, although it was when I was much newer to the game and never bothered really finish or expand on it once we got our first mine.
Do you have to prospect every cave? Sort of. Caves are like a second map layer underneath the first and all the caves share the same layer. Its possible for the large prospecting radius to cover other caves and even possible to see those unreachable caves if they're close enough. Unfortunately there's no minimap inside caves, so it's impossible to know how deep one is and whether you've already covered the whole cave with your prospecting.
Caves are also more likely to have the remaining unclaimed mines, because prospecting is (too) easy and caves are more trouble than the surface to prospect. Our first mine was in a very large and frustrating cave, but once we reached it and prospected again, we detected a second mine in the same cave even deeper (and we explored until we reached it, even though it was just copper like the first). Our grid is pretty central and some of the locals had told us several times that "there's no unclaimed mines left in this SG".