Cave mining, dud or ore?

[Spoonfish]

i found a spot in the cave that will allow me to mine, as per strength messages go.
up and down this whole stretch i pulled out a chunk of wall, only to find stones in each one.
does this mean there is no ore? or just bad luck. its been about 40 tiles mined now (within the roughly 60 tile length area that is mineable)
do i HAVE to mine deep to find out there is ore? or is this just a place that has no ore at all.

[Oskatat]

we dont know. every place is different

[jgudge]

Try looking in the countless other threads about mining.

If you don't find ore and just rock, move down further, there's no ore there.

[Spoonfish]

well i found a second mining spot on other end of the cave so ill give it a try.
this stuff is confusing.

[Potjeh]

Just think of it as clay spots, and cave tunnels as rivers. Except you dig banks rather than shallows, but whatever.

[jgudge]

Now i'm confused...

[Salanmander]

I believe what potjeh meant was, just like there isn't always a clay node on a riverbank, there isn't always ore in a mine. The process for finding them is the same if you don't use prospecting.

[jgudge]

I believe what potjeh meant was, just like there isn't always a clay node on a riverbank, there isn't always ore in a mine. The process for finding them is the same if you don't use prospecting.

Ah.

But prospecting is still kinda screwy... And afaik, it doesn't point to ores in walls. I've prospected beside walls that i KNOW have minerals, and it comes up with nothing.

[Zamte]

The big difference is that ore "nodes" come in much more odd shapes. I thought we had found the boundaries of our iron spot, and then I dug back a half dozen or so spaces and started getting ore again. It wraps around up top, around some like 6x12 "strip" of stone, and continues quite a ways on the other side. There's a similar effect to the east side as well, where the top right corner gives a bunch of stone, but after digging further south I found more ore which again wrapped around.

All finding stone means is that the space you're digging has no ore. You could be one space away from ore and still get stone. Also, ore nodes don't seem to be tied directly to caves. You could mine your way out into the blackness and suddenly strike metal.