Gem hunter credo too hard comparable to its counterparts?

[proknah]

So I started doing my 3rd credo and I chose gem hunter.
Possible quests for this credo http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Credos#Gem_Hunter

I've been mining a lot, including mining on level 2 and so far I've found only 3(!) gems.
Is this how it's supposed to be or am I doing something worng?

[Dakkan]

You should wait on gem hunter until you can reliably find gems.

If you can't find gems then it'll be a nightmare, once you have several different gem nodes it'll be a breeze.

[proknah]

You're saying I should abandon this credo for a while and choose another instead?
And what do you mean by gem nodes? Are there nodes that drop only gems?

[Dakkan]

Yeah, you should pick a credo for something you can do the quests for.

Gems appear in areas, so if you found a diamond somewhere you could dig out more tiles in the area and find more diamonds. The closer to the surface you are, the fewer the gems. As you get deeper though these areas will have more and more gems.

Here is a place from W10, level 5 that had an overlapping jade and opal gem node, and I paved every spot I found a gem.


But on level 1 there would probably be only 5 gems in the same sized area. So for gem hunter, you want to wait until you have a deeper, more developed mine and several different locations of different gemstones. It will be much easier then.

[Sevenless]

Not all credos are early game activities, they don't particularly warn you about which ones are going to faceroll you.