Best way to prospect?

[Smoopadoop]

Where do yall use your extract? I used to be using it directly above specific places in my cave but I've only found ore through pure luck because those places are far apart.
Do yall prospect in a grid around a certain area so you can catch the whole area? Or do you do something else so smart I can't even fathom it?

And when you poke the walls of the mine looking for ore, how far apart do you poke?

[Audiosmurf]

Can't answer the first part, but poke every 4-10 tiles on either side of the hall in your cave's soft sections and you'll find some kind of ore in <60 minutes.

[Hrenli]

Depends what are you prospecting for. Sometimes you just want to check what's underneath your base (especially when it's already underground).

But when I am looking for a specific ore from the surface I actually build a map of the surface, look for all the caves in the area, build map of the cave level 1 and have them in a program one above the other, so I can match the surface and underground easily and precisely. And then use rustroot extract starting from convenient points (which I know are easy to reach from the cave). Extract bellow q20 is useless in my opinion as it has very limited range. Just try to find better water, make better extract and then it is not hard to find where the ore is.

What kind of ore it happens to be is another question. Ore distribution (at least on the 1st level) seems to be quite different from the previous worlds.

[insanechef]

Depends what are you prospecting for. Sometimes you just want to check what's underneath your base (especially when it's already underground).

But when I am looking for a specific ore from the surface I actually build a map of the surface, look for all the caves in the area, build map of the cave level 1 and have them in a program one above the other, so I can match the surface and underground easily and precisely. And then use rustroot extract starting from convenient points (which I know are easy to reach from the cave). Extract bellow q20 is useless in my opinion as it has very limited range. Just try to find better water, make better extract and then it is not hard to find where the ore is.

What kind of ore it happens to be is another question. Ore distribution (at least on the 1st level) seems to be quite different from the previous worlds.

What program you use to match them up?

[Granger]

What program you use to match them up?

You can use basically every graphics manipulation package that supports layers and setting one of them partly transparent.

Look at GIMP for a good open source one with plenty of manuals and tutorials available.

[MadNomad]

or you can just play it by ear and draw the cave on the surface map yourself!

[budzilla]

I use this to match up the overworld/cave layers: viewtopic.php?f=49&t=41026

From there, I run around and prospect next to the cave tunnel walls to minimize tunneling required.

[Sevenless]

Y'all talking rocket science when banging rocks together works fine.

You can use MSpaint and have no issues. Just match up cave entrance locations from the above and below ground maps.

[Hrenli]

What program you use to match them up?

Used TP tool mentioned already above earlier but it refused to load some of the w11 sessions, so switched to Nano mapper (link is somewhere in wizards tower).

You could use any graphic manipulation software, of course, but in case you are not prospecting just a small area around your base the process of building a single layer would become too tedious IMO.

[iamahh]

there's an online editor(uses flash and ads) but does the layer and transparency job

https://pixlr.com/editor/