PC A17 Mining

I didnt play A16 much but when I played prior there were holes in the ground and you could see on the map the cave entrance. Where are these now? I have no idea how to find veins and mine now. Please help!

 
Okay, so my experience so far:

1. All unique textures for ore have been removed and replaced with the old texture for coal. Not sure if this is a bug or if someone mistakenly thought this would be an acceptable fix for the multiple-adjacent-textures bugs. So now, if you do find something you'll have to hit it to find out what it is. Great idea. Not.

2. Overhead zombies don't dig down to you unless it's the day 7 horde as far as I can tell. I've had a swarm milling about overhead while I was clearing out the upper ends of my mine. Went out there the next day and didn't see any signs of digging on the Z's part.

3. Lode distribution ... may or may not be farther spaced. I don't have enough data to really say one way or another, but with the mining speed nerf they definitely *feel* farther apart.

4. Ore distribution in the lode, one the other hand, has changed dramatically in both RWG games I've played through so far.

In A16, you'd have a perlin worm that extended from bedrock up towards the surface, the ore you were looking for was distributed along the outer edges, attached to the rock face, with gravel filling the core. This meant you could simply shovel out the gravel in bulk, collapsing most of it, and keep all the ore you were really there for in the first place. And thanks to the yield on gravel, losing 50-60% of it due to collapse was perfectly fine. You got plenty of stone/sand out of the stuff you did dig.

Now A17 changes this: You still have the perlin worm structure, but the ore (along with actual rock segments) is distributed willy-nilly throughout the worm. You *CANNOT* just collapse gravel however you feel like it, as most of your ore is distributed inside. Losing half the gravel means losing half the ore now. For bedrock based starting structures, one is forced to cautiously shovel out an area and build scaffolding to get to the top of the gravel without dropping an excessive amount of it. Once you've reached the top, you clear a shelf out and progressively shave it down to bedrock, then extend the scaffolding over. Rinse, wash, repeat until the vein is gone. On the plus side, said scaffolding, if done properly, can serve as supports to the overhead stone structure to prevent collapse, or can serve as the framework for said support system. (ie. I generally do this with wood frames but prefer trussing blocks for vertical mine supports, so as the scaffolding gets extended I end up inserting trussing verticals spaced appropriately.)

Now, all that said... the mining speed nerf combined with the distribution change and the fact that gravel yield has been lowered substantially... every swing you take at gravel is wasted time. Every last one. Gravel has about half or less the yield stone does (ie. converting sand to equivalent units of small rock, hitting rock yields roughly twice the rock hitting gravel does) so you're better off boring through pure stone than you are dealing with gravel.) While boring through stone can be ... boring... you simply get more each swing and there's more of it. Gravel's sole purpose now is to give you the middle finger while concealing some ore you can't tell what it is and simultaneously threatening to collapse and eat it all anyway. But you're going to swing at that gravel because you don't have a choice. You want that ore and there's no other way to get it quickly or efficiently anymore.

Surface rocks are still somewhat decent, but given how few there are, you will quickly end up in a situation where travel time and random sneaky zombies/bears will force you to reconsider the gravel shaft you're avoiding.

Other notes:

A) Mining in question was done with Miner/Motherlode at 4. Our server ate its config the day before I would've hit level 100.

B) Starting at bedrock and digging out is still viable, and, sadly thanks to the gravel yield reduction, something you ultimately really want to do if you're building concrete structures. You're going to need that stone (and a *LOT* more) so get it out of the way.

C) The average distance I've mined before striking random lodes at bedrock has been about 100m so far. Still need to do more digging to see if this is consistent. In both instances, I dug a fairly healthy distance before finding one lode and then found another a short distance away, so they may be clustered together more in A17 than A16... but good luck telling what your ore is. A single lode (or vein, take your pick) may have multiple ores in the gravel chute, so relying on what you see mixed in the gravel isn't terribly helpful. I had iron intermixed with lead the last game, and the gravel only ever gave me lead, even in the 30x30 space that was purely iron intermixed.

TL;DR; Summary:

Ore is still out there. It doesn't look like it did. It's probably wider spaced overall. Getting to it is going to be a female dog due to mining speed nerfs, and then you're going to have to waste even more time getting it out because it's mixed with the gravel. Have fun! :)

 
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Wonderful news! Does this mean the developers finally nerfed the mining exploit? Very exciting, and glad to hear this.
I could care less about the exploit for point grinding that 16 had. We need the resources.

 
I have found enough iron down below mining. What I am not finding enough of is nitrate and coal.
Coal is the easiest of all materials, go to a burnt forest area, chop trees or chop up burnt embers there you will get plenty... Lead seems to be the hardest ore for our server to find.. I'll grab a shot of our nitrate mine, it looks like a winter wonderland underground *lol* in fact we have a massive coal mine, iron mine and nitrate mine.. but lead is scarce as hell

 
Here is a spot on navezgane (on stable) next to bobs boars with coal and iron.

Here

Im cheating a to find mining locations for my legit play through . turned off spawn, turned cheat mode off , block durability 25% . Load up an auger , some tnt, and a shotgun ( or whatever firearm you choose) . Dig a hole 2 spaces wide down to bedrock with auger . Back to the wall, fly up placing tnt as you go , shoot it at top, and see if any veins show up. So far best results come from groups of 3 or more small boulders , right in the middle. If i find stuff, i screenshot it for referance . if not, move to new location.

If anyones interested, id be happy to share more locations as i find them. Or , you could just check my screenshots on steam .

 
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If you're going to "cheat", just uncomment the "ore visualisation section in blocks.xml. Much quicker. =P

 
If you're going to "cheat", just uncomment the "ore visualisation section in blocks.xml. Much quicker. =P
Didnt even know there were console commands . Well, at least in the version we have, i assumed they were locked for everything but the developer version. good to know.

and im still a dummy, cause thats an xml edit. Im derping hard today.

Huh, thats an interesting way of doing that . When the crosshairs mouse over the gravel , you get a tooltip telling you what it contains. And the ore shows up as a block of the item.

 
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I am a little confused about mining in A17.

#1 – When they say that the veins are found under boulders, does that mean the BIG boulders or the small boulder?

#2 – Madmole recently said, “If you sample the gravel (watch the harvest) that is what you will find underneath. So if you get gravel/rock/iron when you dig the surface gravel spots you've hit an iron mine. If it doesn't produce a special ore, its a dud, move on.” Does this mean the gravel that is pretty close to the surface? And how close to the boulders is this gravel normally?

#3 – Are all types of ore found in all biomes again or are they spread out in different biomes like they used to be?

Thanks.

 
Found what i believe is a bug though. The white blocks labeled Potassium nitrate are dropping stone instead of nitrate powder.

screenshot

edit : Switched my blocks.xml file back to the original and it drops nitrate again. seems to be an issue with uncommenting the file

 
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I'm a bit lost here. I'd like to see how the ores are distributed. But what means "uncomment ore viz..." ? English ain't my native language so i'm a bit confused here What i need to change?

Edit: Nevermind. i found it out myself. Just deleting that part did the trick.

Also, my first comment here but been playing for c20190120120834_1.jpgouple of years. Hi!

 
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If you're going to "cheat", just uncomment the "ore visualisation section in blocks.xml. Much quicker. =P
I tried that and the game will not load with the visualization added.

 
We were on day 49 and still no nitrate found from mining. Dug 5 different mines in a snow biome near and in the middle of boulders (the small things) and in gravel patches. Nothing. I do have really horrible "game dice" so take that into account.

Finally gave up and enabled node visualization and flew underground with the editor. There was nitrate sort of close to some of my snow mines but not under boulders or gravel... Even marking the location it took 2 more vertical shafts to find the nodes even knowing where they were.

It would be great if there was a better in game mechanic for finding ore, something like an ore detector tool we could craft.

 
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