Overview
The survival update added a lot of things, but also made ores harder to find.
Where to find ores
Since the Survival Update has changed the ore generation significantly on planets, you’ll be hard pressed to find anything now. Or are you?
Turns out, all they did was change the way the voxel appears on the surface.
You won’t be able to find ores by looking for dark patches anymore.
Instead, you should look for subtle, light discoloration in the ground to find ore veins.
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In the snow, you might be able to notice yellow spots. This isn’t the sunlight, this is the ore patch.
It’s a lot more obvious when the snow is in the sunlight’s shadow, too.
It’s still difficult to find these patches just because they’re so hard to spot, especially on noisy grass or rock terrain, but you can try scrolling out your view with alt+mousewheel to get a good picture of the terrain, and you might be able to find these patches easier.
But what about other spots?
Good question! It seems
a list of all the different texture variations you can encounter in your quest to find ores.
You can thank https://www.reddit.com/user/Gatonom for these images.
As a new finding, keep in mind these spots do not have to be exactly this color on their specified planets. They can be either black, yellow, or white spotted, depending on your specific world.
In my own test world Titan’s ores aren’t even visible because of the color similarity.
That’s really all there is to it now. Thanks for reading. Hope to see you out in space, engineers.
Per-Planet Ore Distribution
A lot of you have asked about the new distributions on planets now. So far, aside from the ore patches, the only thing Keen has changed were the fact that you can no longer just find platinum and uranium on planets. It has to be scavenged from either moons or asteroids.
A recent update (Economy maybe?) has made uranium unavailable both on planets and on moons. Uranium cannot be found without modding your planets now. You’ll need to find it in asteroids.
Platinum is still available to be mined from the moons of planets.
If you can’t find your particular ore, keep exploring. Find new veins using your Ore Detector and mark them. A lot of them are well hidden but they follow the exact same spawning pattern as before.