Closed Unusual Ore Distribution (Frustrated Koala)

Maybe I'm unusual for how I play Starbound but every time a new patch or hotfix comes out I'm compelled to start over and re-roll my character. And unfortunately this has given me some insight into the alterations in how often ore is spawned.

Initially the ore distribution for the absolute first patch seemed all right, perhaps with silver or gold being either quite rare, or very rare on low tier planets. But this was gold and silver after all, I rationalized, and it just took me a while longer to find what I needed. But now I feel like I've been dropped into opposite-world and silver and gold are both frighteningly, almost annoyingly common near the surface, whereas Copper, Iron and Coal have become increasing scarce. I spent the better part of two hours this morning trying to ration out my torch usage because I was unable to make any more due to lack of nearby coal. It's quite unusual in my mind having to go back and collect every torch you've used because you're afraid you won't have sufficient coal stocks to produce any more. Never mind what this has done to my planetary travel situation. With coal this tight I don't have the stomach to attempt a jump for fear of coming to a planet with a lower occurrence of fuel ores, and being physically stranded.

If the game has instituted some sort of individual planetary ore preference before generation, I can understand to some degree as the composition of every planet and planet type might be a little different for various reasons. (Size, Density, lack of fauna/flora and geological timescale to produce coals, to speak of real-world reasons for this) But the lack of transparency on the planetary navigation screen drives me to distraction.

On the other hand, if there is no such planetary favouritism on ore generation, it might explain frighteningly wide and regular ore 'dead zones' I've noticed. Finding a large, significant underground natural cave system usually meant finding significant quantities of ores a patch ago. Now it's not unusual to just find it full of irritating killer creatures and 'possibly' the odd chest containing a junk weapon. Of which the killer creatures might not have annoyed me so much if this recent patch hadn't messed with the functionality of shields.. Now I'm stuck hopelessly flailing and running trying not to die from hundreds of pointy teeth, ice breath and blood vomit, lacking the copper or iron to build the required gear for such daring expeditions, let alone the coal to make torches for the job.

 

Totally agree. It feels like it is easier to find diamonds than coal. Well of course it is not exactly like that but coal has gotten really rare.

 

I'm with a totally opposite situation. Copper and coal and other "basic" ores are easy to find, sure, but damn, finding 60 diamond ores on a level 1 planet is a bit unusual to me. Not to mention ridiculous amounts of gold and silver.

tl;dr: At least to me, all ores are easier to find.

 

Good to know. I was worried that I might have gone space crazy. Oo; Y'know, over and on top of talking to your pickaxe..

That's normal, right? Perfectly normal.. *mutters incoherently*

 

Also the clusters have gotten really tiny too. Seems like it's more often for me to find large 12-20 block clusters of gold, and scattered 4-5 block clusters of coal along the surface. Similarly large clusters of silver, but no copper.. Oo;

 

Lucky bugger. Be careful somebody doesn't come along and steal your save file then, that's some grade A luck. I've had three restarts and I keep getting stiffed by the world generation engine. My friends tell me to just wander the surface now, stripmine what I can, retreat to ship, fuel, and jump to next space rock before I get caught. Rinse and repeat over and over until I build up a reserve. Didn't know this game -required- being a Space Vagrant. I thought it was just an 'allowed' play style. I usually try to build up the planets I'm on a little before moving on, provided the resources allow, then when I move on I take anything valuable that I need before migrating. oO; Now I seem to be forever doing that.

 

Thanks for putting this up. I rolled a few characters and ran the surface just to check and see if I had a super-unlucky (well, super lucky if you want lots of gold!) planet or not for my newly rolled char on F. Koala. I literally had the gold ore required to make a gold pick, minus the copper and silver.

After about an hour of mining/spelunking I had over 20 bars of gold, 12 of silver, a huge amount of iron, but only 30 copper ore and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 70 coal. It seems very odd to be unable to progress in gear because I can't find any damn copper!

I would planet hop, but I am very coal-starved as well.

 

Still finding plenty of coal, but yes I have found LOTs of gold near the surface. I have only found one diamond though.

 

Its hard to tell whether the actual amount of coal ore has decreased or if demand has simply skyrocketed. It does feel like gold and silver are crowding out coal which may be fixed when gold and silver ore is corrected. It may also be that coal is ridiculously important now with wood not being viable ship fuel. The need of fuel is so great I went on a suicide mission and lost so many campfires (which uses coal) just to mine 5 Meteorites that provided no fuel except a little coal.

 

Yeah, I'm having fuel troubles too - I'm currently stranded on a coal-scarce planet. Seems like either the spawn rate for coal or the fuel yield per ore needs to increase.

 

I have a ton of copper and silver. I normally find the copper clusters right near the surface and can't resist. The silver looks the same as platinum, and I really need that, so I hit them all.

I'm having little trouble finding coal, but I haven't done too much space exploration. I've only spent about 400 fuel moving to beta and between a couple of planets. My tank is just about full right now though. I only run out of torches when I run out of wood, because you never find any of that deep down.

One thing that would be nice is a more detailed description of resources when looking at planets from your ship. Make the first planet default to heavy in the low level ores, but not the higher level ones so people can progress through the tiers. I had to wait until pretty late to make soldier armor, because I couldn't find enough silver and I never made the knave stuff, because I couldn't find enough of the lower level ore.

 

I think they should allow use to make unrefined wood into coal at tech level 2 or greater at something like a 4-5 wood to 1 ore ratio. After all, charcoal is just compressed, burnt wood anyway.

 

What planet are you on; I've yet to find diamonds, and I've had no issue after this patch (when I re-rolled my charcter, none the less) with finding anything BUT gold and silver.

 

I continued my character after the patch, and as soon as I reached Delta sector, all fuel was gone. No coal, no uranium, no nothing.
While diamonds and titanium flood everything (pockets of 10-12 on the surface, underground and... everywhere). After 10 planets, I run out of fuel, got stranded.

Well, at least I have more diamond than god!

 

Holy cow, that doesn't sound good at all.. They really have to clarify the meta that this game is supposed to involve. Are we supposed to only go into the higher sectors temporarily while fuel sources allow, then skitter back into Alpha sectors when we're running low to refuel? Until it's definitively set on how the gameflow is -intended- to run, I won't know whether bizarre feast-famine situations are bugs or 'features'.. Oo;

 

Actually I'm starting to think that diamonds replaced coal in my game, for what ever reason, as after 10 hours of play I have 563 of them. No, not ore, but refined diamonds. Ridiculous.

Also, it would be a bad game decision to give opportunity to players to get stuck on a planet with no way off, as it would basically end your game right there, with no way to progress forwards nor backwards. So it's most likely a bug/broken game mechanic. Tho, like in my case, it can be serious, as it forced me to abandon all my progress as I can't do anything anymore, and start a new character.

 

All of you forgot to read what is post in the changelog :

" - Ore rebalance (probably way way too much ore at the moment, will be fixed later, enjoy it) "

This is temporal ... for dont make the players need to go to 4 or 5 planets for crafting and test some things .

Yeah , the ammount for some players seems to be ridiculous (like the post saying he have 563 diamonds xD
But this is gonna be tweaked in the next patches , so try to enjoy mineral rich worlds

 

Not many of you have commented on the "dead zones" that the OP mentioned, I too have found that going extremely deep underground into a huge natural cave system after this latest patch is incredibly frustrating as there is literally no ore down there, just as you said the odd chest and alot of monsters, it might just be certain parts of the map and if that's the case I am very unlucky but I'm just not finding anything down there. God knows what they changed to make this happen but it seems pointless to go deep now. I hope this can be fixed soon, it was great before the patch.

 

Yeah I've been stuck on the surface in my own case, hopping planet to planet within my solar system gathering resources. It's the only way I've found that works in a reasonable timeframe now.. Plus it doesn't involve torches.

 

I was initially finding a good supply of copper and passable supplies of iron and coal, the latter mostly in very small deposits.

What I'm finding, though, is a complete lack of any ore at all once you get a certain distance from the beamdown point -- there seems to be *nothing*, like Reidman was experiencing. About five minutes of travel puts me in areas that have the normal distributions of caves, monsters, and chests, but I can't find anything to dig out.