hand drill's ore detector wont work

[Ikit claw]

i'm new on the game and playing on survival, the tutorial says that the hand drill has an ore detector, but there is nothing

i walked for hours around the base everywhere and nothing was found

restarted the game, deleted the save, tried on new games, on and off experimental mode, checked all the keybinds , turned everything on and off, dropped and got new drills, drilled 10 km deep, googled trough everywhere, verified files of the game

but not a single signalf for the hand drill ore spawned.

is there a way to fix this? i'm out of ideas and this is frustrating

maybe is the map? i have been playing on alien planet easy start because i believe is the easiest?

maybe there is a secret key combination i haven't found? please help me

[ShadedMJ]

Everything is probably just fine.
1) Hand drill ore detection range is 20m which is reasonably short. Use a ship based drill if you can. 2) There honestly might not be much ore where you are. Ice lakes are the easiest place to find our. If flying above ground, the ground has different shading when there is ore under it. 3) Since the map is a constant, you could publish a GPS of your game position and one of us could load up a game with a better ore detector and tell you where some is. 4) Everybody has had issues finding ore. You aren't alone.

[Valen]

Indeed, ore is not everywhere. But it is within a few hundred meters/kilometers. You might just be looking in the wrong spots. Look for faint yellow spots on earthlike snow, or on moon soil. Grey discolorations of the grass on Earthlike. White discoloration on Mars and Europa terrain. It is often easier to notice while higher up in the sky.

[Exit]

You may need to dry fire the drill for the ore detection to update. Just hold the leftmouse button down for half a second while aiming at thin air. But as ShadedMJ have mentioned the handheld detector got a rather short range. If you need better range than that I'd suggest outfitting a ship with an ore detector. The ship bound drills does not grant ore detection.

[Valen]

The handheld drill seems to work just like the small grid ore detector to me. It shows down to 25 meters easily if you are standing on the voxels. Sometimes deeper. But the ore can be much deeper. Well down to 100m for some of them.

[Blueberry Muffins!]

The survival game doesn't give you a lot of low-hanging fruit, you have to get clever with your tools. I'm pretty sure the different drop points are chosen for their variety of challenges, they're not random. I don't think I've ever found iron close by for instance, not in the ground, I do remember an iron meteorite just sitting there winking at me ridiculously close, less than 1km away on the plains once.

The game's heavily larded with hints, even the "unknown signal" drops serve as hints. Pay attention, think about everything you see, get inventive, have faith. Some people will tell you to dodge 1-1-1-1-1-1 starts, I'm telling you when you're ready, you won't have to. You could even start there if you've got faith enough and time.

[Ikit claw]

thanks so very much everyone! i will keep looking!

and thanks to Valen for telling me exactly what to look for! and shadedMJ for reassuring me that this wasn't a bug!

[Dan2D3D]

Hi, I see Veteran players shared the important and wanted to add some good Tips.

Explore the ice lakes, a lot are Rich ore spots of the game, that is where all ores of the Planet can be found within 1Km.

No need of ore detector on sand soil, just look for white patches :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3118175304
And black patches on ice lakes :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3118176883

[A Fat, Angry Serval]

Originally posted by Dan2D3D:

Hi, I see Veteran players shared the important and wanted to add some good Tips.

Explore the ice lakes, a lot are Rich ore spots of the game, that is where all ores of the Planet can be found within 1Km.

No need of ore detector on sand soil, just look for white patches :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3118175304
And black patches on ice lakes :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3118176883

This is unfortunately only useful if you either 1. manage to land close to these areas on initial spawn-in or 2. have a way to get there, which requires you to have already built at least a small-grid atmospheric hauler, which can't be done without metal grids which require cobalt. And if you get a bad spawn with no nearby cobalt and no easy trading post access (which happens to me around 70% of the time), you're basically screwed at that point.

Honestly, the metal grid requirement for flat atmospheric thrusters at the very least needs to go. Rovers are more often than not a liability more than anything else due to vanilla terrain generation resulting in extremely rough terrain, so being able to have some sort of aircraft pre-cobalt even if it's just a runabout without any cargo capacity would be a massive help for a lot of situations.

[Valen]

Originally posted by Ikit claw WARLOCK ENGINEER:

thanks so very much everyone! i will keep looking!

and thanks to Valen for telling me exactly what to look for! and shadedMJ for reassuring me that this wasn't a bug!

I even have a post showing screenshot examples. But I can't for the life of me find it again.

[Valen]

Originally posted by A Fat, Angry Serval:

...
This is unfortunately only useful if you either 1. manage to land close to these areas on initial spawn-in or 2. have a way to get there, which requires you to have already built at least a small-grid atmospheric hauler, which can't be done without metal grids which require cobalt. And if you get a bad spawn with no nearby cobalt and no easy trading post access (which happens to me around 70% of the time), you're basically screwed at that point.

Honestly, the metal grid requirement for flat atmospheric thrusters at the very least needs to go. Rovers are more often than not a liability more than anything else due to vanilla terrain generation resulting in extremely rough terrain, so being able to have some sort of aircraft pre-cobalt even if it's just a runabout without any cargo capacity would be a massive help for a lot of situations.

Well, if you gut your small grid drop pod a bit. And know what is required for a flying grid, you can rebuild it to make it flyable with the least amount of digging and refining stone. You can make a remote control block, gyro, antenna to wireless ly control your droppod from your seat. And you can sacrifice a few of the atmospheric thrusters to make them. Even replace a few of them in sideways or thrust forward direction to make steering easier. But you will need to do it in the right order as the progression path might block you. When you got this all done you can fly your ship a bit like a helicopter until you notice ore spots from up high and land there. It's tricky though.

[Dan2D3D]

Originally posted by A Fat, Angry Serval:

This is unfortunately only useful if you either 1. manage to land close to these areas on initial spawn-in or 2. have a way to get there ...

Good point, I should have specified that we can choose where we want to spawn and it is in the Official Video Tutos in-game F1.

Hit F5 when falling with the DropPod, that will reload the world with the same DropPod and land at another area, redo till you land at a Rich ore spot or Easy Biome.

The Desert where there is a ice lake is the best place to build your first respawn station, it is the Easy Biome of the Earth planet.


_________________

Do the following if the F5 Respawn at another area is not working, happens when playing with auto-respawn enabled and/or auto-save :

1 - Turn Off the Survival Kit on your Drop Pod / Respawnship.
(so you will not auto-respawn there)

2 - Hit the Backspace key to kill your character and open the respawn window.

3 - Select the same respawn ship to respawn at another area.

4 - Redo the above till you land at a ice lake, snowy Pole or at the Easy Biome of the planet.


EDIT
Sorry corrections made.

[Dan2D3D]

I will add :

Creative players, so the ones where the survival is too slow for them, prefer to start on one of the Moons especially to find all ores faster and be able to buiild the best ship concepts of the game very early in survival.

Moons have all ores -1 that is Uranium but a lot can be found faster by exploring the asteroids around all Moons.

EDIT
May also buy what we need at the Trade Stations very early because they are closer on the Moons.

[Dan2D3D]

Gift

Here some Rich ore spots of Earth Planet in the custom world named Star System :

GPS:Earth Easy Biome:48784.05:-5056.35:34844.1:

GPS:Earth Desert ice lake:-10568.09:-10242.01:58045.57:#FF75C9F1:

GPS:Earth to Moon:14057.55:52954.06:-27358.68:#FFFFEC5F:


___

Note
Custom worlds are all the same on creating new so the GPS coords of the Rich ore spots.

[Dan2D3D]

Sorry for the multipost but keep in mind the following :

Rich ore spots = Where all ores can be found close to each other, some areas have all ores within 1 Km.

Easy Biome = Where the Ore Detector block is not needed because we can see the ore spots with the naked eye on the soil and no "Bad weather" so no lightning.

Medium Biome = Green grass Biomes because it is harder to see the ore spots on the soil and those have lightning that can damage your creations where you will have to build lightning Rods and Safe Zone (station shield).

Hard Biome = Where there are more lightnings with bad weather and where the large block Ore Detector is needed.

[Candarian]

i drill in the air every few sec
i feel like that re-start the inbuild ore detector somehow
it sometimes show ore that wasnt there befor that way
but it might be absolutely my imagination too :P