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In the system map, after using your FSS to identify all the planets, look for one with geological signals and a percentage of the material you're looking for (e.g. 5% nickel)
Map the planet, change the filter to lava vents/geysers/etc, and fly around the greenish/blue area looking for them. When you find a patch land and deploy the SRV.
If you want to do it the old and really slow way, that was first introduced when Horizons was released almost a decade ago... Yeah.
And if you're going to do it that way, you'll want to learn what the different scanner lines and noises mean: https://wavescanner.net/
Now...
I'm assuming you don't want to spend 20 minutes to half an hour driving around chasing scanner signals, to find 1 or 2 rocks to shoot? If my assumption is correct, read on...
Find a planet that has the material you're looking for, but also make sure it has geological activity. Take a fully loaded mine launcher, and a 3D collector limpet controller with a dozen limpets...
Find an area on the planet that has lots of geological activity. Fumeroles, vents, geysers etc... The more the merrier... Sit about 700M above them, drop a couple of mines... Wait (if it's a low gravity planet drop them at about 200M and then fly up to 700M before they explode). Open your cargo bay and fire off a couple of collectors at the "BOOM!"
Move a bit. Repeat.
Takes a few minutes to gather a variety of materials. If you end up collecting a load of high grade materials, go to a materials trader, and trade down for the lower tier stuff you might need.
As well working at volcanic sites, you can use the exact same method at Brain Tree forests.
20 minutes driving around chasing scanner signals for a couple of dozen materials at best...
Or 20 minutes dropping explosives and watching the fireworks, while limpets do all the work for you (and gather 10x more than you would on the ground)?
Tough call, I know... (I'm actually only being a tiny bit sarcastic for once... Sometimes I just feel like doing it the old school way lol).
I get that a lot... Honestly though... It works very well.
You have to be about 700M up from the surface so that the volcanic vents (or brain trees) de spawn, otherwise your limpets can sometimes get stuck (they also approach your cargo bay from about 500M directly below you).
Just don't do what I did the first time I tried it... Someone did a video, mining polonium or yttrium at one of the Brain Trees sites using that method... I made the mistake of not watching it before I went and tried it lol. So the one thing I learned that you won't see in the video (I'll find it and link in a moment):
DON'T use mines modded with the ion disruptor special effect... The range of their knock out effect is much bigger than I realised (I was only about 200M off the surface due to low gravity).
EDIT: In searching for a video demonstrating it (which has been hopeless, it's all videos of people doing it the old fashioned goober way), I have instead found the first comment I ever saw mention doing it:
Source = Harriet
I would suggest this as youre passively earning money while getting materials or vice versa. but thats just my two bits.
Some, like me, actually find it fun to bounce around in the SRV looking for stuff.
If the OP wants to bounce around, make sure you land your ship in a greenish blue area (as seen in the analyze, not weapons, mode from your ship. Avoid the solid blue areas. Goodies are definitely not evenly scattered and if you land in the wrong area you won't find a thing as you have experienced.
Once you are in your SRV, the display will, if anything is anywhere near, show a very wide arc of blips. As you close in on the goodies, the arc of blips will narrow until it covers less than half the angle it did when the stuff was a good distance away...and you will get a sound as well. Finally, with that narrow intense signal centered in front of you as you move, you will see targets appear as white rectangles and the scanner and then all you have to do is open the cargo scoop, get close enough to blast at a target and then you pick up what falls (or explodes) from it.
Sometimes the item you want is on the back side of a target so you will have to take the SRV around back before blasting away.
It can be a real challenge to gather things in rough terrain and one of the most fun things for me is to descend into a deep canyon to get the goodies, then figure out how to get back up as the SRV has a limit to how steeply it can climb.
Now I have to be careful of a new threat I didn't know about before now - Funky might be above me dropping mines!
(fdev even gave collectors a buff to surface collecting recently)
Do be mindful not to splode yourself. =)
Fumaroles etc (almost everywhere) <- mostly common grade mats
Braintrees (guardian sites near synuefe) <- mostly medium grade mats
Crystal forests (quite far out) <- mostly high grade mats
When should I be looking for these colors: During Glide, post-glide? pre-glide? When I approach a planet (in analysis mode, after scanning the planet to 100%) I don't seem to see colors anywhere....with a bit fat notwithstanding clause on my colorblindness. (I should be able to discern between anything greenish and anything blueish though)
You're going to laugh, but that's one of my other accounts ...
I referred to this method in 2021 on the steam forums.
The probability map works thus:
No colours: extremely low probability.
Speckered: varying probability.
Gasoline Green: high probability*
*Certain bios (i'm looking at you OSSEUS!), will most often be in rugged terrain near the foothill of mountains or mountain ranges. -often in desert-like biomes.
Other things you will only find in crevasses or on polar caps. -and vice versa.
Bacteria are most often found on open terrain of varying composition.
Once you have searched enough planets and terrains it will begin to make sense.
-i recommend using a notepad when starting out so you can compare your findings.
Now, once you've scanned a planet, the system info panel for that planet should tell you what minerals are there and whether there's volcanism. Parsing that info manually is cumbersome, which is why serious explorers will use an overlay like EDDiscovery, which reads and filters the information which would be available to you. At that point you set a filter for the materials you want, the overlay shows you when a planet has both the materials you are filtering for and geological activity, and then you go ahead and land on those planets so it's not a grindy crapshoot.
Alternatively, if exploring isn't for you, you look up that material on a website and then travel as far as you need to to grind it, which works. But if you want surface mining to occur organically in a practical way, you have to be an explorer, just like you'll have a hard time getting manufactured materials if you don't do combat or data if you never run surface sites.
P.S.
For all the crap Odyssey got about its new planet generation, that confusion you are getting wasn't really possible with the old engine; the terrain didn't have the same kind of detailed variation it does now, so there was really clear delineation between "smeared rock texture" and "feature you can interact with." The fact that you can get confused now is a bit annoying from a gameplay perspective, but speaks volumes about how the technology for the terrain generation has advanced from when Horizon released.
The old nav panel 'signposts' in Legacy pointing to geo features were a bit silly too, especially on newly-discovered planets. Once someone learns to read the planet scan in Odyssey, they can find whatever they're looking for.