How to find ores post-Survival Update

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 someone on Reddit has already published a list of all the different texture variations you can encounter in your quest to find ores.

You can thank u/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.










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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.

[Gearshoot1350]

I found a massive asteroid cluster that was filled to the brim with uranium. I did have to go 20 km in a giant sphere to find it though. However, it still exists.

[Mini_Meatwad]

They might as well have removed uranium from the game. Couldn't find anything after 6 hours of searching countless asteroids.

[⫸Lyric Drake 591⫷]

@Emily Laine: EARTH IS A BAD STARTER PLANET, its got nice gravity and has good air, but after getting just a tiny base up you get stuck and most players eventually get raided or rage quit and then you end up sad and come back a few days later having say looked at a guide or two and then your base has been raided and destroyed and its back to square one and then you eventualy lose patience (AGAIN) and it kinda becomes a cycle, and there isnt and platinum anywhere basically on earth which means you need to use the OP but expensive hydrogen thrusters to exit the large annoying atmosphere, i could make a 5 hr long ''comment'' on how earth is the worst, just do mars the white spots that indicate ore are obvious and i almost always have all or almost all of the ores in the game (excluding uranium which is used in nuclear reactors and is only found in space) and mars has a atmosphere so wind turbines work really well on mars, now i better stop typing or i will never stop :P.

[⫸Lyric Drake 591⫷]

ah nice, id already discovered and very expertly exploited mars sand discoloration and titans rock discoloration but the others are new to me, i didnt even know europa had anything other than ice!

[Amazing Sun]

@aversion, thank you!

[aversion]

@sniper cold
This is a serverside setting, ask the server owner to increase the amount of Floating Objects, or just pick up the rocks as you mine them.

[Amazing Sun]

where to stop my ores disappearing after I dig some of them out?

[Master Anon]

u shouldve played the tutorial

[Emily Laine]

Wow... I just started playing SE and have seen absolutely nothing in the game that points this out or even hints at it! I have tried a few of the custom scenarios and settled on the earth-like planet start to get my feet wet and have spent the whole time grinding rocks for trace minerals while scratching my head as to why I couldn't find ore deposits. Thank you so much!

[LoneMausE50]

is there a curtain depth?