Prospecting for Ores

Prospecting is one of the things that takes some time to get results.Right click on some open terrain and in Metallurgy click on Prospect for Copper.It should open the range scanner:The following is speculation. Follow at your own risk and feel free to prove it wrong as this is purely off experimentation.The way this works to the best of what I can tell is that each tick adds a search radial ring to the scan. For example, the lowest setting is 2x2, the next is 4x4, 6x6, etc. The max range following this hypothesis is 72x72.To get started, use the highest setting, and scan. If it finds something, scan the same spot again, but reduce the range by one. Continue this until you don't find a result. That should give you a ballpark figure. Depending on how high the slider is without a result, I'd suggest moving 3-7 squares away either X, Y, or diagonally. The lower the scan range, the smaller the movement spacing.The mineral we need is iron ore. The best place to find this is in a mountain. You might have even been close to it when gathering your stones previously.Head back to the mountain, and scan. Keep scanning using that method until you think you've found something. Once you've gotten the scanner as low as it goes with a positive result, dig.As you can see my method found Copper/Iron in a mixed ore seam in about 10 minutes.This is what copper and iron look like:The copper is the copper colour, while the iron is a reddish-brown colour.After you've loaded your pants with iron ore, teleport home and dump it in your basket.At this point,l you may want to invest in making another basket as the basket can only hold 900 grams of material and ingots and ore are heavy.The ores will be smelted in the smelter into ingots. The conversion rate is 5 ore / 1 ingot for bronze and iron. You're going to need 8 ingots for what we need, and 40 ore pieces total for the first.