Prospecting

Prospecting is a player character activity, used to find suitable locations to build bases. The speed and scale of prospecting analysis is affected by the character's science skill.

While some of the information obtained from Prospecting is purely cosmetic, most of the results can be used to determine the suitability of a location for a Player Outpost.

Prospecting can be assigned to a player character by pressing the "Prospect" button in lower-right part of the screen.

Prospecting Results Screen

Zone - Name of a region where the prospecting took place.
Altitude - How far above the sea level the current location spot is.
Prospector Skill - The Science stat of the prospector.
Area Size - The size of the map displayed on the screen. This is determined by the prospector's skill level.
Wind Speed - The current speed of the wind. Useful to find out how much energy can be generated with wind generators at this location.
- Wind Speeds can change depending on the current weather effect going on. Some areas may have amazing wind speeds during a Duststorm but drop down to no wind during others.
Environment - What soil types are in the area and is also used in determining the crop yield of different types of farms.
- The Environment is based off the zone itself. In other words in Leviathan Coast you will always see Green 100% and Arid 50% when prospecting.
Resources - The resources in the area. You can click each of the boxes below this in the prospect menu to see that resource on the prospecting map.
- Water - The efficiency of wells.
  - The lower elevation wise (To a certain point) the higher the water will be.
- Fertility - The efficiency of farms.
- Stone - The efficiency of stone mines.
- Iron - The efficiency of mining raw iron from under the ground. It also shows the location of iron outcrops on the prospecting map.
- Copper - The efficiency of mining copper from under the ground (unreachable in an un-modded game). It also shows the location of copper outcrops on the prospecting map.

Suggested Base Building Location

Standardized format coming to a webpage near you soon.

Resources

Okran's Pride, just South of Blister Hill, is often used as a starter base due to the efficiency in growing vegetables, wheatstraw, and hemp, along with its bountiful iron ore. However, The Holy Nation will not approve of the settlement if they find out non-humans are living there.

Bugs

Having the resolution at 1080 will result in the numbers from prospecting being covered by the map image. Though some say this can be resolved with a restart, there is another bug that causes the game to start in a lower resolution than what is put in the settings. The easy solution to that glitch is to simply press ALT + ENTER to change the resolution without having to restart the game. Though this makes it so that the game has the right resolution(1080p), it messes with some parts of the UI like the Prospecting window. Pressing ALT + ENTER again changes the resolution back and is therefore a functioning workaround.

Whereas this is not a big problem with most parts of the UI, some parts of the prospecting window scales poorly in 1080 resolution. This might be due to the UI window itself potentially being an image file with clickable areas, while other parts are put on top of it are separate in a sense, and scales differently.

Trivia

Up until version 0.93 at least, a character could also prospect for Carbon.