

The first thing you will have to look out for is dark spots on any planet's surface as these places are where ores will spawn as shown below: In Space Engineers finding ore is made a lot easier by following the below instructions. Ore is needed to build new features on your ships and stations and so finding the right ore becomes extra important in trying to create your ideal projects. One of the most important activities you must complete in order to progress in Space Engineers is finding ore. See the images and descriptions in the table below for more information on each ore. However, once you have identified the vein you wish to obtain, it can often be more effective to rely on sight to guide your mining, and so a Spotlight is almost always useful for this purpose, to more easily see where one vein ends and another begins. This will put the name of the ore on the HUD in approximately the center of the ore patch. The Hand Drill has a small Ore Detector built in, whereas a ship-based Ore Detector has a larger detection radius. It is for this reason that an Ore Detector is always highly recommended for the initial identification process. Identifying ore patches purely by sight can be frustrating, especially if there are two similar ores next to one another (such as Platinum and Silicon). This means that if the deposit is curved or elongated the marker might be off to one side somewhere (and potentially 'out of range' of the detector), and if it's a small deposit it might be simply overruled by the marker of a much bigger one that's close. My understanding is that the logic tries to find the 'center' of the largest nearby ore deposit.



You're fine until you cross a threshold (where the detector query processing can't keep up with the incoming queries) and which point it tanks hard. The trouble is it isn't a linear change like, say, increasing shadow details. The more space CPU cycles you have the further you can push things before it becomes a problem. Vanila small detectors work more reliably in the range of up to 30m. It basically detects ores (sometimes, really sometimes) at 50-80m range, 280-250m range and once or twice deposits 3.5km away shown up. Small grid, range set to 800m (out of max 2500m). Modded world, created after update, using Azimuth's space only overclocked ore detectors.
