I’ve done a lot of minin’ on a T3 planet, and I’m now finding caves that are in perfect condition, but there’s no ore.
To be clear, there’s no blocks mined out, so the cave regenerated, but there’s no ore on the walls of the cave anymore.
Has anyone else seen this? Is it possible caves are busted?
It’s weird, like, just an entire cave system with nothing in it.
Maybe because growing amount of people mining outside caves (bomb mining + AOE hammer full spec)
All these removed blocks should regenerate too. The ressources alocation become more and more randomized.
To summarize we are mixing the whole planet underground.
I would hate for caves to suddenly not be viable for resources.
The world regen doesn’t replace the blocks in the exact locations. Its random on where they spawn within a plot. So if you saw them on the cave wall, the next time they might be 3 blocks deeper into the walls. Just go to altitude 16 and go ham. I find more ore branch mining then I do walking around caves.
Cave minin’ is FUN for me though, that’s the thing.
There’s nothing fun about minin’ in a straight line for 3 hours to me.
Ever gotten the hammers that do 3x3 aoe? 
Maybe fun, but your here wondering where all the ore is at, so can’t be having to much fun… 
Pop some iron or which ever resource you’re looking for into an atlas and see if you’re possibly just gathering in a region with lower density. Prevalent stuff like coal, copper, and iron have a tendency of moving the heatmap around quite a bit. If a region is mined frequently, it may turn cold for a while and other previously cold regions may turn hot.
that’s what I’m grindin towards, but I need a level 50 miner, 40 gatherer, and 40-50 hunter to be able to make those, and a level 30 crafter.
Do you sure? Because here is a discussion about “Do heatmaps have update or not?”
Is tomorrow’s update going to cause caves to regenerate ores on the walls faster?
I only cave mine, and I’m seein’ fewer and fewer ores on the walls.
Well the algorithm is trash and here is why, if you mine all the gems and only the gems, all you leave it stone, the odds will replace it WITH stone and boom you run out and need to destroy stone until it regens gems. I mean the system works with less population and if it actually rerolled already fixed chunks.
Source?
(10 character limit)
If players literally only ever remove resources from the walls of caves, and never the solid rock, then by nature of randomness, the cave walls will become less populated on average, because its going to reinsert more resourcres randomnly, and theres a non-zero chance that the replaced resource will not be on the wall.
On the other hand, if there is a cave which used to have resources on the walls, and now has none at all… it also means “behind the walls” is more dense than average with resources too for that chunk 
Can attest this works in practice ime.
What? #Confused.
Doesn’t this mean that cave mining will degrade over time? Is it the intended design for the caves to be mostly stripped clear a year from now or is there some other mechanic at play too?
If it was explained early on in a tutorial objective it’d help adjust behaviour.
Really don’t mind this guy, he notoriously states his suspicions, wild theories and opinions as facts. There are numerous examples on this forums. Anything he states as fact… take with grain of salt, a big grain 
Just ask the devs how it works.