I have been under the impression that resource %s are mostly meaningless - as a higher number means more resource hotspots, but once you locate a hotspot it has more or less the same density as a similar location on any other planet.
However, people complaining about these %s make me wonder - does a higher resource % mean higher density?
Nope you can have lower % but the region are high in density.
If you have 2 planet with both 3% diamond, one can have all this disparate on world and the other one in 3 montains which make the density way higher and easier to farm.
So the numbers are not really representative on how your world is better to farm X resources.
Agree with gorilla. I have a 1% sapphire world which is only marginally better than perm worlds, however that 1% is all in one giant blob making the farming far above anything else I have come across, better than even an exo that had 1.6%.
It has to be said though that a world with .03% would likely have very poor farming prospects even if in close clusters
Is it a straight percentage of all blocks on the planet (including air)?
the percentage is calculated between the resources blocks that spawn on the entire planet.
So you could get only 2 seams, 1 iron and 1 copper, the resources tab would show 50% for each lol
This is even more misleading than I thought. Bleh, my brain already hurts from all the sovs, w/e.
The percentages in game are the absolute number of that resource divided by the total absolute number of resources on that planet of that class of resource.
There are two classes of resources: Surface Resources (spawn on the surface of blocks) and Embedded Resources (spawn inside of blocks).
A simple example: if you have 200 copper ore, 800 iron ore and 1000 petrolim, the percents will be 20%, 80% and 100%. Since petrolim is the only Surface Resource, it has its own percentage group.
The percentages fail to take into consideration two very important pieces: the size of the world and the average number of resource per block (higher on higher tier worlds). So a 3% on a T4 Homeworld (medium 4.5km planet) might not be “as much” as a 2% on a T6 small 3km Sovereign.
When the discord “bot” pinged my planet it was 12% emerald. When I got in game it was 9.5. So what is said by the bots may be completely wrong. You honestly won’t know till you set foot on the planet but maybe after regen I have a 2% emerald. Sorry it’s late and bored 
Yeah, I get this. The part that makes my brain hurt is attempting to turn that # into a ratio of resources to rock, which is what affects # resources per hour.
I’m pretty sure you can’t make that conversion at all, making the resource %s entirely meaningless in all contexts.
Nice find! From my testing on Perm worlds, my percentage calculations were spot on compared to what the game had for Embedded Resources (they are all over the place for Surface Resources). It seems like the Sovereigns worlds are exotic enough to throw the simple calculations off.
My initial guess is the in game percentages might be taking into consideration drop rates as well, which I am not doing yet. I will definitely see if I can make them better.