Here is my method for finding Diamonds. This is applicable for other gem types if you go to the appropriate planet, location and altitude.
Get a fresh atlas. You can equip it but don’t actually use it until your’e on Serpensarind (Surfin’ Safari as we call it in Portal Seekers).
Get at least 4-5 iron hammers and a couple stone square chisels. You can use better if you’d like but iron is more than fine as it will be able to one-shot what remains of resources after bombing.
Get at least 2 bags of Titanium Bombs. They are reasonable to craft. The resources to make them were already listed above. If you can’t make them yet then check some of the stores around the any of the Portal Seeker gateways as there will definitely be some for sale somewhere and despite likely being expensive, buying a couple should get you enough titanium to easily make your own at a later time.
Get a single Rough Diamond Ore. I’d just buy one from someone or it’s likely someone will happily just give you one to be nice. In fact, if you’ll be online tonight after 9 EST, I’d be happy to give you one myself and I’ll even give you a free, fresh atlas.
Go to Serpensarindi, drop your Rough Diamond Ore onto your fresh atlas and now actually use your equipped atlas to sync it to the planet.
Explore Serpendsarindi and, as you uncover regions, your atlas will automatically update to show “hotspots” of diamond veins. Atlases update once every 24 hours (we wish it was faster than that but @james said there’s a pretty aggressive tradeoff between atlas update frequency and performance so for now it’s 24 hours).
Hotspots will go from black, to grey, to light yellow to white. The brighter the area, the more diamond veins you’ll find there. Go to a location that shows a nice hotspot area and move your character such that the cursor is directly in the center of that hotspot when you use the atlas.
Mine down to around altitude 10. You can check this easily in the “Places” menu. Be careful about lava. Lava starts at altitude 16 and will kill you quickly if you swim in it. To account for this I usually mine straight down for 3-4 blocks one block in front of where I’m standing and then jump down and repeat so I don’t mine under my feet and plunge into lava.
Once in a hotspot and at or around altitude 10, start mining! If you are going to bomb mine, then the technique I use is to use my stone chisel for 6 hits on the left or right side of a block. I use chiseling because it always works with a single hit whereas destroying the entire rock can take 3-4 hits. I then toss three titanium bombs down the little hole I chiseled and, after they blow up, you should find a large area removed but ores and gems and coals and such will be almost gone such that you can one-shot them with your iron hammer.
Keep in mind that for bomb mining with titanium bombs to work well as described in 9 above, you will need a spec that supports it. We’ve found the best spec for Serpensarindi and same-tier planets to require:
Damage Epic
Bomb Epic
2/5 Bomb Mastery
4/5 Attributes Bonus
8/8 Power
0/8 Agility
With that spec, you stand the greatest chance to not destroy resources.
With this technique and spec, I easily pull 200-300 diamonds in a single couple hours session. One last point of advice: if you get to a hotspot and you notice lots of tunnels or even bomb areas already there, it’s because somebody recently went through that hotspot but that doesn’t always mean it’s a lost cause. Diamonds spawn from 0-20 altitude for the most part so if the tunnels and bomb areas you find are, say, lower altitude like 0-10, you can often just go up to 11-20 in the exact same hotspot and still rake in a lot of diamonds.
Lastly, you can do all this without bombs but it just takes longer unless you have a really nice hammer such as a forged titanium or gem hammer which will cost you 10-20K depending on what you’re after.
Hey, Steggs. Does your endorsement of bomb mining mean they won’t be nerfed anytime soon? In theory, I’d like to never bomb mine on my miner. But if it will remain stronger than hammers, I might as well switch over.
I wouldn’t say it’s an endorsement, it’s just a fact that they are good for mining in their current state.
We want to keep bomb mining in as an option for players because we believe it’s pretty fun, but we don’t want it to make hammers obsolete, so we are looking at some potential changes for them.
Thanks for the reply. I’m a bit torn. I wanted my miner to use hammers only after the wipe. But if I want AoE mining, bombs are the way to go, hands down. I just can’t afford 20k for a single AoE hammer.
Yeah now with forging some hammers are expensive. I liked my old diamond hammer that did aoe in the old universe. I wish the forge had added abilities without the devs removing the old gems abilities.
You don’t need to respect anything for bombs. I use forged iron bombs mining with no points in any bomb masteries, just the normal power ones I have for my hammer setup.
First try to go far away from the portals, you will have less chances to find an already harvested spot, look on your Atlas for a good place and go to level 10.
Also bring a couple of full stacks of stone chisels, it’ll help you a lot. And be careful with the lava, always have gravel or sand to stop it spreading.
You have to be patient, mining with hammers takes time, and you need to find the way that fits you.
I just came from Alcyon with 72 diamonds in my pockets, but be aware that the mobs there are pretty hard, they kill me twice until I could find a good spot
So 20-40 is just less number of diamonds veins? Or smaller veins?
Cause I’ve been found those relatively easy on levels 20-27 last few times i was mining.
biggest vein was actually on 27, but that could have been pure luck on my side.
Would it be possible to better explain/buff the centraforge to make AoE hammer mining more competitive with bomb mining? (Please don’t just need bomb mining, it was a pain to get it working right in the first place)
I played through a lot of he beta, but I still have only vague ideas of how the centraforge works, and I have never been successful in forging anything onto even an iron hammer.
I don’t know how it is supposed to work, but I have wasted resources trying. For now it’s just a set of prestige blocks in the corner of my workshop.
I haven’t tried looking for any gems yet, but if it’s anything like it was last time it shouldn’t be that hard. If it is, there’s some sort of problem with the overall process/evolution to become good enough to mine them.
When I was diamond mining I did traditional strip mining from mantle upwards (as high as 50, always close to lava under water) and raised my lines up and down a few blocks as I went along, all the while thoroughly looking with my grapple. I stuck to the same direction each time I went out in order to avoid lava. I found many that way. And I’m looking forward to trying chisels when I return to it.
My advice is try to find a spot away from where everyone else is mining hard I know but spending points on the protection needed is essential, right up to the max.
Everyone is different. Bombs may be effective for some, chisels and hammers for others.
Bombs may be good, but the fact they’re tricky to make puts many people off using them and sticking with what they know best (strip mining).
@boundmore has a 4 part high detail forge series on YouTube, really worth it if you want to know a lot of detail. @Jiivita also has great vids covering just about everything Oort Waves
Remember that diamonds need 60+ blocks above them to spawn. So if you mine under surface that is let say @70ish, then you won’t see diamonds above 10. It happened to me that when I moved away from below a mountain, I could only find diamonds below 10.
hard I know 
but spending points on the protection needed is essential, right up to the max.