After looking trough the registrations of minerals IEContent.PreInit(), and considering the mineralChance, and what ores are found in each mineral type I've worked out the chances by ore type. What I mean by this, is as a player, I am usually looking for a type of ore, so I want to know what the chance is that any given chunk will contain a mineral that contains the ore I want. If I am looking for gold, I probably would like to find a gold vein, but I'll probably be satisified with Copper or Pyrite.

Assumption: other mods are installed that included oreTin, oreSulfur, and orePlatinum. The odds are somewhat different when these ores are not present.

The following is the chance that any given chunk will have a mineral that produces the ore (vanilla ores only for simplicity)

• oreIron 6.90%
• oreGold 5.17%
• oreCoal 1.72%
• oreLapis 0.69%
• oreDiamond 1.72%
• oreEmerald 1.72%
• oreQuartz 0.34%
• Clay 1.72%

I want to focus oreQuartz in particular, because as I have discovered, if you are looking for it, your're gonna have a bad time. It works like this. If you check one chunk, there is a 99.64% chance you didn't find it. if you check two chunks, you have 99.66%^2 = 99.28% chance you haven't found it. If you check 200 chunks 99.66% ^200 = 50.60% there's still more than a 50% chance you haven't found it. Its likely that players looking for quartzite will need to check around 200 chunks to find it. If you want to have a 90% chance of finding quartzite you can check 670 chunks.

Another way to think about this is, at 670 chunks there is a 1 in 10 chance that quartzite has not been found. Or 1 in 10 players will not be able to find quartzite after core sampling 670 chunks.

Lets say you can do a core sample every 30 seconds. (You can't by the way. It seems to take me more than a minute including time running back to base to recharge and totally ignoring all other needs like food.) It takes 5 and half hours of drilling and there is still a 10% you still might not find quartz.

Lets go further. At 870 core samples there is still a 5% chance you haven't found quartzite. 1 in 20 players won't find quartz after grinding on the core sample drill for 7.25 hours straight doing nothing else.

To Compare to Iron, checking 10 chunks gets you a 50% chance. Checking 33 chunks gets you a 90% chance you have found it. and a 95% chance at 42 chunks. No one is suffering to find iron.

As someone who has not put in +12 hours searching for a quartzite deposit this weekend. I can say without a doubt: This is not fun, and that there is a defect in the code regarding the weights by ore.