Marking Land & Prospecting
- The Dev Team
The first step to starting your resource acquisition journey, is to prospect land. If you already own land that has been prospected, you can skip this document and go on to the appropriate type of operation you wish to conduct on the property.
Step 1
You will need to mark the land. This costs nothing, and on this screen if you have any form of booster that can be applied, you will have a check box or a drop down allowing you to utilize that boost.
Marking land costs nothing, and is immediately completed. It is essentially designating this area as a potential resource acquisition site, and taking it out of your available pool of land for this city.
Step 2
Once the land has been marked, you will see it in the overview below. It will have a lot of unknowns because you have not prospected it at all yet. You will next want to click the ‘details’ button to go and view the resource acquisition interface for that site.
Step 3
Below is the resource acquisition interface. There is a lot here, so don’t get overwhelmed. The tab we are interested in is ‘Operations’. This tab is where you conduct all forms of operations on your site. For what we are doing now, prospecting, you will only be concerned with the ‘Other Ops’ column.
In order to do the next step you will need a Survey Engineer. This is done by purchasing a truck in the global market. Navigate to Marketplaces > Global Market > Vehicles Land, and filter “Trucks”. This will bring the various pickup truck options. All of them work so choose whichever you prefer, and set it to the city and country that your newly marked land is in.
Step 4
Once you have purchased your vehicle, you will click the “Surface Prospecting” link from the above image. This will open a new page that is strictly dedicated to surface prospecting operations for that site. Here you should see the truck you’ve purchased, and then you’ll click the “Send To Mine” button. This will dispatch that vehicle and engineer to the site so they can conduct a surface survey.
Step 5
Once the truck has arrived at the site, you will have the option below to conduct a surface survey. Currently, surface surveying takes 30 minutes per acre, and the main overview will show that a survey is being conducted.
It’s important to note that with prospecting, there are 3 potential prospects that can be done, and you can do one, two, or all of them.
Surface Surveying is mandatory. It will detect any timber or shallow deposits that are visible from the surface.
Subsurface Prospecting is optional. This will detect any shallow deposit not visible from the surface. It can be ‘skipped’ if you have a mining drill, and do a core drilling.
Core drilling will gather samples of any deep deposit on site, as well as any shallow deposit that has not been prospected already.
Step 6a (Optional)
To subsurface prospect, you will need to own 1.) A semi with heavy haul certed driver or a LE Semi with this endorsement. 2.) A lowboy. 3.) A backhoe. If you have these requirements, you will click the “Logistics” tab, and then semis. From here, as long as the semi is loaded with the backhoe, and in the right city, you will have the option to bring it to the mine. Once at the mine, unload the backhoe. Once the backhoe has finished arrival prep, you will click Operations > Subsurface Prospecting. This will bring up a new window with the backhoe and allow you to conduct the subsurface prospecting.
Step 7
The final step to optionally find out a deep deposit (Or a shallow unseen + any deep), is to core drill. For this you will need a mining drill, and it will need to be brought to the site just like any other equipment. A mining drill can be bought in the global market via Marketplace > Global Market > Vehicles - Land > Filter for “Mining Drill”.
Note: There are currently 2 mining drills. One is significantly cheaper, and good for starting out miners, and takes 30 minutes per acre to core drill. The second is larger and more expensive, but only takes 10 minutes per acre to core drill.
Once you have brought the mining drill to the site and unloaded it (Using the Semi Operations link from the main site page), you will click the “Core Drilling” link, which will open the window for core drilling, and you will then have the option to “Core Drill” the site.
The above images show starting the core sample drilling, and also show how a mine looks when the shallow deposit has been revealed, but the deep deposit is still unknown.
Step 8 - Labwork
At this point, if you have done core drilling, one of three things will happen.
A.) If you have used a boost that automatically gives you the lab results, you will not need to wait and receive them immediately, revealing what the deep resource is, if any.
B.) If you have your own research facility, you can send the sample there to be analyzed.
C.) You can hire another player or NPC to analyze the sample for you at a research facility.
NOTICE: Currently while we are in early testing, option c is selected for all players, and the results are immediately given. You will be charged $250 per acre for the sample analysis.