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I was a bit confused about how the deposit tracking skill works, and I think I'm not alone in finding it confusing. So I made this guide in hopes that it helps someone like me later.

Please note that I'm not very experienced, and a lot of this might be not-quite-right. I hope it's useful even if not 100% completely correct.

Re: Spoilers: I've tried to stick to information about how the skills work and avoid anything that would be considered a spoiler, since I'd like this guide to be appropriate for a new player working through their beginning harvesting training. I request that you please also try to avoid spoilers in any replies. That said, if you haven't completed The Art of Harvesting missions #1-3, and started on #4, this might be considered a spoiler.

This guide might go well as a companion/addition to the harvesting training mission The Art of Harvesting #4.

If you want a recap of what Milles Dodoine covers in her harvesting missions, this link might be helpful:
Text from Silan Training Missions

I'd like to give a big thank you to everyone on the Universe channel who helped me understand this, and to my fellow refugees at the training camp who I had the pleasure of exploring and figuring this stuff out with.

With love from Silan,
Be'arppy Carmy

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Deposit Tracking Demystified (at least a little bit)

Introduction

So you've done some extracting and prospecting, and now you want to know how to find the lovely resources of Atys. Great!

You might even have learned a skill called "Deposit Tracking" and started trying it out. If you've tried it, you might have gotten messages like "A deposit has been detected at 38 meters," messages that seemed to lead you to a specific location, a location you assumed you could prospect at to get the materials you want.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite that way. You see, deposit tracking isn't sensitive enough to track the precise locations where materials can be prospected up. Instead, it can sense larger formations called deposits.

Deposits

A deposit seems to be an underground formation of some sort containing certain materials. Often one deposit will contain several different kinds of materials. Homins can use prospection to draw these materials to the surface over the deposit to temporarily create a material source that materials can be extracted from. And as you've seen, sources also sometimes emerge to the surface naturally over a deposit.

I imagine deposits are something like this, though, like I said, I don't really know what I'm talking about in any scholarly detail.

Deposit Tracking

The Deposit Tracking skill seems to work as follows to detect the locations of deposits:
1. Locate the nearest point that's over a deposit containing materials matching the search criteria.
2. Remember that point, and report the distance to that point until the point is reached or tracking is stopped.

Here's an example of where deposit tracking will send you (as I understand it.):

Resource Distribution in Deposits

So, you might think all you need to do now is to prospect at the location the tracking sends you to, and you'll have a nice source to get your materials from. Unfortunately, it's (sometimes) not quite that simple at this step either. The reason is, you usually can't prospect up all materials in a deposit at all locations over the deposit.

Though there might be a large area of land over a deposit that contains some Fine Anete Fiber, for example, there might only be a few smaller spots where that fiber is accessible to prospection. And other materials in the deposit might be accessible at other spots. This is why you don't always find the material you're looking for at the location deposit tracking sends you to.

I don't really understand exactly how materials are distributed in deposits and how that affects what can be prospected where. This could certainly be explored more by any Atysian scientists out there! Of note, I also don't know how much deposits change over time. Milles Dodoine mentions that material availability can sometimes change with season, time of day, and weather. And I don't understand much about how homin activity affects deposits. That said, I imagine the places materials can be prospected up over a deposit might look something like this, at least as a first guess:

The Prospection Cone

Since deposit tracking isn't sensitive enough to locate the exact spots where a material is available for prospection, the only option left is to prospect over the matching deposit until a source is found.

However, getting a sense of the size of your prospection cone might help with this task. This chart is an attempt to give a sense of the size of the prospection cone through the first few skill improvements. I've been told that the default angle is 10 degrees and the default range is 2 meters. (That's me in the middle of the picture with my pick, and some young mektoubs wandering around looking at me.)

An Exercise for the Reader

Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it -_^

1. Get a rough sense of your prospection cone. How far and how wide does it reach? You could try to get a rough measure of the range in your walking steps. This might be hard to do with much precision unless you can find a very small prospection spot, maybe at the edge of a deposit. Don't worry about this step too much if it's hard to find a good place to test this.

2. Use deposit tracking to find the rough boundaries of a deposit. If you're on Silan, the Fine Zun Amber deposit from The Art of Harvesting #4 is a good deposit to try this with.

3. Now that you've found the boundaries of a deposit, use prospection over the deposit to find the material you tracked there.

4. (very optional) Now that you've gotten your own sense for these things, reply to this guide with corrections or updated information, if you have some!

Conclusion

That's all folks! I hope it's been helpful. Please reply with any corrections, additional information, and discussion as you see fit, and again, please try to avoid posting anything here that's a spoiler to those who want to explore on their own.

Happy Exploring! ~

Amazing post! Thank you for all the effort!

This post matches what I know of prospecting and is marvelously written and illustrated.  Congratulations, Carmy!

Nice post, I like your cute illustrations! :)

I like to think of the field or area you find tracking as something like a potato patch. Your Tracking leads you to the area your potatoes were planted in the Spring, but when you go to dig them up in the Fall, (Your tracking) may take you back to the 'Patch,' but just because you put your shovel into the ground to dig doesn't mean you will find potatoes. You may need to dig 1 foot to the left, or 2 feet to the right, or maybe even behind you.

As you mentioned, your prospecting radius has a bear on it too.

Plus 'range' may prospect to far away from your potatoes when they were only 4 or so feet away from you, or in between where you are, and where you are prospecting. (At range 5 or higher, it gets really far! Sometimes farther than you can see). So, it could be you are prospecting beyond your potato patch.

Thanks for the post :)

Every once in a while, a person steps into Atys - and tells a great story about a feature(s) of this living planet.

Thanks for your great graphics as well. :)

Loved the post! Very well put!

Thanks for this Carmy - a very good guide, well written and easy to understand :-)

another guide for the cookies ref list, should you care to allow use of it.

very well wrote, love the artwork, and as good a explanation as i've ever seen wrote out.

keep up the good work carmy.

talk

Feel free to link this wherever it's useful, Talk. (And that goes for anyone else too).

And thank you everyone for your replies! It's nice to read what you had to say.

added as
"How "Deposit Tracking" really works (a concept that fits)"

thanks again carmy.

talk

To add one thing: While deposit tracking is somewhat limited in its ability to lead to a prospectible source (and sometimes quite frustrating under this respect), it is nearly perfect in telling whether or not a particular material is available at a given time.

In particular, it tells perfectly about season, daytime, weather situation. But it does not tell whether a source has been depleted (which may last for more than an atys year e.g. in Prime Roots).

Therefore, when waiting for <censored> weather to go away, tracking is an excellent tool even if one knows the location of the sources. Before the BM weather report it was the only tool (known to me) to indicate the availability of raw materials.

This made perfect sense. Awesome, awesome job, Carmy! Loved the cute pics, too!

Young homin, you will become a great digger!

As someone new to deposit tracking and prospecting and having had a lot of trouble with it, this really helped! I'd like to add that within the deposit, I typically see "clusters", or sub-deposits of material sources. These clusters are usually scattered around the deposit area, and they can be depleted after exploiting the spot long enough, in which you must find another cluster of material source nodes.



I'm not a good illustrator by any means (and I'm terrible with working with paint and rasterized graphics in general), buuuuuuuut, I did make an attempt at a diagram to show what I mean.





I could have made another deposit to the left much like the other, but I didn't want to mess up the illustration that already took a little precise work to do. The clusters could contain multiple resource types if the information I have learned is correct; For sake of example, in a cluster you could get fiber and seed. When the cluster "depletes", which gives you a message, you'd have to move on to another cluster within that deposit.



I found that thinking of resource areas in the deposit like sub-deposits or clusters helped me understand harvesting better, and optimize my prospecting techniques to specifically pick out clusters after I had found the boundaries of the deposit. I hope I was of some help!

A trick I've learned from Misatey was this: prospect once with range 3, find several spots, then while standing on top of 1 spot prospect again with NO range (or range 1 at most). This way you keep digging a "sub"-deposit; when you deplete it, prospect again with range 3 (or 4).

It's incredibly reliable and .. hm, tidy. You keep yourself to yourself.