Prospecting range

[kaillslater]

For anyone who's curious: The +/- 10 came from my villager back when he was testing the prospecting system. Since then its been confirmed by other groups a couple times, but we were the first ones to publicize the ranges through my guide.

I remember this because I originally guessed +/- 5 and got corrected by my miner and a couple others

Nice to know, thanks. +-10 for Dowsing Rods sounds believable, but the the range is for Woo-Woo-Wands is clearly greater. I don't suppose you have any information about those that you've been holding out on us with?

Are you talking about +-10% purity or the percentage of elements? IE 15% purity rod finds 5-25% purity mine or 50 sulfur rod finds 40-60% sulfur nodes?

In my case-
This: 19.75 : 44.50 : 10.27 : 25.47 rod at 8% purity found:
This: 19.43 : 53.88 : 1.08 : 25.61 node.

Either way, the purity and one of the elements varied by greater than 10. I am aware of my good fortune.

Do you think it's possible that the rods detect nodes using a normal distribution for the probability of detecting a mine of a certain purity? That would explain why the majority of the nodes found are within +-10%, but that there becomes an increasingly rare probability of finding a node that deviates further from the rod's purity/makeup.

[MagicManICT]

The +/- 10 range is still correct. The rod only checks the highest element. Even then, none of the elements will change by more than 10 as they all add up to 100, so a 5 point change in one or more has to add up to the same amount of change. (Check your math--53.88 - 44.50 = 9.38.)

Purity is a separate calculation based on the sum of the squares, so at higher values, purity can go up by more than 10%.

edit: Oops. Guess I didn't update my personal knowledge base on this a while back. Thanks for the nice spreadsheet, droj.

[Droj]

actually the rod checks against all elements within a range of +/- 10
these were my initial recordings.

[DarkNacht]

I just found a 33%(67.55,8.99,6.23,17.23) mine with a 0%(22.69,22.98,26.32,28.01) Woo-Woo-Wand, has anyone done any work on figuring out how the range on Woo-Woo-Wands works?