Pjotr84 wrote:If you want that kind of purity, just take enough ore to run a smelter 4 times without adding lime (i.e. 100 pieces or 5 boulders), so you get 2 iron bars equal to the purity of the ore, which can be made into a dowsing rod. With that you can prospect in your claim's vicinity. Your second option would be to make a miner on a second account and transfer the ore through Boston.
Note that the smelter needs to be entirely empty for this to work without reduced purity... By "empty" I mean that there's no remaining bar buildup from the last load, if there's a bit leftover it'll take more than 4 loads to flush it out, I think very worst case you'd have to do 8 loads, which is kind of a drag. It's really hard to ensure this unless you're exceptionally OCD about exactly how you run your smelter, if you've been thinking about adding another smelter to your collection, now would be a good time, and you can run those 4 loads on it fresh to get bars that perfectly match the purity of the ore before using the new smelter for day-to-day smelting.
Or, make the abandoned base your mining base, make an alt and train him up to have 20 phlegm or so and mining, and do your smelting there
