Finding Ore
One of the most important activities you must complete in order to progress in Space Engineers is finding ore. Ore is needed to build new features on your ships and stations and so finding the right ore becomes extra important in trying to create your ideal projects. In Space Engineers finding ore is made a lot easier by following the below instructions.
The first thing you will have to look out for is dark spots on any planet’s surface as these places are where ores will spawn as shown below:
Once you find one of these areas you will need to use your drill and ore detector and get to work to gather the ores that will eventually be uncovered. Retrieving the ore may require some trial and error but these spots will more often than not reward you with ore.
They used to be very dark, now it’s sort of speckled. On some terrain (particularly ICE), it’s really easy to see, on other terrain (sand, desert) it can be quite challenging. Ore patches are almost always within 100 meters of the surface, and a lot is within 30 meters. There are also these rocky boulders that are on the surface itself which used to contain all of the ores other than gold and platinum, but now are only iron.
I prefer the new shading, as the old ones had these massive ugly black splotches that made ore detectors almost irrelevant; you only needed one to identify what the ore was. Now, you basically need the detectors to find the ore in the first place. Unfortunately, the detector is also a little too short-ranged at only 150 m; it really needs to be 200-250 m.
Just look for small patches, they often contain gold and silver. If you only see gold then it most likely has also silver, just deeper.
You can find magnesium and nickel in the boulders as well.
You can find all the planetary ores in boulders and they have similar rarity distributions.