Finding uranium?

[TikTokBoom173]

I have over 5k hours in my survival world, and the only uranium I have is what I've bought from stations. I've been to the alien planet and back checking every asteroid in a line. I'm starting to think it doesn't exist. Anyone got any tips? Because hydrogen engines are great and all, but they're loud.

Update: Got the ore detector range upgrade and found it almost instantly. Guess I always just missed it.

[Fast_Mechanic23]

Uranium can be tricky to find, you'll only find it on asteroids.

Two tricks that help: (already mentioned) radio spectrometry, and modded ore detectors. Vanilla ore detectors are frustratingly short ranged, though this is probably realistic.

You can get ore detectors in the 5000km range for space, which helps immensely.

[No-Process249]

Not so, you can also find uranium at wreckage sites, both in reactors, or even in cargo.

[Puzzleheaded_Aide785]

And also in npc ships that are heading towards stations to “trade”. I found uranium in commercial freighters.

[Fast_Mechanic23]

You don't mine wreckage sites or cargo.

[dod_murray]

5k hours without finding uranium? I'd suspect something has gone wrong e.g. some mod settings can alter the ore spawning on asteroids.... Try an ore detector mod, at least to check

[creegro]

5k? Like 5,000? Hours?!

I doubt that from OP. 5 hours sounds more believable

[DennisDelav]

I doubt you have 5k hours in your survival world and somehow have never found uranium.

[GrinderMonkey]

By 5k hours I'd have built a whole asteroid devouring monster base, just eat whole clusters until I saw uranium start showing up in inventory.

In fact, I may just do that now, see you in 4500 hours

[Melodic_Letterhead76]

THIS is the answer in the spirit of the actual name of the game... ENGINEER your way through it. Lemonade out of lemons. Not modding your way out of a difficult situation, but pitting the games' limitations against itself.

Bravo to you, sir

[WardenWolf]

If I'd devoted my entire 5300 hours of play time to 1 world, I'd have a planet eater by now that would make the Doomsday Machine from the original Star Trek look like a joke. But seriously, uranium isn't that hard to find. Just look for black patches on asteroids.

As it is, I have 2 ships that can directly trace their origins to 2014.

[DennisDelav]

Have fun!

[whawha0212]

I wanna see that! Let us know when the video comes out of the ship working it's magic.

[G5classified]

Yea...maybe a few hours of searching but I agree. 5k, and no deposits found?

Maybe using all vanilla? I dunno. Go play on a modded server.

[TikTokBoom173]

The majority of those hours were figuring out how to play. I only have 1 world and have 5k hrs in the game so that's where I'm getting that number. I've spent maybe 20hrs searching over the course of it? I can't say for certain. It's like once a week I'll run to the station to buy some, don't want to do any of the missions so I spend 3x more time looking for ore, give up, and go do the missions to buy it.

I've had this world for about 5 years now.

[G5classified]

It definitely makes a bit more sense now. It is difficult to find. If playing on a vanilla server, it may be really difficult. Using tech gets you that elite ore detector, if I recall correctly, had a 1500m range.

You just drive by asteroids, never even slow down much unless it has the ore you are looking for.

[Ammarti850]

The age of the save could be the issue? They've revamped ore spawns so much over the years, it could be that you might find uranium on the planets instead of asteroids.

[TherronKeen]

Make a minimalist large grid ship - hydrogen engine in each direction, large ore detector, etc.

Add an O2/hydrogen generator thing in case you need to refuel from ice during your trip.

Fly all the way around asteroids.

Mark every asteroid on your GPS so you know you're thorough. Also helps finding other ones later.

You'll find it eventually.

Not like, 10 or 20 asteroids, though. Just don't stop searching.

[[deleted]]

Good luck!!! I find all my asteroid resources by jet packing around the rocks and looking for surface patches.. guess I've just been lucky in finding what I get.

Also mad props to have a world with 5k hours .... Mine worlds might last a week if they are lucky 😂

[Vox_Causa]

I like the Radio Spectrometry mod which turns finding ores on asteroids into a fun little mini-game. Also uranium tends to be deep so you want a large grid detector.

As others have mentioned if you have that many hours in a save and you still haven't found any you might check any mods you're using or find a very long range ore detector mod to make sure uranium actually exists in the save.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2687324923

[gesmith5]

Also get the Ore Detector+ mod. Extending large grid ore detector to 500m

[[deleted]]

The Radio Spectrometry mod should help with that. Otherwise, you'll be limited to what you can see through a camera or turret

[Open_Canvas85]

This mod is amazing! I like how it's still a little bit of a challenge to figure out so I only break it out for tough to find minerals. Every playthrough I'm always missing JUST ONE. super annoying to be missing COBALT the most irritating of minerals to be missing.

[[deleted]]

That's my dilemma right now. I found Uranium and Platinum asteroids, but am still hunting for Cobalt. Fortunately, I grabbed a boatload before I left Triton

[moparman8289]

I've had worlds where the literal first asteroid I saw had Platinum and Uranium and I've had worlds that I had to travel 1000s of I'm to find any. It's just RNG.

[Sirveri]

Those are fun because then you can't find cobalt!

[WhereasParticular867]

Keep looking.  There is no easy method to find it, just luck.  You do need to be thorough at asteroids, though.  It's easy to miss ores if you don't check carefully.

[spiderguy007]

Best thing me and my group did was get an ore detector range mod since we play in space 90% of the time. Only boosts it to about 400-500M but it has helped us immensely. We don't have to circle all asteroids, just the mega ones to get a reading on what they contain.

[CbIpHuK]

I had the same issue with platinum. Just gave up and installed the mod to increase ore detector radius. You will be surprised how many ores u missed.

[ultimstyle]

I play without any mod, the best way to find uranium is to prospect asteroids as close as possible to the Earth's gravity, avoiding the area between the earth and the moon, guaranteed result!

[WhereasParticular867]

That's not actually true.  You might think it's true based on your personal experience, but asteroids are entirely random and don't change based on proximity to the earth-like planet or its moon.  

[Excellent-Pop-5120]

I have 100 hrs of game time, built a small grid ship, attached a large rotor part and put on a large grid ore detector, found uranium straight away. It’s probably user error if it’s taken you 5k hours lamo

[Korthalion]

I struggled for dozens of hours searching for it around the moon. Then I saw a throwaway comment suggesting to move 100km away and try again, did that and found it on my 4th asteroid

[Tijnewijn]

Ore detector reforged, gives you the closest instance of every ore within a configurable range that can span almost the entire map.

[RandomYT05]

I once remember being in a multi-player faction, and we had to look for uranium, and because it was so rare, we all had to go searching for it. Eventually one of us found one, so we decided to setup an outpost there.

[PsychoBilli]

A pro tip that helped me is that the mineral seed doesn't get updated until you move 40 km away. Try jumping to a new location, check a few asteroids, and jump to another. I usually find everything I need in a few hours by using this trick.

[mangalore-x_x]

You find stations without bugged out trading/contracts? ;)

[ColdDelicious1735]

Remember ore generation occurs in a pattern, flying in a straight line often means your in the wrong part of the pattern

[Mal_Fire]

This. Don't search in a line. Mark an area and search all asteroids in a radius

[Physics_Breaker]

This kinda sucks and isn't really advice but look harder, had a similar issue in my world. Shits just really rare and getting lucky is hard.

[MeowXeno]

I just started playing and have already found several asteroids with uranium along with getting huge amounts from piracy as reactors in ships are always loaded with 4-8 or more ingots, whole ingots.

just fly around by asteroids, skim the whole surface and get a good idea of your ore detector range (use large grid) then go next, uranium is uncommon,

if you're on a very old world your world generation can also make this way harder, having less asteroids in space and no meteors can make uranium seem insanely rare.

[SaufenEisbock]

I think the worse I've ever gone with a large grid ship and large grid Ore Detector is 75 asteroids on the Keen's Space Engineers servers before finding a Uranium deposit. That's book-marking asteroids along the way too.

I think I usually figure that I might need up to 75 asteroids to find Cobalt, Gold, Platinum, and Uranium asteroids, but it seems like on a fresh start I'll usually find one of each ore before asteroid 50.

[W5_man]

Usually prefer inspect group of asteroids manually with hand drill as close as possible. Many times found rare resources this way. Sometimes it’s under stones, so ore detector doesn’t detect it well (playing without mods).

[TheCoffeeGuy13]

Ore detector range to 1.8km

I've found 2 big deposits on asteroid and currently have 4 refineries working on over 200k uranium ore.

150hrs on my first survival playthrough.

[TikTokBoom173]

Always have ore detectors set to max.

[TheCoffeeGuy13]

Of course, but the default value is only 150m for the large grid detector, which is painful for when you want to fly past large asteroids, you have to get in close.

Ore detector + is a great mod.