User blog:Mrob27/Relative Abundances of Materials

Introduction
This article gives the abundances of materials measured by how many blocks of material exist, regardless of how easy they are to find. This is not necessarily the most useful way to deal with the problem.

For example, in the table below you'll see that Blue_Stone, Sulphur Ore and Feldspar are just about the rarest materials of all. However, most people who play the game think that Notchium ore is the hardest to find. This is because Notchium is often underground where it cannot be seen, but the Feldspar etc. are on the tops of really obvious colorwood trees.

For another approach to the same problem, see User_blog:Scooter8pie/Rarity_of_Uncommon_Materials.

Method of Data Collection
When you generate a new moon, there are 4 sliders (exotic terrain, cave frequency, etc.), some of which affect the amount of each material that is available (mainly from Plants).

I created 3 moons, one with all 4 sliders set to the default (center) position, another with them all set to the lowest setting, and a third with everything set to the highest setting.

I walked around each long enough to expand the world to about 20 sq km, being careful not to do anything that would affect these statistics. Then I used my mapping program (see User_blog:Mrob27/Internal_Data_Format) to count up all the blocks of material in the entire world. Here are the results.

The Table
The rows of the table are sorted according to how often they occur on the "normal" moon where all 4 settings are left in the default (center) positions.

The two right columns show the values for moons where all 4 are set to the lowest values, or when all 4 are set to the highest values. The numbers without a % sign are in Parts Per Million (PPM).

Most of the variations (like 10.59 versus 8.53 for Boron Crystal) are not big enough to be significant.