Silenciaco posted this guide on the official Firefall forums in July 2013, a few weeks into open beta. The original thread is preserved on the Wayback Machine. The radar screenshot didn't survive, the scan hammer image is the one from the Astrek Association guide the post linked to.

Okie i'm going to cover some basics, and then jump right into the deep end of the pool. If you guys are new, and have not yet read the Thumping Guide found on Astrek Association, do that first before getting into the rest of this thread.

RESOURCES

3 Families of Resources; 16 total resource types

1. Minerals: Copper, Iron, Aluminium, Carbon, Silicate, Ceramic
2. Gases: Methine, Octine, Nitrine, Radine
3. Organics: Petrochemicals, Biopolymer, Xenografts, Toxins, Regenics, Anabolics

Note: Once you gather these resources, you will first have to refine them at the Molecular Printer before you can use them.

SCAN HAMMER

Slams the ground, providing a readout of the resources at the point you activated it, while sending out a wave.

Focus on the Single Vein picture above. Notice the highlighted waves. If you pay attention, you will notice the waves moving in a certain direction. Following that direction will eventually lead to a point where the waves center and rise in height. This is called the peak. The peak is the highest concentration of that resource in THIS vein.

Note: For Double Vein's the scan hammer waves point towards the resource with the highest percentage on that scan, so if you wish to find the lower % resource, you should not go in the direction of the waves.

RADAR AND BIOMES

Okie, so everyone learns about the radar straight out of the tutorial [Hit 'M' key followed by 'Tab']

This shows you all the resources in the zone and their approximate location. You may however find the area to search too large to be productive when you want a specific resource. This is where biomes come in. Each biome has different resources and critters that spawn in it.

There are 3 Biomes in New Eden:

1. Forest: Octine, Toxins, Iron, Carbon, Ceramic
2. Beach: Copper, Nitrine, Silicate, Anabolics, Biopolymer
3. Plains: Regenics, Xenografts, Petrochems, Aluminium, Methine

Note: Now I realize that I missed out on some resources, this is mainly because i started to get lazy and stopped recording where the resources spawn. If you are able, please help me fill in the missing portions and/or correct me if a mistake was made.

Example Time!

Let's say I'm looking for Ceramic. I'll first take a look at the radar and look for ceramic.

Okie so now I can see 3 areas with Ceramic and 1 without it near Thump Dump. I will then take note of where the 3 radars that Ceramic is in intersects, while excluding the one area that does not have Ceramic. Then I further exclude all the beach/plains areas and focus on the foresty parts. At this point I've already figured out the general location of Ceramic, and once i use my scan hammer in that area, I can use the previous scan hammer techniques to locate the peak!

Now we are fully equipped to go out and locate our resources, but people ask "Oh Silenciaco, but I only want high quality resources! How do I find resources of a specific quality?"

Delving into this is where it starts to get complicated.

RESOURCE POOLS

There are global pools of resources that are available. These pools are time limited and resource limited. For instance...

Raw Regenics[CY-645] Default 34866668 46688651 June 13th, 2013 16:53 June 20th, 2013 16:52

There is a pool of Regenics645 that spawned into the default pool (missions, thumpers, watchtowers, etc) on June 13th with 46688651 total resources. 34866668 of those resources have been harvested already. The pool will go away on June 20th at 16:52 server time if the pool is not harvested out first.

When a new vein is created, it pulls X amount of resources out of the pool and puts it into the vein. That vein sticks around until harvested or the global pool times out.

There are multiple global pools; default pool, melding pool (for veins near the melding), new melding pocket pools, PvP pool. Each has different resources at different quality levels.

There are 6 Resource Pools in the game at the moment. Each Resource Pool has its own set of resources and resource qualities spawning in it at a given time.

1. New Eden: Default. This is the pool from which Invasions and ARES Missions draw their resources from.
2. Meld: These resources can be found close to the meld wall in New Eden. They are generally skewed to spawn higher qualities. Tornado rewards are drawn from this pool.
3. PvP Rewards: Resources gained from PvP are drawn from here. Usually midrange in Quality (Greens)
4. Sargasso: Organics are skewed to spawn in higher qualities here.
5. Diamondhead: Gases are skewed to spawn in higher qualities here.
6. Antartica: Minerals are skewed to spawn in higher qualities here.

Therefore if you are running ARES Missions and you suddenly notice getting Purple Octine from one of the missions, you now know that New Eden is spawning that Purple Octine and all NEW octine spawns should be purple till that is completely mined out or timer runs out.

There is a Live Resource Feed maintained by RAWR4Firefall that is extremely useful to get a quick idea of what is spawning where. It should definitely be one of your bookmarks.

Note: The Melding Pockets do not have biomes, so you can only rely on the radar in there.

Okay I believe i have covered everything about resources so far. If I've missed out something i'll come back and edit this. The next post will be about thumping and some advanced techniques to do with it. As usual, correct me if i am wrong about something or if you have something of value to add. Or just to flame the crap outta me.

THUMPING

Xenonox's Thumping like a Boss guide

I feel like he has covered the topic of thumping well enough for me to get a free pass and skip some work =)

FROM THE THREAD

Answers Silenciaco gave further down in the thread.

Seems like seed crystite hybrid doesnt change the quality at all, changing between low and high quality hybrid gives like 1-5 difference in quality.

To simplify it:

The higher the quality of resource used, the higher the required constaints and the higher the resulting statistics.

Also Quality is calculated by quantity of resources, and the seed hybrid is considered as 1 resource out of the few thousands you are using to make your item/skill. Therefore it won't affect the quality of the end product by much at all.

grayrest worked out the numbers in the same discussion:

Component quality is the weighted average of the materials used in construction. Let's say you're making a T2 component that takes a hybrid module, 150 of one mineral, and 200 of another and you decide it'd be a good idea to craft it with Q900 for the first and Q100 for the second mineral (it's not a good idea) and then craft both Q900 and Q100 of the hybrid module to see how that affects things.

Q_high = (150 * 900 + 200 * 100 + 900 * 1) / (150+200+1) = 444.16
Q_low = (150 * 900 + 200 * 100 + 100 * 1) / (150+200+1) = 441.88

When you're making the final item all the quantites are one so the item quality is just the average of all the components.

Silenciaco's T4 afterburner data and the formulas grayrest derived from it:

T4 Base Afterburner: 120 mass, 60 power, 3 cores
Strength: 34.51 m/s, Recharge: 21.20s

coefficient = (stat_max - stat_base) / Q
stat = stat_base + coefficient * Q

MASS = 120 + 300 * Q_recharge + 201 * Q_strength
T_recharge = 21.2 - 12.98 * Q_recharge
STRENGTH = 34.51 + 14.57 * Q_strength

* Q as a value between 0 and 1, so Q912 is 0.912 and not 912

What pool does melding quest come out of?

Each Melding Pocket (now known as warfront) has its own resource pool. The mission in each pocket will pull resources from it's own reward pool.

Current Exceptions include Raider/Chosen Strike Teams and Resource Deposits, which are bugged and pulling from New Eden Pool instead. Expect a fix for those sometime in the future.

If i hit with my scanhammer and fly up i get no lines moving to a point (peak).

It should be working for you, unless you were thumping Radine. (Radine currently has no waves)

Certain resources have been unable to spawn as (thumpable) veins in the melding pockets, and the devs have said they are looking into it. So here is the complete list of resources that cannot spawn: Carbon, Biopolymer, Octine, Methine, Radine.