How big are "resource areas"?

LBML does a pretty good job on zoning out our resources. It seems the more commom resources are spread out throughout the zones, the good stuff however seems to be in smaller areas. I usually find rare ores pretty close to each other, however, coming back to the same area later doesn't seem to work. I also found a igni spot recently which I drained for days, around 50% hits were igni at least. I made killer profits. Then suddenly, almost nothing for days now.

What's your experiences with "resource areas" for the lack of a better term, and how often does it rotate/change?

They are smaller than revival zones at least, though they are a good ballpark to use just to help split things up a little. LBML maps only show server-wide resources found within the last 90 days, so they're very coarse for any resolution.

In one server I mine, you can see the resource distribution change three times as you head south to north once you have logged enough on LBML. I can't say as much about east-west on that one yet, but there are definite areas within a server where resources are completely different. I

It's possible that maybe rarer resources have some sort of smaller zoning within, but I haven't seen anything yet that would differentiate that from just normal variation of rare resources or confounding between location and timing (i.e., mining when a certain resource is really common, but that "pocket" doesn't exist anymore because availability changed over time).

In another server, I can find Force Nexus all over, but the southern 1/4th of it doesn't have any without much change in the other resources. That could mean that it isn't a case of distinguished zones being set up and figuring out what's within a zone in that order, but that from a programming order perspective, each individual resource is given a zone where many overlap and can give the appearance of a zone with a specific loot table to pull from the mob end of things.

So tl;dr, you can find definite zones, but the time factor makes it tricky to really narrow it down. There's a lot you can ponder about, but once you mine an area enough to get a good average of MU over time, that's probably the simplest and best data to get.

Resource areas can vary in sizes, the smaller ones I have mapped are about 500m~1km in width, but they can also be as big as server. Note that I define resource areas as the area one particular kind of resource (e.g. Belkar) can spawn.

Occasionally there will be a narrow lyst/oil belt in-between two resource areas, which makes it quite easy to identify where the borders end. I've also found all zones to be rectangular so far (at least I have never found one that isn't), and do not follow revive zones or any geographical patterns. Ore and EnMatter also have different borders in general so I think they are completely independent layers. Depth also seem to have nearly no influence on the shape/size of an area and it seems to only affect what you can find within the same zone.

The tricky part is of course timing as the resource mix within an area can shift dramatically over time. For example an area where ypu can find A+B+C+D could be either A+B or B+D or C+D depending on what the server feels like giving at that moment of time. There are also instances where an area that historically only has 80% hit rate of Lytairian and 5% hit rate on Ferrum that suddenly gives 15 Ferrum claims in a row and zero Lytairian. There are many theories about this: some say it is based on a timed cycle, some say that it is based on resource consumption, and some will say it is just luck. I've made many attempts to probe at this timing thing but there is really nothing conclusive about it. I'm not really fond of this system since it makes mapping quite difficult as some runs can completely skew the data, and it feels that MA can just invalidate all your maps whenever they are tampering with the resource availability.

On an interesting note, I recently found a small area that is about 100mx100m where I have only found binary fluids. I'm still trying to figure out if it is just an anomaly with the sampling, or it is actually some sort of binary fluid pocket.

It varies alot and is one of the satisfactions of mining to get a grip of that