[Micah]

To elaborate on what Ich said: Sites are discovered based on a SINGLE path. The types of gems that a site gives is independent of the discovery path. For example, the clam fields site produces S gems, but requires W to find. The dying forest (produces 1N1D) is ONLY found by a nature search, death will not uncover it.

That being said, the vast majority of gem sites are found by searching the same path...W searches yield W gems, etc. Generally any off-type gems will be in addition to one or more gems of the searched path, but it's not always true.

Failed searches will generally mean that there is a higher liklihood that searching other paths will pay off. For example, with a 50% site frequency the chance of having 0 sites in a province (disregarding terrain mods) is approx. 6%, so empty provinces are somewhat of an exception, meaning it's proportionally more likely that sites are hiding in the unsearched paths. Likewise, only 6% of provs will have 4 sites, so a province that already has 3 sites in it is unlikely to merit further searches. (there are 4 potential slots for sites in each province, and .5^4 is how I'm getting the percentages here, the .5 will change based on site frequency). The higher the site % the more this will hold true.

As for levels, I generally do fine with manual searches, which cover mostly levels 1 and 2, but if you're looking for powerful discount sites you'll want to search to level 4, especially in astral and death. I'm not really sure how the site freq/terrain mods/site rarity/site income all combine in terms of how many gems you'll get per level from 1-4 on average though, since they're poorly documented from what I've seen, and my ability with that many probability interactions is lacking.

Higher level also isn't always better, most of the gem types have a level-3 search site that produces just a single gem.