What green, yellow, red, and black plots mean

The idea behind the colors

Most map tools hand you raw layers and leave you to assemble a conclusion. The screening map does the opposite: it combines public claim, land-status, access, restriction, and historical-context data into a single rated candidate plot, so you can see where deeper research is worth doing at a glance. The color is a summary of that reasoning, and it is intentionally cautious.

What each color is for

• Green — a planning lead worth researching further. The screening signals line up reasonably well. It is a starting point for official verification, not a claimable or confirmed spot.
• Yellow — a weaker or more uncertain lead. Something is mixed or incomplete. Worth a look, with more scrutiny than a green plot.
• Red — a poor candidate or one with a mapped concern. Shown as an audit layer so you can see why an area was screened out, not as a suggestion to go there.
• Black — a mapped blocker or high-uncertainty area — for example a conflict with existing claims or a restriction. Audit context that explains an exclusion.

By default the map shows green and yellow (the leads) and lets you turn on red and black (the audit layers) when you want to understand why ground was excluded.

Why the bias runs toward caution

The colors are not calibrated to be "accurate" in a symmetric sense, because the two kinds of error do not cost the same thing.

A false blocker — ground rated red or black that was actually fine — costs you one plot. There are many plots. You lose nothing but an opportunity you never knew you had.

A false lead — ground rated green that carries a claim conflict, a restriction, or an access problem the data missed — can put you in a dispute with a claimant, on private property, in a closed area, or in physical danger in country where help is far away. Those costs are real and they land on you.

Because the costs are asymmetric, doubt always resolves toward the blocker. When the data is incomplete, stale, ambiguous, or internally inconsistent, the screening does not split the difference and call it yellow — it treats the uncertainty as a reason to warn you off. This means the map deliberately hides some perfectly good ground. That is the trade being made, and it is made on purpose.

Red and black are not the same thing

The distinction is worth understanding, because the two colors mean different things about the state of the evidence.

Red means the screening evaluated the plot and it came out a poor candidate — the signals do not line up, or there is a mapped concern that makes it unattractive relative to the alternatives. Red is a judgment about quality.

Black means something specific was found that blocks the plot: a conflict with an existing claim, a mapped restriction, or a level of uncertainty about a boundary that the sources cannot resolve. Black is a statement about a blocker, not a ranking.

The practical difference: a red plot might become interesting if you learn something the screening did not know. A black plot has a specific identified obstacle, and until that obstacle changes in the official record, no amount of local knowledge on your part makes it available.

Both are shown as audit layers rather than hidden, because an exclusion you can inspect is more useful than an absence you cannot. If you want to understand a drainage, turning on the blockers and reading the pattern of what is claimed and restricted often teaches you more than the handful of green plots does.

A worked example

Suppose you turn on the audit layers in a drainage with strong historical production and see a cluster of black plots along the river, a scatter of red on the benches above, and two green plots on a tributary a kilometre upstream.

The naive reading is "the green plots are the good ones." A better reading is: the black cluster tells you the river corridor is claimed, which tells you people with local knowledge think that ground is worth holding. The red benches tell you the screening found problems there — possibly ownership, possibly access, possibly restriction. And the two green plots upstream are green partly because nobody has bothered to claim them, which is information too, and not necessarily flattering information.

Green does not mean better ground. It means the screening found no mapped blocker. On a heavily worked drainage, the absence of a blocker sometimes means the ground was evaluated by earlier miners and passed over. The color tells you where research is permitted to be productive, not where gold is.

This is why the region pages exist alongside the map. The color handles land status and conflicts; regional knowledge handles whether the geology is worth your weekend. Read the regions before you read too much into a color.

Colors change, and that is normal

A plot's color is a function of the data behind it and the rules applied to that data, and both move.

Source records update. Claims are filed, maintained, and dropped continuously; land-status records get corrected; road and closure information changes seasonally. A plot that was green last month can be black today because someone filed a claim, with nothing wrong on either end.

The screening rules themselves also change, and when they do the change is almost always toward caution — a new class of conflict being recognised, or a category of uncertainty being treated as a blocker where it previously was not. A rules revision that turns hundreds of green and yellow plots black is a normal outcome, not a malfunction.

The consequence for you: a color has a shelf life. If you researched a plot a season ago and are only now planning the trip, re-check it. And never treat a screenshot or an exported dossier as current — it is a record of what the screening said on a particular day, which is exactly why exports carry their source dates.

Common misreadings

• "Green means I can claim it." No. Green means no mapped blocker was found. Whether ground is open to mineral entry is a legal question answered by the official records, not by a screening tool.
• "Black means the map is broken." Usually black means the map found something. A drainage that is mostly black is typically a drainage that is mostly claimed.
• "Yellow is green with less confidence." Closer, but yellow specifically means something is mixed or incomplete. The right response is more scrutiny of that specific thing, not a general discount.
• "No plot here means nothing here." Absence of a candidate plot can mean the area was not evaluated, not that it was evaluated and rejected. Those are different, and the map distinguishes them where it can.
• "The color accounts for whether gold is there." It does not. The screening evaluates status, conflicts, restrictions, and access context — not ore potential.

What a color does not tell you

A green or yellow plot does not mean land is legally claimable, open to mineral entry, free of private rights, free of claim conflicts, safely accessible, or a place gold will actually be found. Source data can be incomplete, stale, capped, or wrong. The color narrows research; it never ends it.

This conservatism is deliberate. The map is designed to produce fewer false "go" signals, to make uncertainty visible, and to treat "probably not worth pursuing" as a useful answer. A quiet map is doing its job.

How to use a color well

Treat green and yellow plots as a shortlist for the research workflow: confirm land and mineral status, read the existing claims, check withdrawals and closures, and confirm access — then verify the exact parcel and visit before you decide anything. Use red and black plots to learn why an area is a poor bet, which often teaches you more about a drainage than the green plots do.