Originally posted by Crimson:

Smaller ones likely won't have it and it will always be higher up (Where you see Obsidian deposits and Drake spawn.)

While two of them were small-ish, all of the mountain biomes so far have contained plenty of obsidian, drake and wolf spawns, along with frost-caves and dragon-egg spawns, like, I can summon Moder rn if I knew where the boss-altar was.

I'm just just snooping around all over these mountain biomes with wishbone on rubbing my face against the floor to find any silver at all and I'm just not finding any at all. Its just a really arduous process because without silver you're always on a time-limit, in a biome filled to the brim with high damage mega-aggressive mobs.

Like, I thought they might've changed how silver spawns or something, that's legit how miserable trying to find silver is rn in my world seed :/

I think there's 3 altitudes for mountains, and the mobs/findings are as follow;
Base - find wolves
Mid -drakes, eggs, caves
high -obsidian and golems usually near silver

I feel there's more silver than previously but you need to be high enough

In my experience I have only found silver where there are Golems, obsidian & wyrms (drakes), and silver always seems to be at the level of obsidian or higher. Nearly everytime I find silver there is a golem spawn or two nearby. Golems can be a bit of a hassle as they tend to respawn rather quickly, but if you push them into a pit and leave them there, they will not bother you.

I play without killing Bonemass so I never have a Wishbone. That means I always have to find my silver the fun way. (You can find it quite easily hitting the ground with a maul and watching for unexplained 'Too hard' messages.)

In any case, over the course of my adventures, I've picked up a few hints that there is silver nearby without using the maul and they might be generally applicable:

- Silver tends to be found only in large mountains (as suggested), but really this is a matter of how high up you are. Height is not necessarily the main indicator though. The biome must be 'deep mountain' -- towards the inside of the biome and not on the edges.
- Silver tends to spawn in flat areas of just snow. I have never found the center of the silver node to be below a rock or a tree. (The edge of the silver node can be, however)
- More often than not, I see silver nodes in the flat snowy areas near log cabins. It should be possible to find them near castle ruins, but I've never found one very close.
- Rarely a silver node will poke out of the terrain (on hills), but this should only happen if the center of the node still has snow above it.

Never had a problem finding silver once I got the Wishbone and equipped it. Definitely a lot more of it up higher, in the larger Mountains areas.

As others said, it needs to have a certain height where mobs like golems etc. will spawn.

Smaller ones likely won't have it and it will always be higher up (Where you see Obsidian deposits and Drake spawn.)

Yea I visited 3 smaller mountains in my game and they had no silver.. seems to have to be the larger ones like Crimson said.. obsidian and drakes.. good indicator.

I assume you have the wishbone?

took me nine biomes to get silver and it was almost the instant i arrived and it is a massive biome, the other biomes weren't that big, they had an egg n a few caves, i'd sail around for a beast of a biome