Well yes, it flows, but ive seen it "run" up a hill.  I was set right at the edge of a hill, i was mining on 4 tiles, and i more or less mined the entire slope of about 20 tiles while the 4 tiles i had at the top of this hill were solid red the entire time.  I would like to understand how exactly it works to know how to choose the best spot to mine from.

Well the best way for me is to minimize relocking tiles and reactivate miners. So with a Riveler mk2 would be to set 5 tiles with each laser as far away as possible, with a small red sized (sitting bot at the centre) patch can be set for around 2hrs or so without changing tiles.

Seen others just setting it all lasers on 1 tile. This was popular in the good old days of liquid epitron mining, but it was changed to an ore as it is now. I dont know why the placed all on one tile though

I guess effeciency starts by learning not to use a geoscanner on miner and fit another tuner, scan area first with argano. Also, how accurate is your scanning btw? . If its not 100% you can really judge the liquid flow behaviour.

Think of it this way as an analogy.

Tiles are like small reservoirs of water with a pipe connecting each adjacent tile and your mining laser is a hose pumping water out, as you empty the 'reservoir' adjacent tiles will start filling up the that space until there is no more water to fill it up from nearby reservoirs (tiles).

alexander is mostly right - the liquid ore layer does not follow the terrains elevation (you would find liquid stuff not on slopes if it would!)

you can imagine an ore layers like a 2048x2048x256 greyscale map. when you mine a tile, your lowering a pixelvalue from max 256 down to 0 (dont ask my why its only 255 cycles max)

liquid ores do lower the pixel values of the whole connected deposit (i guess a random pixel per cycle) - with that the gradient areas will start to disappear and sometimes split the deposit in half.

You can imagine that like the liquid ores are located in underground bonds with a flat upper surface. when you empty them, the deepest point willl be the place where you want to start mining, as the flat outer areas start to disappear first.

It's connected with data I think.

My logic is this. Every tile of has has a representation in the database. Partly by limit, partly by design they set it to use just one byte (which has eight bits is a convenient power of two permitting the values 0 through 255). With 2 bytes the limit would be 65000 something cycles (with the number of tiles that would be a waste of disk space to hold so much data(it take more space to hold 1 byte than 2, even if the data could be in the limit of 255)). So 0 is the 256th cycle.

Oh yes, I was rushing my answer, but I also wanted to add that Anni. There's enough data on the map already