Impact of Spread and # Samples

[sweetbaboo-1]

Hello, I'm very new to this tool and attempting to find a 3x or 4x hut on seed 974123259 for MC version 1.20.

I found this issue #160 which provided a session save for finding a 3x hut, but I'm not confident that I have setup the rest of the settings correctly.

Currently I'm searching a 36x36 million block square (everything is the same distance from my pig cannon), my spread is set to 256 and number of samples to 50k.

Here is an image of the setup for context.

I don't know enough about world generation to know how rare a 3x hut is. My instinct tells me that it should be pretty likely that in an area of that size there exists at least one 3x hut, and that scanning an area of 1.3B blocks shouldn't take days or weeks. Assuming my instinct is correct I believe the issue lies in my virtually chosen at random settings for spread and # samples.

Could someone explain what spread and # samples actually does, and clarify if my instinct is even remotely correct?