Minecraft Forums

I have looked at several other suggestions on mineral veins and geology, and contributed a bit to this one, but I haven't seen anything with this particular idea before. Hope you enjoy.

The Problem:

For a game called "Minecraft", mining is the least interesting part of the game.

Want to be an effective miner? Gather a few stacks of :--+:, a few iron pickaxes, and dig a staircase to layer 10. Mine straight lines in any direction. That's all there is to it. Ore generation is completely random and chunk-based, so there is no good way to mine.

Moreover, there's no reason to label anything "Diamond mine" or "Iron mine", because there's no reason to mine above level. Why would you mine at the iron-only level when you can get just as much iron while mining for diamonds? Everything about Minecraft is awesome except for mining. Don't even get me started on minecarts. Apart from using them to travel in and out of your (one) mine, they are useless for mining.

However, we don't want to make the game easier. Making the current mineral veins larger wouldn't help; it would just decrease difficulty and lead to more mindless branch mining. Minecraft needs to mimic the way that mineral deposits occur in the real world.

A short explanation of how mineral deposits are generated right now:
The Solution:

Use the currently existing cavern generator algorithm to produce large, winding fields containing high concentrations (up to 10%) of ore.

Imagine one of the smaller cave systems that you've seen. Imagine filling it up, from floor to ceiling, with 90% and 10% :coalore:. That is what one of these mineral fields would look like. Of course, you wouldn't be able to see it, because it would be buried underground. If you dug into it, you'd first think that it was a small vein. But if you dug around, you'd realize that you had stumbled upon a coal mine. You would build a base, light everything up, and build a minecart rail system back to your home base. You wouldn't be able to mine it all right away, so you would return whenever you needed more :Coal:.

At lower depths, you'd have fields. At the lowest part of the map, you would have fields and fields. Every mineral field would be about the same length (think small cavern with 4-5 low-ceiling rooms stretching across 5 chunks), but the fields for more precious resources like and would be narrower and would occur less frequently.

You could still find limited ores by strip mining, but each vein would only have half of what it has now. Spelunking would still be a great way to find ore: not only can you still find small veins, but the chances of a cavern occasionally crossing a mineral field are high. You could go through caverns at different depths depending on what kind of ore you needed the most.

This would add tremendously to multiplayer. No one person will be able to quarry out an entire mineral field very quickly; it's more likely that you would set up a mining camp with iron doors, and give access (using a redstone system) to members of your team. Instead of mindlessly hacking through branch after branch, you would have to figure out what path the mineral field took through the rock. You would probably end up with 15-20 for every or or or you collected, since you wouldn't always be able to predict the meandering path of the mineral field and so you'd get extra stone in the process.

The Details:

Overall, the amount of ore in any given map would only increase slightly. Decreasing the current maximum vein size by half would make strip mining somewhat less rewarding, but the same strategies would still work.

The mineral fields would be generated procedurally just like caverns currently are. They would usually stretch across 4-6 chunks, although larger or smaller mines would be possible. They would be rare enough that you would have to explore for quite a while, but not so rare that they'd be a once-in-a-lifetime find. This would encourage players to build separate mines for separate minerals and link them all together with minecart rail. Encouraging expansion is always good.

This would open up modding tremendously. Being able to change the size, saturation, or occurrence of mineral fields would have a lot of advantages in creating multiplayer server worlds. You could have low-resource servers to keep people on the surface and make things more challenging, or high-resource servers geared toward mining development. Multiplayer worlds would probably even have wars over who controls access to the largest and best mineral fields.

Here's a cross-section view of what part of a small gold field might look like (if you blasted away a clean face with TNT). Such a field would stretch for quite a distance and probably branch out in a few different directions. Using Cartographer to look for gold would reveal small pathways that look a lot like shrunken cave systems.










Any given field would span a dozen chunks if it were completely untangled and laid out straight. Remember, though, that the rarer mineral fields are narrower, deeper, and less frequently generated.

What average mineral fields would look like using the above figures:

[*:1adz112a] :coalore:: A field averages 11 meters across. Gives 29 stacks :Coal:, 144 stacks :cobblestone:, and uses 281 stone picks. Only generated more than 40 meters above :opblock:, so it's possible to find it poking above :grass:.
[*:1adz112a] :ironore:: A field averages 10 meters across. Gives 24 stacks :Iron:, 119 stacks :cobblestone:, and uses 117 iron picks. Only generated between 30 and 50 meters above :opblock:.
[*:1adz112a] :goldore:: A field averages 9 meters across. Gives 19 stacks :GoldBar:, 96 stacks :cobblestone:, and uses 12 diamond picks. Only generated between 20 and 30 meters above :opblock:.
[*:1adz112a] :DORE:: A field averages 8 meters across. Gives 15 stacks :Diamond:, 76 stacks :cobblestone:, and uses 9 diamond picks. Only generated between 5 and 15 meters above (which means they will usually cross :Lava:, adding and excitement).

Right now, is 1.25x as common as :DORE:, is 5x as common as :goldore:, and is twice as common as :ironore:. To maintain current ore levels, you'd only have one diamond field for every 200 chunks. Given that rarer fields are also smaller, that's one diamond field, one gold field, four iron fields, and six coal fields for every 14 chunk x 14 chunk area (roughly three times the size of a small biome).

Note how many stone picks it would take to completely exhaust a coal field. Most of us don't have that many picks laying around! You'll take what you need at the moment, and build an efficient mining system so that you can go back and get more whenever you need it, with minimal effort. Of course, you'll eventually exhaust the mine and go prospecting again, but it will take you a while. Chances are that you'll have several mines open at any given time.

If you're hollowing out an underground base and you come across a few :ironore:, you won't know whether they are just random veins or part of a larger iron field. You'll immediately F3 to see where you are, because you'll know that iron fields only occur at certain depths. Of course, if you're working near the bedrock, you'll know that you're out of range for iron fields, so you'll harvest the random vein and keep looking for :Diamond:.

For those of us who like explosions, this adds another delightful element: prospecting! Feeling lucky? Dig a hole, drop a into it, and stand back. Keep dropping into the shaft until you hit bedrock (a platform with a single hole in it is good for this). Build a staircase or water elevator down into the shaft and look for exposed mineral fields. Right now, is useless for mining because it destroys so many ore blocks, but this would give it an additional use.

If it's properly weighted, I can't think of any way that this idea would cause problems. It would merely make the game so much more exciting, challenging, and rewarding. Mining would be a skill, not a bore.

Thoughts?

Additional Details (will add progressively):

To make prospecting even more interesting, Notch could link mineral fields to biomes. Tundra/Taiga biomes would spawn gold fields (think gold in Alaska), desert and ocean biomes would spawn coal fields (coal is fuel, so think about Arabian oilfields and offshore drilling rigs), woods would spawn iron fields, and plains would spawn diamond fields (think Australian or African diamond mines). 

Players would have a reason to expand outside their preferred biomes. Desert nomads would trade coal for the iron of mountain warlords. Wars would be fought for control of coveted diamond fields. Intrepid adventurers would raid gold mining camps in frosty wastelands. People would do their utmost to keep the location of diamond mines secret....tiny passageways and treacherous dungeons filled with lava traps to hide the entrance.

Kingdoms would rise with railway systems to bring resources from all different parts of the map. Robbers would build switches into railways to divert gold-filled minecarts on their way back to the citadel. We'd have real economies based on resource distribution and trade.

Also: TREASURE MAPS. Now that maps are planned for 1.6, we'd have a way to show other players the locations of mines. The game is called Minecraft, not explore-on-the-surface-to-find-neat-mountains-craft.

Well said my friend, although, the fields should be larger, even though, say the coal fields, are 15 or so meters across, using over 100 iron picks to mine the chunk to only get 36 stacks of coal, the amount of prospecting and or branch mining to get required iron is too time consuming. perhaps just denser desposits are needed, so that the name "(Insert mineral name here) Mine" is more fitting.

Quote from The_Phantom_Potato »

link-that-I-already-saw ?

I posted to that one, but the ideas were still a lot different. The main difference is that he wants to lump minerals together within each chunk and I want procedurally generated fields with high (but not pure) concentrations of ore. The author of that forum told me here that I ought to make a new thread with my ideas. If you'll look at OP, I link to that thread at the top. Thanks, though.

Quote from Frostile117 »

the fields should be larger, even though, say the coal fields, are 15 or so meters across, using over 100 iron picks to mine the chunk to only get 36 stacks of coal, the amount of prospecting and or branch mining to get required iron is too time consuming. perhaps just denser desposits are needed.

To put what you just said into perspective: right now, it would take 1,700 iron picks to get 36 stacks of coal. This would make coal 10 times more common in the mineral field itself, but not so dense that you can exhaust the mine in a few hours. The idea is to give players a reason to stick to a certain area, but still slow them down enough to make it challenging.

However, I could definitely see denser deposits for things like coal in exchange for fewer coal fields per unit area.

Idea for probability

1% for Coal
0.5% for Iron
0.08% for gold
0.0001 for Diamond

This is quite a good idea. On my planetoids map, stone planets are filled with minerals. I never have the time to dig all of them out, so I label them as my mine. I slowly deplete them, and then go prospecting for anpther mine the same as just depleted. In this way, I have one depleted diamond planet, one depleted iron one, a half drained iron ne, and two coal planets.

Having a bunch of minerals in one place really makes it better—the sense of eureka! when I hit a diamond core, the eurphia of mining endless ... err... coal.

Caves are what make it fun.

Quote from Bobbunny »

Idea for probability

1% for Coal
0.5% for Iron
0.08% for gold
0.0001 for Diamond

Percent of what? Is that the chance per chunk of getting a given mineral field? Or is that the new level of ore per block on the map? The current ore levels (within their preferred zones) are 1% coal, .5% iron, .1% gold, and .08% diamond. I'm ignoring lapiz and redstone, because the map has plenty of each of those and no one would care about finding a redstone mine or a blue-dye mine.

Quote from le_alouette »

This is quite a good idea.

Having a bunch of minerals in one place really makes it better—the sense of eureka! when I hit a diamond core, the eurphia of mining endless ... err... coal.

Thanks! Let me know if you have any other ideas to make it better! And I'm sure there's something quite thrilling about unearthing a bunch of diamond!

Quote from PugRme »

Caves are what make it fun.

I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that you don't want to lose caverns, then I totally agree! I don't want to replace caves, I just want to use the same algorithm to add diffuse mineral fields. If you mean that spelunking with mineral deposits around would be fun, then you're absolutely right. Imagine seeing 3 or 4 on the side of a natural cave wall. They might be a random vein....or they might be part of a huge gold deposit stretching across 3 chunks! You'd have to mine them to find out what's behind them....

I think this would make mining a lot less boring, but it would suck for already generated multiplayer maps.

Quote from TheEvilM »

I think this would make mining a lot less boring, but it would suck for already generated multiplayer maps.

Yeah, it would. Of course, a lot of the multiplayer maps I've used regenerate large portions of the map often.

Note: I've added a few additional thoughts to the OP, like linking mineral fields to different biomes.

Interesting idea - I'm all for more reason to have multiple bases, and multi-chunk veins would definitely help with that. One thing I'd add is some surface indicator for the deeper materials, especially if the veins were rare.

For instance, a chunk in the center of a gold vein might have gold nuggets in/near the river beds - this would be a dirt or sand block with gold sparkles in it. Not that amazing inherently (probably like a 1-2% chance of dropping gold ore when mined, otherwise dirt/sand), but would be a good indicator of gold down below.

Quote from Bobbunny »

Idea for probability

1% for Coal
0.5% for Iron
0.08% for gold
0.0001 for Diamond

Per chunk. I think for yours, finding stacks of gold and diamond would be too easy. You may say "That's a one in 10,000 chance of finding a diamond field!" Yeah a 1 in 10k chance of finding stacks and stacks of diamonds... Seriously though effectively by digging in one straight line, you'll find plenty of mineral fields.

Quote from Errorsatz »

Interesting idea - I'm all for more reason to have multiple bases, and multi-chunk veins would definitely help with that. One thing I'd add is some surface indicator for the deeper materials, especially if the veins were rare.

For instance, a chunk in the center of a gold vein might have gold nuggets in/near the river beds - this would be a dirt or sand block with gold sparkles in it. Not that amazing inherently (probably like a 1-2% chance of dropping gold ore when mined, otherwise dirt/sand), but would be a good indicator of gold down below.

I don't know that I'd want to add new blocks (e.g. "glittering gravel"), but having mineral fields specific to each biome would help as a surface indicator. At least that's what I think.

Quote from Bobbunny »

Per chunk. I think for yours, finding stacks of gold and diamond would be too easy. You may say "That's a one in 10,000 chance of finding a diamond field!" Yeah a 1 in 10k chance of finding stacks and stacks of diamonds... Seriously though effectively by digging in one straight line, you'll find plenty of mineral fields.

I'd certainly be open to making field frequency rarer if the fields were made longer and/or wider to keep the net ore quantity consistent.

If you knew the right level to dig for the biome you're in (based on the ore you want), it would be pretty easy to find most deposits eventually. Coal and iron at least....diamond and gold would be rarer. The issue isn't finding the field....it's making it easy to get in and out and back to your home base.

Honestly, I think that this is a good concept, but a little bit.... too much. I mean, 15 STACKS of diamonds? Now, that is more diamonds than anyone would ever need, and I think that if it gave that much diamond, it would have to be so rare that people would most likely quit a world before they ever ran across one, or else Minecraft would get too... easy. Just my opinion though.

Quote from fishworshipper »

Honestly, I think that this is a good concept, but a little bit.... too much. I mean, 15 STACKS of diamonds? Now, that is more diamonds than anyone would ever need, and I think that if it gave that much diamond, it would have to be so rare that people would most likely quit a world before they ever ran across one, or else Minecraft would get too... easy. Just my opinion though.

Good point. Maybe the diamond fields would have a wider spread and lower concentration. The idea is to be able to find a large area with ore. You won't get 15 stacks of diamonds in a few minutes of mining, or even in a few hours. You'll just have a substantially better chance than you currently have, IF you know which direction to dig.

15 stacks of diamond might seem like a lot, but it isn't much for a multiplayer server. Subtracting the diamond it would take to mine it, that's around 35 suits of armor (including swords). An army will go through that much diamond in no time. And it isn't as much as you think for single player; it would still take hours and hours to get half a stack of diamonds.

Remember, ore will still spawn in tiny veins the way it does now, albeit with slightly smaller veins. This is just an added bonus to make exploration and multiple bases useful.

Quote from The_Phantom_Potato »

I got around to reading the OP and...Well, it just sounded pretty epic. Not too sure how it differs much from the other thread though. Basically just a more spread-out variant, seems like.

Thanks!

The main difference is that this version provides a mechanism for generating ore procedurally rather than chunk by chunk. We don't want each chunk to have a single massive iron deposit; we want there to be REAL mineral fields that spread across vast distances deep underground.

With the cluster idea, it's too easy. You're guaranteed one giant deposit per chunk, and it's all going to be in one spot.

Quote from The_Phantom_Potato »

I don't know what procedural generation means. Is this being modded?

Procedural generation is the way that caverns and terrain are generated. This is different from the way ore, bedrock, dungeons, and mob spawning is controlled.

When a new 16x16 chunk is generated, the terrain and caverns are generated randomly, but at the edge, the random variables are confined to the chunks that already exist. That's how you have huge rolling hills and oceans that are all larger than a single chunk.

Procedural generation is the most awesome part of Notch's coding. If it weren't for that, every 16x16 chunk would have its own separate terrain and altitude. Caverns would never be larger than 16x16.

Ore, dungeons, and bedrock are different. They are generated randomly, based on each individual chunk. Before any procedural smoothing is done, each chunk gets 1 tiny diamond vein, 1 tiny gold vein, 1 lapiz vein, 4 iron veins, and so on. Mobs spawn based on the number of mobs already in a given chunk. That's the difference.

Without changing ore generation from chunk-based to procedurally-based, we can't have mineral fields larger than 16x16.

It's possible to mod the current code to group ore deposits within each individual chunk, but creating new mineral fields would require some pretty fundamental coding changes. It would be hard for anyone outside of Mojang to figure out how to use the procedural generator for this. That's why it needs to come from the top.

I would be satisfied if they merely added these fields without decreasing current ore spawning rates.