Create a new world and chose the Customized world type (not Superflat), click on "Customize" and the "Next Page" to get to the second page, scroll down to bottom, the Diamond _Ore settings are the second from the bottom, move the slider for "Spawn Size" all the way to 50 and see what happens.
BTW the maximum standard diamond vein size is 10, a 2X2X2 cube with an extra ore on top and one on the bottom (in opposite corners.)
Either your son pulled a fast one on you and created a world with custom orespawning settings (or worse, went in creative or similar cheatiness and placed down a bunch of ores hoping you'd be there when they were "found"), or he has a mod installed that changes how ores are spawned.
There's a mod, which I think might be a custom thing written for the Sevtech modpack, that completely undoes vanilla ore generation and sets up massive (or sometimes not-so-massive, depending on the ore's rarity) clumps of ores with samples marked on the surface to let you figure out where they are.
It would (hypothetically) be possible for veins spawned in four different chunks to merge at the mutual corner, but even that occurance wouldn't give anything like this…
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
It would (hypothetically) be possible for veins spawned in four different chunks to merge at the mutual corner, but even that occurance wouldn't give anything like this…
Because ores, plants, structures etc are added shifted by half a chunk (to the SE I think) those 4 veins would technically have generated in the same chunk and that "corner" would be in the center of a chunk. (or at least on the center line if only 2 veins were involved.)
Thanks for the tip Hexalobular and DuhDerp. I think you are right. I asked my son and he thinks he did change that setting.
I think i will make a new default world for myself.
That sounds like a good idea.
It's fun to play around with the settings but it could take a lot of the fun out of collecting diamonds.
I tested with the max value and got 314 diamonds out of my first find. Very nearly 5 stacks.
I accidentally changed the value for lapis ore instead of diamond ore on my first test and got REALLY tired of digging through lapis ore.
One thing worth noting is that the "size" in the Customized settings is only loosely connected to the actual size of veins; it seems to follow a roughly square function as the actual size increases by about 100-fold when you increase the size from 5 to 50, and I found single veins with 600 ore when I tested this:
Also, this is the size data I calculated for every size from 3-50 while developing my own mod; this uses the ore generation algorithm prior to 1.8, which is slightly different (sizes of 8 or less give slightly larger veins while larger sizes are slightly smaller than 1.8+; in 1.8 they increased the size of all veins by one, which more than offsets this for small veins with a ~20% increase in the amount of every ore. In either case a size of 2 or less resulted in no ore being generated):
Vein size: 3; average number of ore: 1.17765
Vein size: 4; average number of ore: 2.64732
Vein size: 5; average number of ore: 3.50566
Vein size: 6; average number of ore: 4.10832
Vein size: 7; average number of ore: 4.95650
Vein size: 8; average number of ore: 5.74709
Vein size: 9; average number of ore: 6.56232
Vein size: 10; average number of ore: 8.06491
Vein size: 11; average number of ore: 9.81045
Vein size: 12; average number of ore: 11.66980
Vein size: 13; average number of ore: 13.46662
Vein size: 14; average number of ore: 15.14508
Vein size: 15; average number of ore: 16.91712
Vein size: 16; average number of ore: 19.10412
Vein size: 17; average number of ore: 21.74758
Vein size: 18; average number of ore: 24.87240
Vein size: 19; average number of ore: 28.27072
Vein size: 20; average number of ore: 31.86289
Vein size: 21; average number of ore: 35.73324
Vein size: 22; average number of ore: 39.93195
Vein size: 23; average number of ore: 44.53781
Vein size: 24; average number of ore: 49.07673
Vein size: 25; average number of ore: 53.67949
Vein size: 26; average number of ore: 58.46202
Vein size: 27; average number of ore: 63.98146
Vein size: 28; average number of ore: 69.91253
Vein size: 29; average number of ore: 76.61868
Vein size: 30; average number of ore: 83.57547
Vein size: 31; average number of ore: 91.05137
Vein size: 32; average number of ore: 99.00442
Vein size: 33; average number of ore: 107.18492
Vein size: 34; average number of ore: 115.99825
Vein size: 35; average number of ore: 125.67054
Vein size: 36; average number of ore: 135.76334
Vein size: 37; average number of ore: 145.97621
Vein size: 38; average number of ore: 156.30264
Vein size: 39; average number of ore: 166.61493
Vein size: 40; average number of ore: 178.36125
Vein size: 41; average number of ore: 190.57649
Vein size: 42; average number of ore: 203.56660
Vein size: 43; average number of ore: 217.01971
Vein size: 44; average number of ore: 230.84738
Vein size: 45; average number of ore: 245.65820
Vein size: 46; average number of ore: 259.88254
Vein size: 47; average number of ore: 275.66590
Vein size: 48; average number of ore: 291.32706
Vein size: 49; average number of ore: 308.02110
Vein size: 50; average number of ore: 325.69168
As an example of how I use this, I set the sizes of each of the 1.8 stone types and similar blocks to 50%, 100%, and 200% of normal within a given region, where 100% is a size of 32, averaging about 99 blocks per vein; half the size is 24 (49 blocks) and twice the size is 42 (203 blocks).
My son created a randomly seeded default world in 1.12.2.
When mining near our spawn point I found a single diamond vein with more than three complete stacks of diamond ore! More than 192!
How is this possible!? I thought the largest diamond vein would be 8 diamonds.
He must have changed the settings for ore size.
Create a new world and chose the Customized world type (not Superflat), click on "Customize" and the "Next Page" to get to the second page, scroll down to bottom, the Diamond _Ore settings are the second from the bottom, move the slider for "Spawn Size" all the way to 50 and see what happens.
BTW the maximum standard diamond vein size is 10, a 2X2X2 cube with an extra ore on top and one on the bottom (in opposite corners.)
Just testing.
Either your son pulled a fast one on you and created a world with custom orespawning settings (or worse, went in creative or similar cheatiness and placed down a bunch of ores hoping you'd be there when they were "found"), or he has a mod installed that changes how ores are spawned.
There's a mod, which I think might be a custom thing written for the Sevtech modpack, that completely undoes vanilla ore generation and sets up massive (or sometimes not-so-massive, depending on the ore's rarity) clumps of ores with samples marked on the surface to let you figure out where they are.
It would (hypothetically) be possible for veins spawned in four different chunks to merge at the mutual corner, but even that occurance wouldn't give anything like this…
Thanks for the tip Hexalobular and DuhDerp. I think you are right. I asked my son and he thinks he did change that setting.
I think i will make a new default world for myself.
Because ores, plants, structures etc are added shifted by half a chunk (to the SE I think) those 4 veins would technically have generated in the same chunk and that "corner" would be in the center of a chunk. (or at least on the center line if only 2 veins were involved.)
That sounds like a good idea.
It's fun to play around with the settings but it could take a lot of the fun out of collecting diamonds.
I tested with the max value and got 314 diamonds out of my first find. Very nearly 5 stacks.
I accidentally changed the value for lapis ore instead of diamond ore on my first test and got REALLY tired of digging through lapis ore.
Just testing.
One thing worth noting is that the "size" in the Customized settings is only loosely connected to the actual size of veins; it seems to follow a roughly square function as the actual size increases by about 100-fold when you increase the size from 5 to 50, and I found single veins with 600 ore when I tested this:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2207780-how-spawn-size-correlates-to-actual-vein-size-of
Also, this is the size data I calculated for every size from 3-50 while developing my own mod; this uses the ore generation algorithm prior to 1.8, which is slightly different (sizes of 8 or less give slightly larger veins while larger sizes are slightly smaller than 1.8+; in 1.8 they increased the size of all veins by one, which more than offsets this for small veins with a ~20% increase in the amount of every ore. In either case a size of 2 or less resulted in no ore being generated):
As an example of how I use this, I set the sizes of each of the 1.8 stone types and similar blocks to 50%, 100%, and 200% of normal within a given region, where 100% is a size of 32, averaging about 99 blocks per vein; half the size is 24 (49 blocks) and twice the size is 42 (203 blocks).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?