TenNeon

If you use it correctly, the propick can let you zero in on clusters with alarming precision. This is a more specific version of what danagor was describing: Get your first reading of a vein.Pick a direction at random and dig that way, checking for readings every few blocks. If your readings get stronger, keep going until they get weaker.When the readings get weaker, stop and mark it off. I usually mark the boundary between "traces" and "nothing of interest found".Turn around and go in the opposite direction until you find a similar boundary.Count the number of blocks between your markers. Walk to the halfway point and start two tunnels perpendicular to your first one. (you're making a '+')Find two more edges of the vein with these tunnels using steps 3-4.Find the center using the method in step 5. The vein is now either above you or below you.Dig shafts/stairways up and down from this new center. If your propick gives you a boundary between traces and nothing, then the vein is in the opposite direction.Congratulations, ore! Unless you've been chasing some mineral.Obviously if you hit the vein before completing these steps, then you don't have to keep going through it. I frequently hit the vein at step 7.One warning to consider is that this method can be thrown off by the presence of multiple veins of the same ore in a small area. If you establish a "center" across all three dimensions and find no ore there, you might be near two veins. I've not yet had this happen, so I don't have a plan for dealing with it.

Vanilla Minecraft lacks finite water for reasons that have nothing to do with it being difficult for people's machines. Minecraft in pre-Infdev had finite water and it worked fine- the problem was that it doesn't play nice with infinite worlds. (Pre infdev (called Indev), Minecraft worlds were small and finite.) When the idea of chunks was implemented, Notch had to deal with how water flowed when the entire body of water wasn't loaded into memory. If you have a few chunks of an ocean loaded, and you drain that area, how does the game know that more water can flow in from the unloaded chunks? One solution is to ignore the fact that the body of water has more water in the unloaded chunks; upside- conservation of mass, downside: waves of water whenever you load a chunk that has a higher water level than the one you just drained. I believe Terraria uses this finite water model (however, it still has problems with water duplication resulting from the imprecise way water volumes are stored.) Another solution is to assume that neighboring chunks with water have infinite water, keeping you from having these big waves of water whenever you load a chunk that has a higher water level. The downside of course is that the water level will inevitably start to rise as more water is added to the world. What Notch decided to do was split water into "flowing water" and "source blocks"- the infinite water model. This has the advantage of not caring at all what an unloaded chunk's water level is. The other advantage is that it makes water more "gamey"- you can sculpt it, carry it around, add or remove streams without having to do hundreds of trips with a bucket. You can also have continuous waterfalls and fountains without a more complex water cycle happening in the background- this was seen as a major advantage back in the day.