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The Shadow

46c Experimentation: Ores

115 posts in this topic

So I've done a fair bit of exploring in Creative with two different worlds. I fly around to different biomes, then dig holes down to bedrock, testing with a propick as I go. We're talking dozens of holes on both worlds.

I've found quite a lot of sphalerite on both, sometimes detectable from the surface. Also a fair bit of saltpeter. And, twice, galena.

And nothing else. At all.

Now, I don't know anything about the intended relative distribution of ore. Maybe (say) hematite is supposed to be rare enough compared to sphalerite that I shouldn't expect to have seen any so far. But I would have expected to have found at least a little bit of cassiterite, since making it more accessible was stated as an explicit goal.

It would seem that ore distribution is indeed bugged, unless I've just gotten really unlucky on both worlds. I mean, in my first world (45), I found native copper and hematite in my first mine!

(I considered the possibility that the propick was bugged to only detect certain things, but I tested - it's not.)

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i ve noticed this as well.

there seems to be a massive amount of sphalerite and sometimes some bismuth / salt peter

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how do you check for sure? mcedit or something? i've gotten a lot more detections for sphalerite on the last world i generated in 46b but not a single hit in caves or near surface for a single thing other than sphalerite and caves still seem as empty as ever.

also, the propick is much worse to use for figuring out where the ore actually is once it's detected now, i really wish bioxx had kept the smaller vertical range.

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Did some flying around and testing with WorldEdit over the last hour or so.

The great majority of chunks I tested had no ore of any sort, sphalerite or otherwise.

Of those that did have ore, all of them had sphalerite and saltpeter, usually quite a bit of it, and almost always in large deposits around the same depth (~40-60 below ground level). Along with those deposits there were some deposits of bismuthinite, tetrahedrite and cassiterite, but they were more rare.

All five ores are the same block type (TerraOre, block ID #213), with the specific type they appear to be (and the ore they drop) determined by some unknown means.

In two chunks I found a second block type (of three present in the TFC config file), TerraOre2, block ID #214. In one of those chunks I found deposits of Jet, and in the other Magnetite. My suspicion is that the three ore types are organized by tier/rarity, and specific ore types only appear in certain tiers. That's just a theory though, and I've have to do a lot more testing to be sure.

At present, (regardless of whether or not I'm right about the ore block types and whether or not the ore tiers are arranged by block type), everything but Sphalerite and the other tier 0 metals definitely seems waaaaayy too rare. I mean... I only found -one- deposit of magnetite, none of copper, and that was using a script to hunt down the right chunks to search in. Without that script I would have had to just dig random holes all over the landscape, and considering I had to search 20-30 chunks with the script to find any ore at all (then another 20-30 to find magnetite), I would have been at it quite a while.

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well it's good to hear someone's actually done a proper scientific evaluation of it, on the other hand it's fairly horrible to hear my suspicions confirmed, at least in this case.

was still banking on getting a detection of something else that can be worked before i decided to keep the current world, but i guess it's going to be build to build worlds for a little while at least.

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If anyone stumbles on a seed that does have copper or iron, it would be useful in testing whether I'm right about how the ore block types correspond to tier/rarity.

EDIT: Nevermind, one of the ones for b44 from the seeds subforum worked. Testing theories now, back with results shortly.

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Ok, looks like I wasn't entirely right. I found Hematite, Cassiterite, and Native Copper all as block ID #213.

I've found Cinnabar (along with Magnetite and I believe Jet, though I didn't make a note of it at the time) as block ID #214

The ore block ID's don't appear to correlate to ore tier, and the specific ore's I found in specific ID's may simply be random chance.

My best guess now would be that the ore block types have to do with whatever function creates the ore deposits in world making multiple, increasingly unlikely to succeed, passes (which would explain why I see a lot of Ore block ID 213, very little of Ore block ID 214, and essentially zero of Ore block ID 215). The specific ore types (Magnetite, Cinnabar, etc.) may or may not be tied to any particular ore block ID, until I find an example of an ore using an unusual block ID I can't be sure.

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So I decided to do one more round of tests, mostly to try and get a better grip on exactly how ore is spawning at the moment.

Instead of using worldedit this time, I used an external program to strip all the non-ore/non-bedrock blocks out of a world I'd been playing in previously. I then flew a wide circuit along the edges of the space that created (forcing more chunks to generate), and repeated the process. When I was done, I had an area roughly 25 chunks wide by 30 long in which every deposit of ore, even a single block, was exposed. I then flew through that exposed area, using a prospecting hammer to inspect every vein of ore I came across and marking them with torches when I was done.

These were my observations:

Block ID is linked to ore type, though not ore tier. It also seems to have something to do with the shape the ore occupies when it spawns. Block ID 213 forms small clustered pockets of tier 0 ores near the surface. These clusters come in groups of 5-12 and each deposit in the cluster is usually no more than 8 blocks. My guess would be that these are intended to be your starter ores, and were almost universally either sphalerite, tetrahedrite, or saltpeter. Rarely, I found a few blocks of galena or cassiterite, but never very many.

Around 65 blocks below sea level (y=70 to 90), massive veins of block ID 213 form (massive as in, 20-60k blocks at a time, or more). The bulk of these veins is sphalerite and tetrahedrite, often changing to galena or cassiterite below ~y=75 or so. I also found exactly one pocket of hematite, one of native copper, one of bituminous coal, and one of native gold in these veins. Large veins sometimes form on deeper layers (y=30 to 50), but they tended to be composed primarily of galena.

I found a few small deposits of block ID 214, which seems to form from about y=100 down (though I didn't really have very many examples to study, so that could have just been random chance). Block ID 214 includes cinnabar, jet, petrified wood, and the like. (I'm guessing these are intended to be rarer ores). The deposits of block ID 214 were never large (the largest I saw was around 40 blocks in total), and spawned in broken sheets composed of small groups of 2-3 blocks seperated by a block or two of normal stone.

Block ID 215 just never spawned in, as far as I could tell.

Given the amount of ore I found, I'm not sure how anyone, even with the help of a whole team of friends, could expect to make reasonable progress on a map like this. Digging up every single bit of ore in the entire area (over 800 chunks in total containing just around 20 million blocks of stone) would have given someone just about enough copper to make one hammer and an anvil EDIT: plenty of copper goods.They could have gathered enough iron to make an anvil, even maybe enough to reach steel, but would not have had enough to make more than a handful of steel tools before being forced to fall back to tin and zinc.

I love this mod, and I really can't imagine going back to vanilla minecraft... but something just isn't right with this.

EDIT: As Elustran pointed out, Tetrahedrite also produces copper, something I was just drawing a blank on.

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Brodiggan, that's some quality testing there, and very much appreciated, however I'm a bit confused. You said that veins of 20-60k blocks of ore formed, some of which was tetrahedrite, but that was only enough for a copper anvil? Shouldn't a single vein that size be enough for several hundred ingots of copper or more?

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Doh! You are correct. For some reason I completely blanked on Tetrahedrite also being a source of copper and was only counting the pocket of native copper I found. In that case, there was ample copper available, just not necessarily in easy to find locations. (Mostly the tetrahedrite spawned on the underside of the large veins between y=70 and y=90, so anyone tunneling in from above would likely have had to mine out a whole lot of sphalerite before finding the tetrahedrite.)

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Doh! You are correct. For some reason I completely blanked on Tetrahedrite also being a source of copper and was only counting the pocket of native copper I found. In that case, there was ample copper available, just not necessarily in easy to find locations. (Mostly the tetrahedrite spawned on the underside of the large veins between y=70 and y=90, so anyone tunneling in from above would likely have had to mine out a whole lot of sphalerite before finding the tetrahedrite.)

Do you or does anyone else know how to get a block count similar to what appears on the main MC wiki? I'd be curious what the exact number of each type of ore was. We could use that to start to derive what the average number of blocks you need to break to get a vein is. It would also be interesting to guess some standard deviations on expected time - from anecdotal evidence, a lot of people are having trouble finding anything at all, so my guess is that the standard deviation is pretty large.
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I love this mod, and I really can't imagine going back to vanilla minecraft... but something just isn't right with this.

nail on the head right there.

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Do you or does anyone else know how to get a block count similar to what appears on the main MC wiki?

Unfortunately multiple ores share the same block ID, with the specific ore type determined by some means I'm unsure of (possibly a combination of biome and the stone type in which it was found?). I'll see if I can figure something out though.

EDIT: Figured it out, see below.

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Back with hard data! Took a bit of editing to get MCEdit to read the new TFC block types, but once that was done, getting some raw numbers out was a cinch. Some afternoon when I have some freetime I may try and do this again but divide up the results by depth to see how that affects things... but I'm not going to have time to do it today.

Anyway, on with the resullts (my interpretation/observations to follow):

Total Blocks of Ore: 878612 (0.578% of blocks in world)

Type I Ore (Block ID 213)

Sphalerite - 447012 (55.139% of ore type, 0.2939% of blocks in world)

Galena - 194991 (24.052% of ore type, 0.1282% of blocks in world)

Tetrahedrite - 61934 (7.640% of ore type, 0.0407% of blocks in world)

Cassiterite - 53043 (6.543% of ore type, 0.0349% of blocks in world)

Bismuthinite - 49191 (6.068% of ore type, 0.0323% of blocks in world)

Limonite - 1239 (0.153% of ore type, 0.0008% of blocks in world)

Bituminous Coal - 1020 (0.126% of ore type, 0.0007% of blocks in world)

Native Copper - 962 (0.119% of ore type, 0.0006% of blocks in world)

Hematite - 853 (0.105% of ore type, 0.0006% of blocks in world)

Native - Gold 373 (0.046% of ore type, 0.0002% of blocks in world)

Lignite - 84 (0.010% of ore type, 0.0001% of blocks in world)

Type II Ore (Block ID 214)

Saltpeter - 64543 (95.042% of ore type, 0.0424% of blocks in world)

Jet - 1479 (2.178% of ore type, 0.0010% of blocks in world)

Gypsum - 1435 (2.113% of ore type, 0.0009% of blocks in world)

Cinnabar - 363 (0.535% of ore type, 0.0002% of blocks in world)

Petrified Wood - 90 (0.133% of ore type, 0.0001% of blocks in world)

Observations

1.) Sphalerite, Galena, and Saltpeter together make up over 80% of the ore found (of either type). Hematite and Limonite (the two iron bearing ores I found) make up less than 0.2% of the ore found. Considering the amount of iron required to make steel... these proportions seems badly out of balance.

2.) Tetrahedrite and Native Copper make up about 7% of the ore found, which is more than I expected. With the addition of Cassiterite, getting to bronze should be doable once you've found one of the large veins around level 80. I think the main problem people have been having there is that these veins are widely separated and are not detectable from the surface (or even from anywhere near the surface), so finding one is a matter of blind luck. EDIT: The lack of surface caves is probably contributing too... if people had a more accessible way to get down to y=110 or so, they'd be more likely to detect one of the large veins with a prospector's pick.

3.) I suspect (but cannot prove) that the saltpeter found in the large veins (which are otherwise composed entirely of block ID 213) is there as a result of a bug. There are smaller deposits of saltpeter found in the same broken/blocky veins as jet, gypsum, cinnabar and the like (which would make sense, as they are the same block type). But the large chunks found mixed in with sphalerite and the other type I ores don't make a lot of sense. If, however, they were supposed to be an iron bearing ore type (magnetite maybe), then the iron bearing ores would jump to just around 7%, on par with the copper bearing ores.

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I have nothing but praise for your efforts, for you have brought the cold, harsh light of evidence to us.

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Total Blocks of Ore: 878612 (0.578% of blocks in world)

you know, this single datapoint was by far enough? less than 1% of the blocks in the entire world were ore? wow.... just... wow, never thought it was quite that broken, not even a whole percent of the world is ore, that explains way too much.

at the same time though, i appreciate how thurough you were.

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you know, this single datapoint was by far enough? less than 1% of the blocks in the entire world were ore?

That's actually not as bad as you might think. Even in vanilla minecraft, you get at maximum about 0.6% to 0.7% ore to stone, and since I had cleared out quite a few blocks already in earlier tests, I just had to lump dirt, water, everything but air in with stone when I was calculating that percentage. Overall, the percentages probably aren't that different, just the distribution.

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A Few More Results

So I just couldn't leave this alone... I generated five new worlds just to make sure I hadn't done something to the original world I tested in the process of stripping out the stone and to see if possibly the world seed had any overall effect on ore distribution. The results are pretty interesting (to me at least).

1.) Saltpeter was massively overrepresented in every single world I tested (supporting my theory that ore generation is bugged in some way and is placing saltpeter in place of other minerals). However, I did find worlds with magnetite, hematite, limonite and so on, so saltpeter is not replacing a specific ore.

2.) The physical distribution of ores is pretty consistent between worlds (veins at similar depths of similar shapes), but the makeup of those veins varies dramatically from world to world. One world I tested was 97% saltpeter and bismuthinite, another had huge deposits of Limonite (Iron) that made up over a quarter of all the ore in the world... but not even one block of Tetrahedrite or Native Copper... making the Limonite useless.

3.) The total amount of ore varied quite a bit as well. The world with the least ore had only 0.13% ore to stone, the one with the most ore had 0.87%.

Other than the issues with saltpeter, I'd say the biggest problem at present is the inconsistency of worlds. Three of the five worlds I tested had enough ore types entirely missing that it would have been impossible to progress past either tin/zinc tools or copper/bronze tools, and two had so little ore in general that it would have been difficult to even move past stone tools without a great deal of luck.

I think there needs to be some mechanism in place to ensure that:

a.) there is at least enough copper and tin to make it possible for someone to produce a bronze anvil/tools after searching a reasonable area...

and b.) that there is enough iron present somewhere in each world to make progress through the higher tiers of metal possible. Personally, my suggestion would be to add some time intensive but easily available source of iron, something like black iron sands along some river banks, or iron nodules found in the same manner as gemstones when mining through regular stone.

EDITS: Grammar, typos, and a couple added suggestions on how the current problems might be fixed.

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That's actually not as bad as you might think. Even in vanilla minecraft, you get at maximum about 0.6% to 0.7% ore to stone, and since I had cleared out quite a few blocks already in earlier tests, I just had to lump dirt, water, everything but air in with stone when I was calculating that percentage. Overall, the percentages probably aren't that different, just the distribution.

have you tested it then? that's pretty hard to believe, it's honestly pretty hard to dig out a decent amount of stone and not find a bunch of ore in vanilla is all.

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have you tested it then? that's pretty hard to believe, it's honestly pretty hard to dig out a decent amount of stone and not find a bunch of ore in vanilla is all.

That's a result of the distribution (lots of small pockets all over the place instead of a few very, very large pockets). You could think of the vanilla ore distribution as having more 'surface area', which makes it much, much more likely you'll run into a pocket or two in fairly short order almost anywhere you dig. I haven't personally tested those ore numbers though, so I will double check (back in 10 minutes or so).

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Overall, these numbers seem kind of strange - there should be more iron available than basically any other metal...

For comparison, based on looking at charts others have made in vMC, it looks like upwards of 2% of blocks (not including air) are ore, and that's upwards of 2.7% if you're operating at the mining layer. Iron alone is .6%.

So the other question is if the ore arrangements you found were unusual for the rock strata that was in the chunks you were testing. For example, magnetite seems to be extremely rare - are you simply not generating enough sedimentary rock, or are there vast swaths of sedimentary rock that are generating without magnetite?

Also, how are you getting the block numbers from MCEdit? What were you editing, a config file or something? It would be nice to be able to pitch in a little.

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Comprehensive work, Brodiggan. Well done.

It probably would do well for others to repeat the data collection to validate if there is possibly some other source of variability.

I've dabbled with MCEdit only at the basic user level and even that was months and months ago. I'll certainly sign up to collect some data if you can provide some details about how to configure MCEdit to break the blockid's out.

Cheers,

Sarethor

edit: I see elustran's thinking along the same lines. I also agree with him that knowing the Rock composition of the world is also important for us. Bioxx had stated that the layers are randomly generated across the different biomes but if it's truely random there definitely could be a skewing effect on the ore generation.

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That's a result of the distribution (lots of small pockets all over the place instead of a few very, very large pockets). You could think of the vanilla ore distribution as having more 'surface area', which makes it much, much more likely you'll run into a pocket or two in fairly short order almost anywhere you dig. I haven't personally tested those ore numbers though, so I will double check (back in 10 minutes or so).

awesome, i didn't want to make a request, but if i'm honest, even 5% seems far too low for vanilla.

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awesome, i didn't want to make a request, but if i'm honest, even 5% seems far too low for vanilla.

Double checked in a vanilla world, I got 0.06% Gold Ore, 0.54% Iron Ore, and 0.02% Diamond Ore (which is pretty much what I expected).

Those totals are not the maximum at a particular layer or anything though, there are levels at which the distribution of Iron is much, much higher in vanilla, those are just the percentage of ore out of every possible block you might have to dig/mine through from floor to ceiling... stone, dirt, gravel, etc. Those numbers do not include trees, water, lava, bedrock or the like though, just blocks you'd have to mine out.

Overall, these numbers seem kind of strange - there should be more iron available than basically any other metal...

Agreed, there should be, but that's not what I'm seeing when I actually generate worlds.

For comparison, based on looking at charts others have made in vMC, it looks like upwards of 2% of blocks (not including air) are ore, and that's upwards of 2.7% if you're operating at the mining layer. Iron alone is .6%.

Part of the difference may lie in what we're counting the ore as a percentage of. I'm totalling up every block you might have to mine or dig through (including things like dirt), which may be pushing the apparent percentages down. Even with that though, I just haven't seen the kind of numbers you're talking about reflected in what is actually spawning as of b46c.

So the other question is if the ore arrangements you found were unusual for the rock strata that was in the chunks you were testing. For example, magnetite seems to be extremely rare - are you simply not generating enough sedimentary rock, or are there vast swaths of sedimentary rock that are generating without magnetite?

I haven't tried checking the surrounding stone types yet. For these tests I generated a world, allowed every chunk within my render distance to generate, then saved the world and opened it in MCEdit. In MCEdit I selected the area that had generated (a block of land 23 chunks wide and long), hit 'select chunk' to make sure I was getting everything from floor to ceiling, then used Analyze to get the total number of each block type (which I saved and imported into Calc, where I did all the checking of percentages and such).

Also, how are you getting the block numbers from MCEdit? What were you editing, a config file or something? It would be nice to be able to pitch in a little.

There is a file in the MCEdit Library.zip (./pymclevel/minecraft.yaml) that you can edit to add definitions for new block types that would otherwise just show up as "Future Block" in MCEdit. I'd suggest editing it with something like sciTE since there appear to be one or two special characters/formats that MCEdit is using for added markup, and notepad might bork them up a bit. Give me a sec to find a decent filehost and I'll post the minecraft.yaml file I've been using.

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