Realistic Deposits

Realistic Deposits makes finding ore a reason to explore, then build a proper mine. Rare iron districts, layered coalfields, diamond pipes, gold veins and lapis lenses and emerald pockets give you deposits worth returning to, with old workings leading into some of them. Small pockets of diamond- and gold-bearing river gravel offer another way to prospect. It runs on MMD OreSpawn.

The project starts with Minecraft 1.10.2 and is intended to follow the maintained OreSpawn branches across Forge and NeoForge.

Version 0.7.0.110021 adjusts the balance for fresh Minecraft 1.10.2 worlds. Coal, iron and lapis keep more ordinary ore between mines, diamond starter workings follow the pipe wall, and some lapis and emerald sites can retry a poor fit. Ordinary emerald generation is unchanged. Existing worlds keep their settings, generated chunks and saved mine layouts. Back up important worlds before updating.

Current features

• Rare, region-scale deposits that remain identical regardless of chunk generation order.
• Long, folded stratiform_seam formations instead of enlarged spherical ore blobs. The experimental iron default is a major mining district with an irregular principal horizon, five to seven splays, two or three subparallel lenses, and short fault displacements. A sparse halo gives prospecting clues around the fault gaps instead of making the displaced ore impossible to rediscover. Each chunk writes only its own deterministic part of a deposit.
• Massive-and-rare, geome-aware, and host-rock-aware generation modes.
• Coalfields with several thin beds, folds, fault offsets and local rock partings. Existing Mineralogy sedimentary rocks are used when available; Mineralogy is not required. See coalfields.
• Additive, hybrid, and replacement policies for controlling interaction with ordinary ore generation.
• Rare diamond pipes and linked river placers, without adding new host rocks or reshaping rivers. See diamond deposits.
• Steep gold veins with rich shoots, lean stretches and linked river gravel. See gold deposits.
• Compact lapis lenses with richer pockets and short workings. Natural marble hosts them when Mineralogy strata are active; ordinary stone is used otherwise. See lapis deposits.
• Rare emerald pockets along pale underground traces, with occasional larger finds whose abandoned galleries can reach more than one pocket. Large mines have several separated zones to prospect beyond the starter workings. They fit natural schist in active Mineralogy strata, or natural vanilla stone variants otherwise. See emerald deposits.
• Configurable support for vanilla and modded resources.
• Safe generation that avoids air, fluids, bedrock, block entities, structures, and undeclared host blocks.
• Live reload for iron and coal geometry. Emerald, lapis, gold, diamond and other structural changes wait until restart.
• An entry in both Forge's Mods configuration and OreSpawn's World Settings.
• Abandoned workings with sloping, stepped entrances and short underground galleries. New defaults attempt them at every iron formation, coalfield, diamond pipe and goldfield, plus each lapis or emerald district, where safe. River placers stay untouched. See the mine settings.

Coalfields can already use Mineralogy's existing shale, siltstone and conglomerate. Wider catalogues for Mineralogy, Base Metals, Modern Metals, Base Minerals and Base Gems remain future work.

Requirements

The current branch requires:

• Minecraft 1.10.2;
• Forge 12.18.3.2511 or a compatible newer Forge 12 build;
• MMD OreSpawn 4.1.6.110021 or a newer compatible 1.10.2 release, but earlier than OreSpawn 5;
• Java 8 to run Minecraft.

Realistic Deposits is independent of the similarly themed Large Ore Deposits mod and does not require it.

Configuration

Install Forge, OreSpawn, and Realistic Deposits in the usual mods directory. The first launch creates:

config/realisticdeposits/deposits/vanilla.json
config/realisticdeposits/deposits/coal.json
config/realisticdeposits/deposits/diamonds.json
config/realisticdeposits/deposits/gold.json
config/realisticdeposits/deposits/lapis.json
config/realisticdeposits/deposits/emerald.json

The supplied definition describes one rare iron district using a 640–960 block folded horizon, a 160–240 block down-dip span, and a 3–8 block thickness. Its density controls the disseminated halo around the connected mineralized routes rather than producing a uniformly random cloud. Two or three faults introduce short, recoverable breaks and modest vertical or lateral offsets. The shipped iron definition uses hybrid interaction with 25% background iron so early play remains viable while a discovered district can support a long-lived mine and rail network.

The separate coal catalogue adds two to four beds across a large coalfield, keeping 25% ordinary background coal. It favours sedimentary and wetland basins while allowing sedimentary cover in some other geological regions. Coalfields use plain stone without physical strata, or suitable existing sedimentary rocks when those strata are active. Old catalogues are never overwritten, and old worlds do not receive new coal rules automatically.

Goldfields add narrow, steep veins with richer pockets rather than walls of solid ore. Nearby river sediments can contain gold-bearing gravel: mining it leaves spent gravel and has a one-in-four chance of a gold nugget. Fortune increases successful drops. The gold catalogue keeps 15% ordinary background gold; the larger deposits are deliberately unevenly distributed. Their total reward is not forced to match vanilla.

Lapis occurs in smaller, irregular lenses rather than huge ore-filled layers. With physical Mineralogy strata, lenses fit into natural marble; limestone, dolomite and decorative marble are not substitutes. Without those strata, natural vanilla stone variants provide a simpler setting. The separate lapis catalogue keeps 30% background generation. Where a proposed site doesn't fit natural marble, the new defaults check nearby positions in the same region. A discovery can supply a lasting reserve because each vanilla lapis ore block drops several lapis pieces.

Deposits only affect newly generated chunks. Changing these settings does not retrogen, replace, or rewrite an existing chunk.

Every definition chooses one alignment mode:

• massive_rare selects formations without requiring OreSpawn geology;
• geome_aligned requires the formation centre to be in one of its configured geomes;
• rock_aligned also requires each output block to be in one of its configured rock_families.

Aligned candidates are safely rejected if the current dimension has no active OreSpawn geology sampler. The available families are sedimentary, metamorphic, igneous_intrusive, and igneous_volcanic.

The interaction field controls ordinary generation for the same resource and dimension:

• additive leaves it unchanged;
• hybrid scales it to 25% by default, or to background_generation_scale when specified;
• replacement disables it while leaving the massive deposit active.

OreSpawn 4.1.3 applies those limits to imported OS1/OS3 ordinary rules too. Explicit custom placement channels remain independent. Manage Vanilla Ores must be on to activate imported vanilla rules. When it is off, those rules stay inactive and Minecraft supplies the ordinary placements instead. Realistic Deposits' selected policy still controls the background supply. Saved settings and existing chunks are preserved.

Biome IDs and Forge biome-dictionary filters can be supplied with biome_ids, excluded_biome_ids, biome_dictionary, and excluded_biome_dictionary.

Use the diagnostic commands to inspect the loaded catalog and preview planned formations:

/realisticdeposits status
/realisticdeposits preview <regionX> <regionZ> [deposit-id]
/realisticdeposits reload

reload requires operator permission. For iron and coal it applies enabled, selection, shape, height, geome, family, and alignment changes. Diamond geometry and source links require a restart, as do gold, lapis and emerald settings. Resource, dimension, host, biome-filter, interaction-policy, scale, added, and removed definition changes are structural and take effect after restart. Abandoned-mine settings are also captured with the world's deposit definition. New provider entries are deliberately not injected into a world profile that already exists.

The configuration screen is available from Forge's Mods list and OreSpawn's World Settings screen.

Building from source

The Gradle build runs on Java 17 and compiles the mod for Java 8 using the configured toolchain. ForgeGradle's Minecraft preparation utility uses Java 25.

OreSpawn 4.1.6.110021 is downloaded from Curse Maven, checked against its official checksum and mapped for development automatically. The exact dependency is curse.maven:mmd-orespawn-245586:9518063. No sibling checkout, local jar or local.properties file is needed.

An optional local-candidate override is still available for development, but it must name an isolated repository and a complete checksum. Publication is blocked whenever that override is selected. Normal builds use the public release.

On Windows, run:

.\gradlew.bat clean check build
.\gradlew.bat genEclipseRuns verifyEclipseProductionClasspath

Import the project into Eclipse through Buildship after generating the Forge run configurations.

For a separate test world, use runMajorIronClient.launch. It keeps its saves and configuration in run-major-iron, apart from the ordinary client launch.

The generation qualification guide describes the optional local-only packaged-server checks for policies, imports and saved worlds. The mine-testing walkthrough uses a separate Eclipse profile and disposable saves for the new workings. For coalfields, use prepareCoalMeasuresManual and the coal-testing walkthrough. For lapis, see the lapis walkthrough. For emeralds, see the emerald walkthrough.

Hosted CI/CD keeps to builds, unit/helper tests, static checks, reproducible jars, dependency hashes and ordinary Eclipse launch definitions. It does not run Minecraft servers or gameplay suites. The release guide explains the manual release action and its publication checks.

Bug reports and feature ideas are welcome through the issue tracker.

Links

• CurseForge project
• MMD OreSpawn
• Source repository

License

Realistic Deposits is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.