So... I was getting really frustrated with my search for shiny ore so I decide to do a little map analysis..
Using cofh tools, I removed all the shiny ores in a square radius of 100 blocks from me. That is an 200x200 area. Since it can spawn from y level 5 to 30, that is a volume of 200x200x25 which is 1 million blocks!!!
It only removed 101 blocks! In 1 million blocks there are 101 shiny ore blocks! That is 0,01%!!
Dont you think the spawn chance needs a little boost? Its not like its going to break it to much since there is enough ferrous to get shiny ore later.
Or maybe other ores need a little nerf so more stone is available to spawn, since the chance should actually be 0,04% (3 blocks in a 16x16x25 volume) but with so many non-stone blocks, it just fails to spawn them.
The problem is all the progress that is halted in the quest book while we try to get the 10 shiny blocks. I could start building machines and all the stuff but I would rather do the normal progression with the quest book instead of finding the 10 blocks in a couple of days and suddenly unlock 20 already completed quests...
The only downside is the requirement for a world reset, since the retrogen just did nothing to me...
ps: While at it, also check lapis... is spawn rate is also kinda low... maybe due to the high density of other ores too...
Orespawn is one of the things we have been looking at. It is currently being worked on but as you pointed at it would require a world reset which is something we would like to avoid. BUT the pack is in BETA so world resets might happen. I'll add your comments onto our bug tracker and I will talk to Snow about what we can do