Pity you can't simulate having had Blood Magic's Falling Tower Meteors all over. Those are chock full of ores, but it's a totally random mix. It could also be a cool 'back story' for why you're the only person in the world. The previous inhabitants were summoning ores from the sky and over did it.
If I can find a mod that can handle it, my plan is as follows:
- Diamonds and Emeralds are going to be found in small geode-like formations encrusted with Obsidian (i.e. you need a pick that can break obsidian to get to the goodies inside).
- Resonant Ores are also found in roughly circular geode formations that are largely hollow, but might occasionally have one or two crystals fully formed inside. However, the crust is almost entirely resonant ore, providing the player with enough to get started with the discovery of only one or two geodes.
- Extremely sparse metallic ore placement, perhaps only one or two at a time with a large areas between, maybe only 2-3 of these per chunk.
- Occasional veins of ore, with a frequency of less than one per chunk, but consisting of 30-50 ore. This would be the template for most metallic ores, with gold veins being smaller and at lower y levels
- Gold and silver 'comstock' lodes, where these are seen together, as well as lead and silver 'galena' veins. Lapis/Iron veins, with native copper, cassiterite (tin), and bauxite (aluminum) veins found separately.
- Possibly 'dense ores' (if the mod updates) being found within the middle of these veins
This gives you a pretty decent world which, when combined with Ruins and some of the things it brings to the table and RTG's complete re-write of how the world is built, is not only more realistic but also more interesting to discover. In some ways, having a very sparse general density of ores with periodical veins will actually give you a much higher percentage of the ores naturally occurring to be found by the player because a larger vein is much easier to strike via branch mining with far fewer branches require to find one. Then once you find it, you simply follow it along until it dies out, much like miners have realistically done for centuries. This means a lower dependency on auto-mining techniques because a mining player can find a higher percentage of the already occurring ores until the mid-late game when you simply have a need for tons of resources to make your improbable structures.
This does two things mechanically:
First, because you can find a much larger percentage of the ores manually, you have a lower need of auto-mining, and this pushes back the need for the auto-mining systems which drives power, transportation, and processing to ridiculous over-engineered standards in the still fairly early game, which causes the player to try to 'tech rush', bypassing some of the more interesting technology in an effort to push to the point where they can 'set and forget' a remote mining system, which is powered and sends its results back to base, which is typically end-game tech.
Second, this dramatically reduces the 'ore glut' seen in many systems simply because you've never HAD to set up auto-mining to get everything you needed, so it never occurred to the player to set one up. Which means you don't have a constant influx of ores passively growing while the player is doing other things, because he's always had everything he needed from his manual mining. He may have hundreds of ingots of a given material in his system, but he typically won't have tens of thousands, because he never felt the need to mine that much and never felt the need to set up auto-mining because the resources he obtained manually were sufficient unto his needs.
This is a natural solution to the ore glut problem which is prevalent in many playthroughs. It also makes mining much more interesting for the average youtuber, because you can skip through the regular stuff and cut the video back on when you find a vein to excavate. And it also makes the pack's tech tree more interesting to explore in its fullest rather than trying to find ways to rush to the end of the tree just to get your basic infrastructure set up because of the need for auto-mining to support your infrastructure.
And this is the kind of thing that most pack developers don't consider. I think the only pack team that really is considering something like this is the Resonant Rise team. None of the FTB or Curse packs I'm aware of for 1.10.2 are even considering this take on worldgen in general and oregen in particular. But I think it is one that separates 'edition churn' packs like the DW20 pack from truly great packs.
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