Realistic Deposits

Realistic Deposits is an extension for MMD OreSpawn that is being built to make valuable minerals feel like geological discoveries. Instead of scattering a steady supply of small, isolated ore clusters throughout the world, it plans rare formations large enough to reward exploration and support sprawling mines, rail networks, and long-term resource projects.

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

This is an alpha. The supplied catalog currently adds iron only. Back up your world before updating, and expect the defaults to change as testing continues.

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.
• Additive, hybrid, and replacement policies for controlling interaction with ordinary ore generation.
• Configurable support for vanilla and modded resources.
• Safe generation that avoids air, fluids, bedrock, block entities, structures, and undeclared host blocks.
• Live reload for geometry and alignment tuning, with structural changes clearly deferred until restart.
• An entry in both Forge's Mods configuration and OreSpawn's World Settings.

Compatibility catalogs for Mineralogy, Base Metals, Modern Metals, Base Minerals, and Base Gems will be added as those product lines become available on each target.

Requirements

The current branch requires:

• Minecraft 1.10.2;
• Forge 12.18.3.2511 or a compatible newer Forge 12 build;
• MMD OreSpawn 4.1.3.110021 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

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 15% background iron so early play remains viable while a discovered district can support a long-lived mine and rail network.

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. It immediately applies enabled, selection, shape, height, geome, family, and alignment changes. Resource, dimension, host, biome-filter, interaction-policy, scale, added, and removed definition changes are structural and take effect after restart. 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 4.1.3.110021 is downloaded from Curse Maven, checked against the official release checksum and mapped for development automatically. No sibling checkout, local OreSpawn build or local.properties file is needed. The exact dependency is curse.maven:mmd-orespawn-245586:9335434.

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 packaged-server checks for policies, imports and saved worlds.

CI also checks reproducible jars, dependency hashes and ordinary Eclipse launches. 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.