Bukkit

A Bukkit ore generation plugin that loves underground caves and structures. Instead of having spawned random ore blocks that players struggle to find in the most humiliating and boring manner, this plugin improves the player experience by analyzing and linking the underground natural formations of water and lava lakes, caverns, abandoned mine shafts and whatever is down there, usually fun to admire and explore, with a varied and configurable set of ore veins. Their endpoints are visible on the cave walls so they can be easily discovered by explorers. Nonetheless, this feature adds a level of difficulty to Minecraft, especially for the new settlers. There are no more random little deposits scattered everywhere, thus making it much harder for them to find the desperately needed basic ores by just digging blindly underneath their shanties unless, of course, they're extremely lucky. They can still do that however, from now on, their best bet is to listen for the sound of underground water and lava rivers, or for the moans of the undead, both a good indication that a cavern is nearby.
But when they do stumble upon a vein, the rewards are usually considerable, and because the ore is grouped in veins, they'll start saying "Hey, let's head down to our coal mine!". Everything gets interconnected with this plugin, so mining will soon lead to "We should start planning for our web of mine carts, on an industrial level" and for some "I wonder were this ore vine would lead us to"

Features

• Configurable distribution of ore veins. The plugin will attempt to hit the desired targets, providing there are enough caves to link.
• A more natural look with the inclusion of noise in 2.0.
• Two distinct types of ore formations: regular veins and pockets of ore, both of them having one of their ends visible on the cave walls.
• The plugin works by default in automatic mode. This means the world will get analyzed and repopulated with ore as the players reach the unprocessed areas. And yes, it works just fine in an already generated world without you having to lift a finger. In manual mode, the worlds can be prepared in advance.
• Perfect companion for Anti X-Ray plugins. CaveOreVeins is ignoring the generated game seeds when populating.
• The main game engine is single threaded, but the plugin could make use of all your available CPU power, as its analysis stage is performed asynchronously (and yes, the load on both its sync and async stages is also configurable). Actually, it's more than advisable to have as much parallel CPU power as possible, or in other words, don't bother running it on your tiny EC2 Amazon instance.
• Starting with version 2.1, a hierarchical configuration mechanism allows for customized configs for any combination of worlds and biomes.
• Version 3.0 introduced the concept of ore impurities, where different types of ore blocks, creature spawners, chests and structures can appear on the ore vein paths.
• Built-in server side X-Ray, to give you a hand with those pesky config settings. Bye bye client side mods.

Installation

The server plugin needs to be placed in the /plugins folder to become active. Alternatively, if you wish to update an old version, place it inside the /plugins/update folder. If the server is already running, a reload command must be issued in the CraftBukkit console or inside the game client.

Configuration

The default configuration file config.yml will be dropped into the /plugins/CaveOreVeins folder as soon as the plugin fires up. Unfortunately, CraftBukkit strips out the comments at that stage, so a detailed explanation of the settings can be found here:

• for 3.x
• for 2.1
• for 2.0 and earlier versions

Commands

The available commands are listed here.
Normally just installing the plugin is enough to get you going. It works out of the box for both new and old worlds, without any supervision. The automatic mode kicks in as soon as the plugin becomes active and repopulates the world with ore, each area being triggered by players wandering around.

Change log

• 3.2.0 Beta :
  - Potions, enchantments and entity eggs for chest inventory items.
  - Quartz added for the Nether (useful for old worlds only), disabled by default.
  - Multi-config example included.
• 3.1.1 :
  - Compatibility fix for MCPC+ 1.4.7
• 3.1.0 :
  - Built-in X-Ray for CREATIVE mode, very useful for testing your configs.
• 3.0.1 :
  - Compatibility fix for Spout.
• 3.0.0 :
  - Reworked the way the plugin waits/triggers a chunk to be initially populated by the game. The Bukkit team surely don't care to make this any easier.
  - A separate definitions file for custom materials, variations of the standard in-game materials, mob spawners, chests and structures.
  - A material picker command that allows for a quick way of finding out information about the active materials, especially the custom ones.
  - Ore vein impurities, in the form of blocks, items and structures that appear on the vein paths.
  - General performance improvements.
• 2.1.0 :
  - Hierarchical configuration mechanism; custom configurations for any combination of worlds & biomes.
  - Compatibility fixes.
  
• 2.0.0 :
  - Support for custom blocks and metadata.
  - Noise added in the ore generation.
  - Global restrictions and exclusions.
  

Recommendations

• Before you activate the plugin on your server, check the configuration, and run it on a test CraftBukkit server, hosted on a machine ideally resembling your live one in terms of CPU/memory configs. If the CB server is running on a single core CPU, I strongly advise you prepare the worlds manually with the CaveOreVeins_SpawnOre command rather than keeping the plugin in auto mode.
• For testing, I recommend using the material picker and the X-Ray command. Alternatively, mess around with the client by using the X-Ray mod on the client side, activated through MCPatcher.
• The plugin doesn't hook up to the world generation chainset, as it requires to act on areas far larger than a 16x16 chunk of data. Tune your area size based on your machine power, keeping in mind that bigger the areas the better the experience. Word of caution though: if you change the area size, the already processed areas will have their ore regenerated.
• When activated in auto mode (default), the plugin is going to modify your existing worlds, so it is imperative to back them up first.
• Have fun!
  

Feel free to use the ticketing system for any bugs you may have discovered.

The Bukkit team was kind enough to let us have a forum, so head over there to have a nice little chat.