To test the latest beta I decided to take the same seed I’ve been playing for a few years now and open a fresh instance. At first all was fascinating to see where the new version differed from my original, lakes and rivers where there were none before, changed shorelines, strange water filled holes leading into the depths. I set about gathering resources and I quickly noted I wasn’t finding coal. I knew ore distribution was changing which is where the first problem became evident. According to the chart I found abundant coal was only high up and my seed spawned me in lowlands with no highlands anywhere nearby, certainly not as high as the chart. It did indicate that coal could be found but chances were low and likely not in the open air. I quickly found that I could not go surface caving near my spawn, all the caves I knew about were cone or replaced with lakes or deep aquifers, I could not find any surface caves heading underground. So I started mining. After hours of mining i rarely found more then 3 or 4 pieces of coal, and that was after a lot of exploratory digging first near the surface and then deeper and deeper. I also found in my digging that I couldn’t find an open air underground cavern to save my life above y=23 or so. Plenty filled with water, huge ones. Note I rarely found other ores too though much more then coal. Once I safely dug into one of the new caverns I quickly set about resource gathering but at that depth coal has petered out. What I had gathered was not much help in lighting the gave even with the new lighting rules. The new ore distribution is going to need some tweaking
Comments 6
Lucky for my sister and I, we spawned near some mountains and were able to find coal nearly the second we looked around. But this could have been for the worse as we continued with the world until we decided we REALLY needed iron. we both started our own mines in search of iron but that was a bust. R.I.P. that one random world. 😛
This seems like an intentional change which almost makes the game unplayable. It is nearly impossible to create a strip mine at the level at which coal generates most commonly now, and it is so rare outside that range that getting over the simple hurdle of making iron tools is ridiculously hard.
Thank you for your report!
However, this issue has been temporarily closed as Awaiting Response.
Is this still an issue in the latest version? If yes, can you please add it to the affected versions (or mention it if you are not the reporter)?
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I have been unable to get to my console to confirm if it’s been resolved. I have seen that some of the latest beta notes report changes in how ore is distributed which may resolve the issue. I’m hoping to confirm soon.
Cleaning up old tickets: This ticket had been set to 'Awaiting Response', but has not received a response from the reporter (~3 months+) so is being closed as Incomplete. If you feel this is still a valid issue then please comment, or create a new ticket following the Issue Guidelines which includes steps to reproduce the problem.
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I agree coal look really rare but I don't know if it's because I was mining really deep