A couple of weeks ago, I was playing on a modded Minecraft server with my family. The mod pack we’re using is heavily focused on Create — with all the glorious cogs, gears, steam engines, and kinetic chaos you’d expect.

One consistent pain point: gathering ores in large quantities. We built massive Create-powered drills that helped, but some resources — like Ancient Debris — were still extremely hard to get in bulk.

That’s when we stumbled on a gem: a mod included in our pack called Create: Ore Excavation. And it changed everything.

Infinite Ore Veins? Yes, Please.

This mod adds a new gameplay mechanic: "infinite" ore veins that are scattered across the Minecraft world. Once you locate a vein within a chunk, you can set up a massive drill to extract from it — and it won’t run out.

There’s a catch, though:

• You need serious rotational energy to power the drill.
• Some ores require lava or water to operate.
• And you need a special drill bit to actually mine the good stuff.

I consider this a mid-to-late game mod — by the time you can reasonably craft the necessary machinery, power sources, and transportation, you’re likely already well-established.

Flying around with a jetpack, I managed to find about 5 infinite veins across thousands of blocks. It was totally worth it. Once you discover one, I highly recommend setting up teleporters or portals for quick access.

The Problem: Where Are the Veins?

After scouring the overworld for diamonds and the nether for ancient debris, I started to get frustrated. I was flying for hours and finding nothing.

That’s when the programmer in me kicked in.

"Wait a second… this can't be truly random, can it?"

I had a hunch: the placement of ore veins was probably deterministic, based on the world seed and chunk coordinates. So I did what any curious dev would do — I went digging in the mod’s source code.

Diving Into the Mod Code

Now, I haven’t touched Java in over a decade — so jumping into Minecraft mod source code felt… nostalgic. And confusing.

I didn’t try to learn the whole modding ecosystem. Instead, I laser-focused on this one problem:

Given chunk coordinates (x, z) and a seed, tell me which infinite ore vein if any is located there.

I sifted through the mod's code, dependencies, helper libraries, and Minecraft internals. It was scattered, but not impossible to follow. I began pulling out key logic pieces and reconstructing them in my own script.

To stay grounded, I wrote some unit tests using my world seed and the chunk coordinates of known ore veins I’d already discovered. That way, I’d know if my reimplementation was on the right track.

It worked beautifully. TDD to the rescue.

Claude, Java RNGs, and a Few Late Nights

The trickiest part? Rebuilding the mod’s random generation logic, which relies on Java's Random class and some salted structure seed calculations. Thankfully, the mod also included some handy JSON files with values like:

• Chunk spacing
• Separation distances
• Salt constants

Once I had those, I asked Claude to help me reimplement the structure seed logic in JavaScript. After a few hours of tinkering and running tests...

✅ It worked. My tests passed. I had a working ore vein locator.

The Payoff: A Diamond Rush

To validate my code, I brute-forced a search for a diamond vein in the overworld.

It found one.

I flew to the coordinates...

💎 Boom. Diamonds. I couldn’t believe it.

Try It Yourself

I’ve made the tool available online for anyone who’s had the same frustrations I did:

👉 Create Ore Excavation Hunter

All you need is your world seed and some chunk coordinates, and it’ll tell you if there’s an infinite vein there.

That said — I still highly encourage manual exploration first. There’s something magical about the moment you stumble upon a rich vein after searching for hours.

And finally, a huge shoutout to the creators of the Create Ore Excavation mod — it’s a brilliant addition to an already amazing gameplay experience.

Happy mining.