June's GeOverhaul

The mod reimagines terrain as the result of about 4.6 billion years of geologic evolution. Land is divided into large areas called provinces, each holding ancient pieces of crust with a similar rock makeup. Plate boundaries between provinces produce volcanoes and mountain belts, and mountains form only in provinces where two continental plates collide and cause uplift and deformation.

The pack ships with more than a thousand rocks and minerals and hundreds of ores, with more types still being added. Ore placement follows geology: minerals appear only in the rock types able to host them. Coal is split into Lignite, Bitumen, Vanilla Coal and Anthracite according to their effectiveness in furnaces, iron is more common because it is one of the most abundant elements in the crust, and gold is rare, turning up in sandbanks and rivers or in large quartz veins in mountains. Copper follows porphyry granite along plate boundaries, diamonds occur only in kimberlite shoots, and lapis lazuli appears only in metamorphic rock.