Surface Ore Pebbles

Each pebble sits over an ore pocket and is placed only occasionally in the overworld. The pebbles that mark copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis and diamond ore appear at the surface, and pebbles for deepslate ore and water-adjacent ore also generate. Rarer ores have rarer pebbles, and a player usually finds the pocket by going straight down from the pebble, anywhere between 6 and 48 blocks below it.

The idea draws on the surface deposits of Vintage Story, where a visible sign hints at what lies underground, and on the way real-world ore veins often outcrop at the surface. Prospectors can start digging near a found pebble in hope of a richer vein. The mod adds six new blocks, one for each pebble type, each shaped as a stone carved from its matching ore.

Breaking a pebble has about a 50/50 chance to drop the matching ore gem or nugget, and the drop can also be a small amount of the ore. Diamonds can be obtained without a pickaxe, because the pebble needs no special tool to break. The mod is installed on Forge only, with a single build, 1.0.0 for 1.20.1, released under the MIT License and not open source. Environment: client and server, so both the server and every player need it.