Handwerk 0.16.0 — The Ore Update

Ores now look like the rock they grew in. Dig through a granite pocket and you'll find granite iron ore; break into the sulfur caves and the ore there is set in sulfur, not in grey stone. It's a small thing you'll notice constantly.

✨ New

• Ore Variants — all eight overworld ores (coal, copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond, emerald) now come embedded in granite, diorite, andesite and tuff, plus sulfur and cinnabar from the 26.2 sulfur caves. That's 48 new blocks on 26.2, 32 on the older versions.

  • Nothing changes about where ore spawns. Veins already ran straight through granite, diorite, andesite and tuff — they just placed plain stone ore no matter what they replaced. Now they place the matching block instead. Size, frequency, depth and biome distribution are exactly as before, so your usual mining routes stay just as productive.
  • They behave like the ore they are. Same hardness, same pickaxe tier, same drops, same experience, same Fortune and Silk Touch behaviour. The Prospector Pickaxe follows veins through them, and other mods that check for "iron ore" recognise them too.
  • Sulfur caves are the one real gain. Sulfur and cinnabar were never valid ore hosts, so veins skipped straight over them and left those pockets barren. They're part of the rotation now.
  • Resource-pack friendly. The rock itself uses the plain vanilla texture, so any pack that restyles granite, tuff or sulfur carries over to the ore variants automatically.

• New advancement: Know Your Rock — awarded the first time you mine an ore that sits in granite, diorite, andesite, tuff, sulfur or cinnabar. It joins the Handwerk tab next to the other block advancements.

• Tidier creative menu — Lanterns, Trapdoors and the new Ore Variants each moved into their own tab. The general Handwerk Blocks tab had grown to several hundred entries and was getting hard to browse. Everything still appears next to its vanilla counterpart in the normal tabs, too.

🩹 Fixes

• Handwerk no longer crashes on startup with recent Ohmega builds. Ohmega 1.6.0-beta.18 began rejecting API calls made before its own start-up, and since the load order puts Handwerk first, the Lodestar Charm's accessory binding tripped over it — the game never got past loading. This hit 0.15.4 as well, so if Handwerk suddenly stopped launching for you after updating Ohmega, that was why.

  Digging into it turned up the real cause: Handwerk had been registering the charm the wrong way round for as long as the integration existed. Ohmega's API expects an item you own to simply be an accessory, and it picks that up by itself — no registration call, and nothing that could run at the wrong moment. The charm now works that way, so the accessory slot works on beta.17 and beta.18 alike.

• Every tool that breaks more than one block respects your enchantments again. Only the block you actually hit was ever mined with your tool — everything the hammer, the excavator or the prospector pickaxe took beyond it was broken as if by nobody, so Silk Touch and Fortune silently stopped at the first block. Silk Touch gave you ore instead of the block it should have preserved, Fortune multiplied nothing, and the experience Silk Touch is supposed to suppress dropped anyway. Now every block in the area or the vein drops exactly as the first one does. This has been in for as long as those tools have, on every version. (The scythe was always correct and is unaffected.)

• The Prospector Pickaxe follows a vein through changing rock. It used to stop dead the moment the surrounding stone changed — most noticeably in the sulfur caves, where a copper vein would break into unconnected fragments. It now follows the ore, not the block, so a vein that runs from stone through granite into sulfur comes out in one go. This fixes the old stone/deepslate boundary too, where the same thing quietly happened all along. Separate deposits stay separate: copper never chains into the iron vein next to it.

• An optional integration can no longer take the game down. Trinkets, Ohmega and anything similar now run isolated: if one of them changes its API from under us, you lose that one feature and get a line in the log instead of a crash screen.

🔮 Coming in 0.17 — Vertical Slabs

Vertical Slabs were announced for this release and didn't make it. Sorry about that — the ore work turned out to be the bigger win, so it got priority, and I'd rather ship slabs properly than half-done. They're still very much on the list for 0.17. Thanks for your patience! 🙇

⚙️ Technical

• Ore variants register in the minecraft namespace (minecraft:granite_iron_ore). If Mojang ever ships this officially, the IDs line up and existing worlds convert cleanly instead of ending up with orphaned blocks.
• Rendering uses a two-layer model: the plain vanilla host-rock texture with a cut-out ore overlay on top. Eight overlay textures cover all 48 blocks, which is what keeps resource-pack compatibility intact.
• Tags, drops, experience and the worldgen features are all derived from the vanilla ore at data-generation time rather than hand-written, so a future vanilla rebalance is picked up automatically instead of drifting apart quietly.
• Worldgen extends the 16 vanilla overworld ore features with one host-rock target each. Since targets are matched in order and the added ones are more specific, they only decide which block is placed — never whether one is placed.
• Compatibility note: extending a vanilla feature means the last datapack to load wins. Terralith rewrites ore_diamond_medium as well, so with both installed only one of the two takes effect there. Every other ore feature is unaffected.

💬 Feedback and bug reports are very welcome — join us on Discord. Thanks for playing! ⚒️