Living Ores

Living Ores is a mod that adds new blocks to the game as a way to farm resources not possible or not as easily in vanilla.

How It Works

The mod adds a new variant of each ore block in the game (excluding ancient debris and nether gold ore) which is known as a Living Ore Block. Once placed down these blocks won't do anything as they begin exhausted. Though after being activated via being right clicked on by their resource counterpart (e.g Diamond Living ore is activated by a diamond), it will begin to spread to neighboring natural blocks and turn them into living blocks. Most of the time the blocks will be spread as their exhausted counterpart, though they have a small chance to spread as the alive version and continue spreading. On spreading the source block will also have a chance at exhausting itself, or if it tries to spread to a neighboring block that it can't spread to, it will have a chance at exhausting itself.

What They Drop

If mined by a pickaxe with no enchantments, it will drop the same drop the normal variant of the ore would drop. If mined via fortune it would have the same effect as the standard block version too. However, if mined using silk touch it will not drop the living block and will drop the Deepslate or Netherack variant instead. Thus meaning once you place a block it cannot be moves, though spreading it a distance is possible.

How To Obtain Them

Around the world a new structure will spawn being a Living Spore Geode. These only spawn inside of Lush Cave Biomes, but inside of them they are fairly common. They aren't always exposed to air but they do make a sound and can be located that way (The sound is a higher pitched version of chorus fruit growing). Once found they will be a sphere of mud and mangrove root mud. Inside of there will be a layer of moss and then tuff. Then the center block will be a Living Spore block which can be mined using a Netherite Pickaxe. Anything below Netherite will break the block and you won't pick it up. This block can be used with 4 Deepslate Or Netherite ore plus 4 moss blocks to craft 1 living ore block of whatever type you want.

Why They Are Useful

The Living Ores are a new way to farm resources that are either a pain to farm normally or are almost not possible like diamonds. They can be pushed via piston, and can override stone blocks so a simple farm should be possible to do.

Extra Information

There is a gamerule called exhaustOnSpread which is true by default. If toggled to false it will disable the source block having a chance at exhausting itself on spread meaning the original blocks once activated will never stop spreading to neighboring blocks. (The new blocks that are spread though will still mostly be exhausted) It is balanced however, that statistically the blocks if placed just on a field or something should never spread forever.

Youtube

For a more visual look at the mod I have videos about it on my Youtube Channel LINK along with other mods I make.

Living Ores

Fabric API