Ore Distribution Scanner
Find out exactly what depth to mine at, without ever leaving the game.
You want to know where an ore really spawns in your world. Not the wiki's vanilla numbers, your world, with whatever modpack worldgen is actually in play. The usual way to get that answer is painful: pre-generate part of the world, run a separate scanner tool outside the game to crunch the region files, then read the output somewhere else. By the time you have your graph, you have left the game twice and burned half an hour.
Ore Distribution Scanner does the whole thing in-game. Stand in the dimension you care about, run one command, and read the results in the same recipe viewer you already use to look up crafting recipes.
Scan In-Game With One Command
Type /ods scan and the mod sweeps the terrain around you, counting every ore by type and by the exact Y level it was found at. No pre-generation step, no command line, no second program. The scan runs on a background worker, so the server keeps ticking and the Watchdog stays asleep while it works, and progress is reported as it goes with a summary when it finishes.
That is the simple path. When you want more, the same command takes more: scan several dimensions at once by passing a comma-separated list, scan everything with all, or add a radius for a wider or tighter sweep on a single run. Simple stays simple, and the depth is there when you need it.
See Where to Dig
Open JEI, EMI, or REI, look an ore up the way you would look up a recipe, and the mod draws its distribution as a graph: a gold curve running from bedrock at the bottom to the sky at the top, swelling at the depths where the ore is most common. Hover any depth to read the exact average per chunk and the raw count behind it. The graph renders natively in all three viewers, so it sits right at home next to every other recipe you browse.
Per-Biome, Not Just Per-Dimension
Most distribution data gives you a single curve for the whole dimension. That is fine for vanilla, where ores ignore biomes, but it falls apart in modpacks where an ore only spawns in certain biomes. A dimension-wide average will tell you something is rare everywhere when it is really common in one biome and absent in the rest, and you dig in the wrong place for hours.
Ore Distribution Scanner buckets every find by biome. The graph has a biome selector, so you can step through each biome's own depth profile or view the dimension-wide picture as a whole. Frequency is normalized by how much of each biome was actually sampled, so an ore in a biome you barely touched is not unfairly compared against one you covered thoroughly, and thinly sampled biomes are flagged as low-confidence rather than quietly lying to you.
Or Just Ask in Chat
No recipe viewer installed? You can still read everything from chat. /ods info <ore> prints where that ore peaks and which biomes it favors, and /ods list shows what you have scanned so far. Both work on a dedicated server console too, so admins can check distributions without ever opening a client.
Safe to Run on Any World
The scan is strictly read-only. It reads terrain that has already generated and never triggers new world generation, never edits a block, and never touches your save beyond writing its own results file. Loaded chunks are read live; chunks that exist on disk but are not loaded are read straight from the region files. It cannot map terrain that has not generated yet, so biomes you have not explored show up thin or empty. Explore more, or pre-generate the area, and scan again to fill the picture in.
Commands
The root command is /ods.
Scanning:
/ods scan scans the dimension you are standing in./ods scan <dimensions> scans one or more dimensions: a single id, a comma-separated list, or all./ods scan <dimensions> <radius> does the same with a one-off radius for a wider or tighter sweep./ods cancel stops the current scan.
Reading your results:
/ods info <ore> [dimension] [biome] prints an ore's peak depth and where it concentrates./ods list shows which dimensions you have scanned; add a dimension to list the ores found there./ods status shows whether a scan is running and how far along it is.
Managing data:
/ods clear <dimension|all> deletes saved results./ods reload applies config changes without a restart.
All commands work at permission level 0, so the mod is fully usable in singleplayer without enabling cheats and by any player on a server. Server admins who want to restrict scanning, clearing, and reloading can raise scan_permission_level in the config; the reading commands (status, info, list) are always available.
Configuration
Counting is driven by ore tags, with a whitelist and blacklist if you want to add or remove specific blocks (handy for modded ores that fall outside the standard tags). On Fabric the settings open in-game through Cloth Config, reachable from Mod Menu; on Forge they live in the config file. Editing the ore list asks you to rejoin so the viewers can pick up the change.
Pairs With
Genesis is the natural partner here. Because the scanner can only read terrain that already exists, pre-generating the area with Genesis first gives it far more to work with and a far more complete result. GeoStrata is the other one: when your ores are spread across 27 different stone types, an in-game map of where each one concentrates earns its keep fast.
Compatibility
Ore Distribution Scanner is built for Minecraft 1.20.1 on Forge and Fabric, with 1.21.1 (NeoForge and Fabric) planned.
To see the graphs, install any one of JEI, EMI, or REI. The graph renders natively in whichever you use, you only need one, and the scan plus the /ods info readout work even with none of them installed. Each viewer integration loads only when that viewer is present, so the mod never forces a recipe viewer on you.
License
Alkeari License Agreement (ALA v2.2)
Issues & Feedback
Found a bug or have a suggestion? Open an issue on GitHub.
