OreSense

A prospecting compass powered by amethyst shards.

Tune the Ore Sensor with a sample, load it with amethyst shards, and follow the needle to the vein. Samples can be ore blocks, their drops, or items made purely from that material.

Available for Forge, Fabric, Quilt, and NeoForge. Current mod version: 1.0.2.

Features

• A compass-style dial at vanilla pixel scale, with a red needle, above/below lamps, a charge gauge, and a window showing your sample.
• Find coal, copper, iron, gold, redstone, lapis, diamond, emerald, quartz, ancient debris, and amethyst geodes—including deepslate and Nether ore variants where available.
• Use samples such as ingots, nuggets, storage blocks, raw ore blocks, cut copper, netherite scrap, and amethyst shards. Mixed-material recipes, such as pickaxes and golden apples, are not followed.
• Supports modded ores through the ore tags used by each loader, with samples discovered from their drops and recipes.
• Hold up to 64 amethyst shards. The gently pulsing charge gauge shows your remaining charge even when the Sample slot is empty.
• The needle pulses faster as you approach a vein. Indicator lamps show whether it is above or below you, and cyan sonar rings show the sensor is searching.
• Data-pack friendly: add your own item-to-block targets under data/<namespace>/sample_aliases/.

How to use it

1. Tune it: Right-click to open the sensor and place a sample in the Sample slot.
2. Charge it: Put amethyst shards in the Shards slot.
3. Follow it: Hold the sensor in either hand. A chime announces a lock, and the needle points toward the vein.
4. Mine it: Swap to your pickaxe—the lock stays while the sensor is in your inventory. Mining the first block spends one shard; the remaining blocks in that lock cost no additional charge.
5. Skip it: Sneak-right-click to release a lock and search for another vein. Releasing within four blocks spends one shard if that lock has not already been paid for.

Spending about ten seconds outside scan range releases the lock without spending another shard. Creative mode never consumes charges.

Recipe

Four gold ingots, four amethyst shards, and one iron ingot.

Place gold ingots in the corners, amethyst shards on the edges, and an iron ingot in the middle. The recipe unlocks when you pick up an amethyst shard.

Supported versions

Download the file for your exact Minecraft version and loader. Each combination has its own build. Snapshots and Minecraft pre-releases are excluded.

Requirements

• Install OreSense on both the client and server.
• Fabric and Quilt require Fabric API for the same Minecraft version.
• Quilt builds for 1.17, 1.17.1, 1.18, and 1.18.1 require exactly Quilt Loader 0.26.4. Later Quilt builds require 0.30.1 or newer.
• Check each file’s release notes for its specific loader and dependency requirements.

Configuration

Configuration files are created on first launch:

Adjust scan range, scan interval, optional text readings, and whether samples must point to ores.

The default scan range is 32 blocks horizontally and 16 blocks vertically.

Restart after editing. In multiplayer, the server configuration controls scanning and the optional text readings.

Links

• Source code and full documentation
• Report an issue
• GitHub releases