hey, there's an issue with Magneticraft ores, i opened a pull-request with the solution

Default radius is way too huge.  Was just testing this mod out early game in a modpack I'm creating.  Was hoping to use it to help find some iron veins/etc, so I made a stone prospecting pick and made a mineshaft.  After 30 minutes of smacking walls and digging tunnels, not once has it helped me find ore, despite it outputting a lot of ore into chat.  So I peeked at the config file..  12 block radius under the checked block?  That's huge.  That means..  any found ore can be anywhere in a roughly 24x12x24 area under the checked block.  That's not even remotely helpful lol, that's like saying "Hey, there might be some ore here, but you have to dig out more than a chunk to find it!"

That said, I can still see this being useful.  Going to test dropping the radius down to 4 or 5 blocks, that way if a player gets a hit, they only have at max a 10x5x10 area to search.

In reply to AlcatrazEscape:

 Well, that's sorta understandable.  The problem is if you're doing it mid-progression and don't have a good mining tool, then 12 block wide triangulation becomes a problem.  Lets talk theoretical situation.  You're trying to get metal for your first metal tools, but need to find a vein.  12 block range will better help you locate a vein if you're going completely blind.  But then again, a stone prospecting pick has like 5% accuracy.

Now lets say it returns an iron producing vein, so you want to "triangulate".  So you prospect blocks repeatedly to try and overcome accuracy while moving in one direction 'till you stop getting hits.  You mark the spot.  You go the other direction doing the same 'till it stops, then mark it.  Then you go in between the 2 spots, then turn 90 degrees and go to the side and repeat again.  Eventually you start to get a pattern and idea of where to mine after at max, a 24x24'ish area, and probably many broken prospecting picks.  If you're doing this on the surface, won't be too terrible and the 24x24 area will likely be smaller due to depth of the vein.  But it'll still very time consuming.  If you're doing this underground, this is going to take a large amount of time and guesswork, and likely isn't going to speed things up much.

If you have absolutely no hints what-so-ever where veins could be located and you're expected to just random mine chunk after chunk 'till you bump into something, TFC style, then sure...  that's where having a large range on the prospecting pick would be helpful.  It's also less painful if you already have a diamond pick or other mod pick that can chainsaw through the stone, so you can triangulate with ease.  That said, in practical use with today's mods...  the large vein mods tend to give you hints at vein locations with surface samples or flowers, while the mid to small vein mods just spam the ore everywhere.  In these scenarios, you're more than likely using the prospecting pick to reduce branch mine grind.  And that's where the large range just makes triangulation more difficult.

That said, I tested 4 range, and it was very helpful at detecting near misses.  In the end it felt a little short and not so helpful for finding more elusive veins, so I'm going to give 6 range a shot.  Anyway, I hope you see my point and why I feel the 12 range is just more time consuming and frustrating than it's worth, with today's 1.12 mods.