UltraVein

Hold a key. Break one block. The whole vein goes.

A universal vein miner for Minecraft 1.20.1 — veins, tunnels, patches and staircases, every one of them highlighted before you swing.

Every shape, exactly as the mod computes it. Yellow marks the block you are looking at.

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Why another vein miner

Most vein miners break a vein and stop there. UltraVein gives you ten shapes on a scroll wheel, shows you the exact blocks before they break, and runs on Fabric, Forge and NeoForge from one codebase — no Architectury, no config library, nothing extra to install.

Feature	What it means
See it first	The blocks light up while you hold the key. No guessing, no surprises.
Ten shapes	Vein, layer, column, patches, tunnels, staircases. Wheel to switch.
Resize live	Turn a 3×3 tunnel into 5×5 or 1×1 without opening a menu.
Honest durability	Forty blocks cost forty durability. Fortune and Silk Touch apply.
Plays nice	Claims and protections are respected. Optional on both sides.
Drop-in	One jar for Forge and NeoForge, one for Fabric. That is the whole install.

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Controls

Input	What it does
Hold V	Arm UltraVein — the blocks that will break light up
V + Sneak + Wheel	Switch shape
V + Wheel	Grow or shrink the shape
Break a block	Everything highlighted goes with it

V is the default and nothing in vanilla uses it. Rebind it like any other key under Options → Controls → UltraVein, along with two optional keys for stepping through shapes without the wheel.

While you are switching, the corner readout opens into the full shape list with the marker moving through it — the entries stay put, so you always see what is coming next.

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The shapes

Every geometric shape follows the face you are looking at. Mine into a wall and the tunnel bores sideways; look down at the floor and it bores down. The yellow square is the block you hit.

Shapeless

The vein miner itself — every connected block of the same kind.

Layer

Matching blocks on this height only. Flattening floors.

Column

Straight up and down. Clearing shafts.

3×3 Patch

A flat square lying against the face you hit.

5×5 Patch

The same, wider. Quarry walls in four swings.

3×3×3 Cube

A cube around the block — the dimmed layer is the depth behind it.

Tunnel 1×1

A one-wide corridor straight ahead.

Tunnel 3×3

A walkable corridor. The block you hit is the floor.

Staircase Up

Two blocks tall per step, so you can actually walk it.

Staircase Down

The same, heading for the deepslate.

Why the tunnel sits on the floor

The block you look at is the floor of the tunnel, not its middle. Centring it makes the corridor drift: aim one row higher and the whole cross-section moves with you, half of it is already air, and the tunnel wanders off its line. The floor is an unambiguous thing to aim at. Set tunnelAnchor to center if you want it the other way.

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What goes, what stays

By default even the geometric shapes only take matching blocks. A 1×1 tunnel through stone leaves ores standing, because they are not what you started on. Set geometryMatchMode to any to carve straight through everything instead.

"Matching" means the same block, plus variants worked out automatically: iron_ore and deepslate_iron_ore go together, and so do mod:zinc_ore and mod:deepslate_zinc_ore, and oak_log with oak_wood. That runs off a naming rule rather than a list, so it handles modded ores nobody told it about. Anything it misses goes in extraBlockGroups.

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Durability is real

Every extra block is broken through the same vanilla call as a normal swing. That is deliberate: tool damage, Fortune, Silk Touch, drops, experience, statistics, food exhaustion and every protection mod's permission check apply exactly as they always do, instead of being reimplemented and getting them subtly wrong.

Forty blocks cost forty durability. preventToolBreak stops before your pickaxe snaps.

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Installation

Loader	Jar
Fabric	ultravein-fabric-1.20.1 + Fabric API
Forge 47.x	ultravein-forge-1.20.1
NeoForge 20.1.x	ultravein-forge-1.20.1 — the same file

On 1.20.1 NeoForge is still a drop-in replacement for Forge, so one jar covers both. UltraVein declares no dependency on either, only on Minecraft.

Install it on the server too. The mining happens server-side. A client-only install shows the highlight but breaks nothing — and it tells you so, in red, instead of silently doing nothing.

The mod is optional on both sides: a client with it can join a server without it, and the other way round. Nobody gets kicked.

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Configuration

Two plain JSON files in config/, reloadable in-game with /ultravein reload.

ultravein-server.json decides what happens:

Key	Default	Meaning
maxBlocks	64	cap for the connected shapes — one stack of drops
maxShapeBlocks	256	cap for the geometric shapes
tunnel3x3Length	10	a 3×3×10 corridor, 90 blocks
tunnel1x1Length	16	depth of the 1×1 tunnel
staircaseLength	16	steps per staircase
tunnelAnchor	floor	or center
veinMatchMode	grouped	strict / grouped / any
geometryMatchMode	grouped	same, for the geometric shapes
requireCorrectTool	true	only break what your tool could harvest
preventToolBreak	true	stop before the tool snaps
blockBlacklist	[]	block ids never to touch
disabledShapes	[]	shapes the server forbids

ultravein-client.json is looks and input only: HUD position, highlight colour, see-through highlighting, scroll behaviour.

In multiplayer the server's rules win and are pushed to every client on join, so the highlight always shows what will really happen.

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Commands

• /ultravein info — the rules currently in force
• /ultravein reload — reload the configs (permission level 2)

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MIT licensed. Inspired by FTB Ultimine.