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Large ore vein feedback

Given the recent snapshot, containing the huge ore veins, I have a couple of pieces of feedback on it.

1. The veins should be perhaps a little rarer. Not by much, but when I played it, I found one almost immediately, which could take away from the early gameplay of finding your first iron and having to work up. Perhaps reduced surface exposure could work?

2. There should be ore vein 'deadends', which would be smaller blobs of tuff and iron or granite and copper, which at first glance would look like a large vein, but would actually be more like a normal tuff/granite blob with an unusual amount of ore in it. Again, this would help early gameplay not grow too OP and help add a little more variation to the generation. These could appear a little closer to the surface to help teach people (especially new players) what sort of thing they should look for later in the game.

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    I agree that they are too common.  I think they should be much rarer, perhaps nearly as rare as strongholds, and that there should be a special way to find them.  My proposal is that compasses go haywire when standing in a chunk with a higher than normal iron or copper ore content, mimicking the magnetic anomalies caused by some large iron deposits IRL.  That way, the player could find regions with veins in them while exploring the surface, which is more of a mid or late game activity.

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    Seamus Callaghan, that's a great idea. If ore veins were too common it would completely destroy early game progression, but if they were too rare and without a way to find them, players couldn't reliably find them in the late game. The idea for compasses to malfunction around ore deposits is genius--it's a real phenomenon, it gives a use to compasses, and feels a lot closer to vanilla than things like "ore maps". Some suggestions to expand on your idea: When the player's x/z coordinates are within, say, 30 blocks of any part of an ore vein, compasses would start to slightly move back and forth, but barely noticeably. The closer the player gets to the vein (in terms of x/z coordinates), the more it'll spin and generally act weird. And if the player is higher or lower than the vein, the spinning will be slightly less noticeable--this way the player can still detect a vein from the surface, but be able to zero in on its depth.

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    Registered User commented
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    And @Melly Dow, I might be misunderstanding what you mean by "early game", but in my experience, the early game is gathering basic resources and mining enough iron for basic gear. Iron farms aren't made until the mid/late game, since they can be pretty complicated to build, and in the scope of the early game, one doesn't need stacks of iron. I think making ore veins harder to find (and adding the compass mechanic) would make vein mining at least as viable as iron farming in late game. And yes, mining in deepslate is slow, but that's what enchanted pickaxes are for. Iron farming has always seemed like an exploit to me, so it's good to know there's a legitimate way to get masses of iron.

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    Registered User commented
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    I really like the new rarity of ore veins. They are rare enough to not be reliably found in the early game, but they're also a great source of iron in the late game. During the late game, I recently explored a huge cave, and by the end of it, I found a large iron vein. The iron vein looked amazing as it sprawled throughout the cavern, and it was very satisfying to mine due to the variation of blocks.