More Ore

What More Ore Actually Does (And Where It Falls Apart)

More Ore is a mod that increases ore generation density and variety in Minecraft. It replaces the vanilla ore distribution algorithm with a more aggressive placement system. The result is that you find ore much earlier in your progression, which changes the entire pace of the game. People install it because mining iron at spawn is supposed to be tedious, and they want to skip that part. Here is the thing nobody tells you. More Ore does not just add more ore. It changes the vein structure and the biome distribution parameters. If you have it installed alongside mods like Biomes O' Plenty or TerrafirmaCraft, the ore placement can conflict with custom terrain generation. I learned this the hard way when I set up a server with roughly twelve mods loaded and found that diamond veins were spawning inside bedrock layers in deepslate biomes. The server crashed every time someone hit that chunk. The fix was switching from More Ore's default configuration to a trimmed config file that disabled deep-level generation overrides and fell back to vanilla for anything below Y=0.

Download and Installation

You grab More Ore from its official GitHub repository or Modrinth page, depending on the version you are running. Pick the Fabric or Forge build that matches your Minecraft version exactly. A mismatch between the mod version and your loader version is the most common reason it fails to load. Put the .jar file in your mods folder and launch the game. That is it for singleplayer. For servers, drop the same file into the server's mods directory and restart. Clients connecting to the server also need the mod installed — More Ore is server-authoritative for chunk generation, but the client side needs it to render the textures properly. The download link is straightforward. Search for "More Ore [your Minecraft version] modrinth" or check the author's GitHub releases page. Always verify the checksum if the mod page provides one. Corrupted downloads show up as missing texture errors or crashes on world load, and those are painful to debug because they look identical to mod conflicts.

How the Ore Generation Works Under the Hood

Vanilla Minecraft generates ore using a sparse distribution with fixed vein counts per chunk. More Ore replaces that system with a configurable density multiplier and a new vein placement algorithm. It typically uses a noise-based placement system that considers block hardness, biome type, and vertical height to decide where veins spawn. This means ore distribution is no longer uniform across all biomes, which is actually a good thing if you have ever tried to find coal in a mushroom field. The default settings increase vein count by roughly 2.5x and vein size by about 40 percent. These are rough numbers from my testing, and they vary between versions. You can adjust every parameter in the config file. The file lives in your config folder under a name like more_ore.json or similar. Open it and you will see sections for each ore type with separate controls for min_height, max_height, vein_count, vein_size, and biome_filter. Most people leave the config alone. That works fine for survival games. It breaks harder when you start combining it with other generation mods or datapacks that also modify ore placement. Two mods changing the same biome's nether quartz generation will clash, and whichever one loads last wins. The game does not warn you about this.

Common Problems and Workarounds

The biggest issue I run into repeatedly is the lag spike during world generation. More Ore's algorithm is more computationally expensive than vanilla, and if you are generating a large area — say, using /forceload or a map rendering tool — you will notice chunk creation slow down significantly. On a decent machine, a fresh world generates in about the same time, maybe ten to fifteen percent slower. On a weaker machine or a server with lots of connected players joining at once, world gen can become a bottleneck. My workaround for this has been to use the pre-generation tool along with a throttled config. Set vein_count and vein_size to vanilla values for the initial world gen pass, then switch back to the higher settings afterward. The world stays stable, and once the chunks are generated, the game runs normally. Alternatively, increase the concurrent chunk loader threads if your server supports that setting. Some forks of More Ore include a multi-threaded generation option that cuts generation time by nearly half on an 8-core machine. Another problem is that More Ore can make early-game progression too fast. Finding a full stack of iron within twenty minutes of spawning changes the game in ways some players do not want. It removes the exploration incentive from the first hour. If you are running a survival server and this is a concern, dial down the iron and coal multipliers in the config. Keep the deeper ores like diamond and netherite at higher values so late-game progression still feels rewarding.

More Ore Configuration Tips That Actually Matter

Do not just spam higher numbers across the board. The config file has a biome blacklist feature. Use it. Biomes like The End or custom modded dimensions may have their own ore generation rules, and forcing More Ore into them creates duplication and visual glitches. I had a situation where End island generation was producing veins of overworld iron sitting in end stone, which looked absurd and broke several datapack scripts that scanned for end ore types. Also, pay attention to the overlap prevention setting. Some versions of More Ore include an option to prevent veins from spawning within a certain distance of each other. When this is off, you can get clusters of three or four diamond veins in a single chunk, which makes the game trivial and ruins the challenge. Turn it on. The default distance is usually reasonable, but test it. Generate a small test world and check if the distribution feels right. If you want precise control, export your config to a shared file and version-control it. A simple git repo for your server configs prevents the common mistake of forgetting which settings you changed three weeks ago when a new version of the mod ships with different defaults.

When More Ore Is the Wrong Choice

More Ore is not a universal fix. If your goal is balanced, challenging survival gameplay, it actively works against that. The mod exists to make ore abundant, not to create scarcity. For speedrunners or challenge runs, stick with vanilla or use a mod like VanillaTweaks that lets you tweak individual parameters without adding a whole new generation system. Server owners should also consider the impact on trading economies. In towns or player-run shops, iron and gold prices collapse within days of More Ore being active. If your server relies on a player-driven economy, you will need to compensate with custom pricing plugins or by disabling the mod's effect on commercially valuable ores. There are alternatives worth looking at. If you want more ore but with better balance, try mods like AmbientSounds or Terraforged that modify generation more subtly. If you want complete control over every vein, datapacks with custom generate rules give you fine-grained control without the overhead of a full mod. For server admins who need both abundance and predictability, the BetterNether mod (when used for nether-only ore changes) paired with vanilla overworld generation is a reasonable compromise.

The bottom line is that More Ore does what it says. It adds more ore. The complexity comes from how it interacts with everything else in your mod configuration. Test thoroughly, keep a backup of your working config, and do not expect it to play nicely with every other terrain mod you install.