Vein Miner

Quickstart

1. Install the mod and load a world (singleplayer or multiplayer — no setup needed).
2. Find any ore vein underground — coal, copper, iron, gold, diamond, emerald, lapis, or redstone ore all work.
3. Equip the appropriate tool (pickaxe) and mine one ore block as you normally would.
4. The entire connected vein breaks instantly, and all drops go straight into your inventory.
5. Watch your action bar for a message confirming how many blocks were mined and how many item stacks you received.

Overview

Vein Miner removes the tedious process of mining ore blocks one at a time. The moment you break a single ore block, the mod automatically finds every connected block of the same ore family and breaks them all at once, server-side. Drops are calculated using your held tool and any enchantments on it, so Fortune and Silk Touch work exactly as expected. Items fill your inventory directly, and any overflow is dropped on the ground nearby.

What It Adds

Vein Miner adds no new items, blocks, or crafting recipes. Its entire feature set is behavioral — it enhances how ore mining works without requiring any in-game crafting or configuration.

Supported ore families:

How To Use

Mining a vein:

• Hold the appropriate tool and mine any ore block as normal. No extra key presses or hotkeys are required.
• The mod activates automatically whenever you break a block that belongs to a supported ore family.
• All connected blocks of the same family are broken in one action.

Enchantment support:

• Fortune — Each vein block's drops are calculated with your Fortune level, giving you the same bonus you would get mining each block individually.
• Silk Touch — All vein blocks drop themselves as raw ore blocks, just as if you had mined each one with Silk Touch.
• Other tool enchantments (such as Efficiency) affect mining eligibility as normal.

Inventory and drops:

• Drops are inserted into your inventory automatically.
• If your inventory is full, overflow items are dropped at your feet rather than being lost.

Action bar feedback:

• After a vein is mined, a message appears on your action bar:

  Vein mined X blocks into your inventory (Y drop stacks)

• This message only appears when two or more connected ore blocks are broken together.

Abilities And Mechanics

• Connected search — The mod searches for ore blocks that are directly adjacent (including diagonals) to the originally mined block and share the same ore family. Only contiguous clusters are collected.
• Server-side processing — All vein detection and block breaking happens on the server, making the feature fully functional in multiplayer without any client-side mod requirement on other players.
• Spectator mode — The mod does not activate while you are in Spectator mode.
• Tool requirement — The block must be breakable by your currently held tool. If you cannot mine the block (e.g., wrong tool tier), vein mining does not trigger.

Progression And Strategy

• Prioritize Fortune III — Since Fortune is applied per-block across the entire vein, a Fortune III pickaxe dramatically multiplies your yield when clearing a large diamond or lapis vein in a single swing.
• Silk Touch for smelting efficiency — Use a Silk Touch pickaxe on iron and gold veins to collect raw ore blocks, then smelt them in bulk with a blast furnace.
• Watch your inventory — Large veins can produce many item stacks at once. Clear inventory space before mining deep veins to ensure nothing is wasted on overflow drops.
• Deepslate veins — Deepslate ore variants are treated as the same family as their stone counterparts, so a vein that crosses the deepslate layer boundary is still mined completely in one go.