It's been touched on many times, but I haven't seen any good "alternatives" to finding ores.

Instead of going the awkward eye on a stick route, instead go with a more visual route. IE: Some sort of large surface ore deposit that visually stands out. This would lead to a more natural gameplay loop of finding infinite veins. With this change maybe a more common generation default to substitute the lack of a way of finding the ore would be helpful. Or even keep the current way, and add this on top if a more common generation default is not in the mod's vision.

Currently the stick method is just way too clunky and often focuses on ores further away than a closer deposit. With some sort of surface (or even underground) indication of an infinite vein I feel the mod would get way more attention.

After playing around with the configs and KubeJS-ing some ores and what not, I do realize this is a huge change since currently, the way things are handled it seems veins are not part of world generation.

I do like the way large ore deposits made the ore indicators, which are basically plants in a pattern.

I just started using the stick and man, it completely ignores all veins in the "Found traces of..." section except some random one. I could be standing right next to a vein and the stick would show me that there is one 500 blocks away.