As it can sometime be hard to find a vein of poor ore, especially for the uninitiated, it would be great if there was some in game way to help point players in the right direction.

MalkContent came up with some great ideas for this. The general idea is that scattered around the player will be able to find maps to nearby veins. The map would lead to a Miner's Shack placed above a vein. Also present at the shack would be a Zombie Prospector, a Pickaxe wielding zombie. Inside the shack would be a mineshaft leading down to the vein with some minecart stuff at the bottom. Somewhere a chest would be present where the player would be able to find more information about poor ore vein in the form of a letter along with some loot.

Some preliminary investigation revealed that is possible to add markers to vanilla maps by adding some NBT data. The rest is pretty straight forward, perhaps the most difficult part is spawning the maps in the proper areas not too far from the shack, but not too close either. This would be in either chests in mines, blacksmiths, workshops, or villager trades. There may also be some concerns about the number of map IDs (65536), but it's probably a non-issue so long as shacks are moderately rare.

My more indepth take on map generation:

• Maps to a prospecting camp can only be found once the camp has been generated
• All maps to a prospecting camp share the same id (because this might be one of the few instances where available map id's could be exceeded otherwise due to continuus generation of maps) It would allow peeking if two players found the same map, but prospecting is a competetive business :P
• Whenever a prospector's map is generated it randomly selects between the ~5 closest camps and one additional completely random camp. Methods that don't allow for location-of-generation-detection should be avoided, because it'd be difficult to find a useful map on a big server, if the camp they point to is always completely random
• Could rarely spawn in the hands of zombies. Should be done in a way that they are not always dropped, but dropped like a rare drop, as with armor/weapons/tools a zombie can spawn with. This way they are double-rare and only drop when killed by players. This would prevent exhaustion of chest loot preventing other players from finding maps in the area.
  • add a method to recycle maps back to some paper so people don't get sick of the same drops around their homebase x) a bucket of water surrounded by maps or something

If you use chests I'd rather want you to put some empty void chest or some metal chests there.

Actually if the map is too rare people would just find it with xray or direct mining.

I suggest ditching the letter & instead having ore samples.

I know Vazkii's Quark does something similar with maps in dungeon chests that lead to stuff. You can easily avoid the map ID issue by not actually generating the map until the player interacts with it. You could either see about adding some kind of dungeon loot hook -- in 1.10 dungeon loot chests generate their contents only when they're first opened; they might have a forge event or something. But honestly it'd probably be safer/simpler to add an item that turns into a map when it gets an "I'm in the a player's inventory" tick.

my suggestion is to have 2 cargo carts, one with cobble, one with a sample of the ore of the vein.
have the cargo carts be linked.
put them kinda in front of the door so people will probably shove them and be like "whaaat, are those linked? what is this mod?"

Edit: Mockup Screenshots done in 1.7.10



chests are only really there because it looked empty with just the hut and i thought I'd make a storage area.
still, my hillarious contents of chests:

1. a poisonous potatoe, a bone, a slimeball, a mushroom
2. a crowbar (because those minecarts are attachted. hinte-de-hinthint)
3. a cobweb, 2 pieces of dirt

you can also put some emblems in carts though to show it's railcraft.

@purpleposeidon the problem is that many people don't understand that poor ore doesn't generate in small clusters like normal ore, rather over a large area. I'm not sure how I'd get that idea across without a letter/book of some kind.

By the way is the shack above the ground or underground?

Both?

Or will it generate somewhere in a cave?

1.11 cartographer villagers could sell maps to prospector shacks.

For 1.10 should railcraft engineer villager sell these maps?

sure they should buuuutt you will need to get lucky. (aka made trade quite rare)

i a up for that idea.however they should only be traded once. once it is gone. it is lost for good.

why? maybe you lose yours or other players want that map, too

How about they only ever offer the same map for trade? Want a different map, get a different villager.

well we could clone it. using another map , a feather and ink sac. that is feasable.

I am asking why you want to have it only be able to be traded once. Cause that's just not general trading behavior and possibly requires coremodding unless there are already the right hooks in place for villager trading.
Unless there's a good reason for that behavior, why put in the extra work? So: Why should they only be traded once?

to make it valuable and not like a piece of rubbish paper that can be thrown away when not used.

Regarding this:

I would suggest holding back the map idea to 1.11. 1.11 adds maps which point to Ocean Monuments and Forest Mansions; we could add our own map (Prospector's Map maybe?) at that point without using some hacky method as proposed here.

Well, railcraft should go to 1.11 asap since 1.10 is badly supported by forge.

People frequently report that they cant find ore mines on discord. I think we should kick this issue forward.

Are we still working on the prospect concept or is it abandoned?

I am having ALOT of trouble finding ore mines.......