Bedrock Ores is a world-gen mod that adds a unique method of resource acquisition. Instead of regular ore blocks it spawn ore clusters embedded in the bedrock. These can then be harvested by the player, behaving much like the contained ore does, except that the block will never fully break. Each time the contained ore would break, its drops are spawned and the bedrock ore's yield is reduced. Once the ore deposit is exhausted, the block will simply turn into regular bedrock.

The yield of the bedrock ore veins goes up the further away they are from spawn, so digging them up by hand will get tedious quickly. To make your life a little easier, the mod also adds a single machine block, the Bedrock Miner. This machine will automatically harvest bedrock ores in the 5x3x5 area below it. It needs to be powered either by pumping burnable materials, such as coal, into one of its sides or by connecting it to an external power source; Forge Energy and classic Redstone Flux are supported. All harvested ores will be ejected into an inventory above the miner. Note that the machine will stop working if there is no inventory to eject harvested ores into.

Collection of ores

Note that the mod adds no ores of itself, it just wraps existing ores. Any ore that does not use a tile entity should be supported (which I'd wager is roughly 99% of all modded ores). Bedrock ores simply wrap the block state of the actual ore and forward relevant calls, such as checks for harvestability. Think Carpenter's Blocks.

Retrogen
The mod supports retrogen, i.e. it will generate bedrock ores in already generated chunks, unless configured not to. This means you can throw it into your pack and keep playing your old worlds, and bedrock ores will pop up where they would have been, had the mod been present right from the start.

Configuration
As with any mod, you'll find all general settings for the mod in its config file at .minecraft/config/bedrockores.cfg. This includes settings like the time it takes the automated miner to extract a single ore from a bedrock ore block, how likely it is a vein spawns in a chunk, a global scaling for the yield of veins, settings controlling the scaling with distance to spawn and more

While the config contains a few nice high-level settings, if you're working on a mod-pack you may wish to dig deeper, and adjust ore spawns on a per-ore level. That's what the JSON config system is here for. Once you've run Minecraft with the mod installed at least once, you'll find a JSON file in your .minecraft/config/bedrockores directory alled _example.json. This file contains an example entry for an ore definition, i.e. settings for an ore that may spawn as a bedrock ore. You can also have a look at this file in the repository.

You can either add custom entries in that file directly, or create your own JSON files following the same format, i.e. one array of objects with ore definitions. To adjust single properties of an entry, you do not have to copy the full entry from the defaults, you just need to use the same block state definition and specify the properties you wish to override. All other properties will use the defaults/previously defined values. Note that this means the order in which files are loaded may be important, if you adjust the same ore in multiple files; JSON files are loaded in natural order, i.e. file4.json is loaded before file10.json.

So, for example: let's say you want to reduce the yield of iron patches from their default (unscaled!) 180-225 to 100-125, but leave all other properties alone, you'd add this to a JSON file in the .minecraft/config/bedrockores directory:

  {
    "state": { "name": "minecraft:iron_ore" },
    "yieldMin": 100,
    "yieldMax": 125
  }

The same principle holds for all other properties as well; use the same state and override any individual properties you like.

Integration
The mod currently comes with built-in support for:

Thermal Foundation
IndustrialCraft 2
Immersive Engineering
Forestry
Mekanism
Tinker's Construct
Deep Resonance
TechReborn
Extreme Reactors
Iskallium Reactors
AbyssalCraft
Silent Gems

It should be trivial to add ores from other mods (see the Configuration section). If there's any you'd like to see in the default config, let me know. Note that the bedrock vein config allows grouping blocks. From each group, only the entry with the lowest sort order will actually be used. So e.g. if you have both TF and IC2 installed, it will automatically only generate TF copper in bedrock veins by default, and no IC2 copper. This makes the default config usable in most cases with just a few tweaks. You can easily change the order of these in the config, or if you need more precision, via the oregen JSON files.

Why?
I've never been quite happy with how automated resource acquisition works in modded Minecraft. It's either magical blocks that harvest massive areas (BuildCraft Quarry, Mekanism Miner), or blocks that generate ores out of thin air (MineFactory Reloaded Laser Drill, all those boring magical plants). At least some of them with a limit per location (Immersive Engineering Excavator). The IE way is pretty close to what I wanted, but that the generated ores did not have any in-world representation still bugged me. So, playing a bit of Factorio, enter the idea of multiple ore drops per block. Now let me stop you there: yes, Dense Ores are a thing, but they still drop all at once, so not the same at all. The only problem with this idea was having a quasi-unbreakable block somewhere, possibly in the way: depending on yield, it can take quite some time to get rid of it. But rejoice, there's some unbreakable block in Minecraft already, quite a lot of it, actually, and it is called bedrock. So that's when it clicked for me, and here we are. If you'd also like to give a fresh kind of ore generation and automated mining a shot, this mod might just be what you're looking for.