I would like to crate a custom mining mob, and was wondering if anybody could suggest an efficient method of scanning nearby blocks ( like in a 5 block radius ) for ores, and at longer range ( 16 block radius ) for only visible ores.

 

The basic concept is that the mob can "smell" buried ores within a limited range, but can still "see" surface ores from a distance.

 

I would like something that is quick running, not likely to introduce lag, and can be adapted for other similar tasks.

 

Thanks for any help.

The only way to do this that I know of is to iterate over all the blocks within that radius (for loops) and check each for line of sight (ray trace).

 

For better performance, you can limit the 'sniffing' to occur once every several ticks rather than once per tick, since the mob probably didn't move too far.

I was hoping for a way to do it without having to iterate through all the blocks.

I think coolAlias' suggestion is the most practical, so long as you don't have too many of your mobs, and you limit your search to (say) 100 randomly chosen blocks in the radius, i.e. your mob doesn't have to be perfect.

 

Otherwise, you could maintain a parallel data structure to store the positions of ores and search it more efficiently.  For example - for each chunk, you maintain a list of all [x,y,z] of all ores in that chunk, sorted in ascending y order.  Every (say) 2 seconds, your mob stops, searches the four adjacent chunks and checks all entries in the list between y-16 to y+16 to see if they are close and visible.  If your ore is rare, this is much faster than having to search every block within a 16 block radius.  But you have to be careful to keep it synch with the world data.  There are chunk load and unload events which can help you do this.

 

-TGG

 

 

 

 

 

 

For 5 block radius, it is fine to search all blocks.

For 16 visible blocks, combine raytracing and surface tracking method.