TONI’s Better Mineshafts

The vanilla mineshaft is a tangle of oak corridors lost in the rock. Better Mineshafts digs a real mine in its place: a timbered shaft with its cage, two or three levels of drifts and crosscuts round it, ore stopes, a smithy, a powder magazine, bunks and a pony stable, a chasm crossed by a trestle bridge, the mother lode at the bottom, and up on the surface a mining camp under its headframe.

No two alike: every mine is dug from its own seed. Same places as vanilla, same /locate.

Where the ground over the shaft is dry and even, the shaft comes up in a mining camp cut level into the land. Over the shaft stands one of three headframes: a timber headframe with its back legs and the winding house behind it, a brick tower with the wheel on top, or a shaft house with a small wheel under its roof. The rails come out of the shaft to the ore tipple, and round the yard the seed picks the rest: a bunkhouse, a cook fire under a canopy, a tool shed, a corral, a water tower, the assay office, the explosives shed and the spoil heap. Temperate, snowy, desert and badlands camps each have their own wood and stone.

A 5 x 5 shaft lined with timber runs from the sump up to the surface. A ladderway climbs its north side with a landing at every level; the cage hangs on its rope at one of the stations (or up at the collar), and every level has its station: a timbered hall round the shaft with gates, a signal bell, carts, barrels and the station chest. Fall down the shaft and the sump at the bottom catches you.

Two or three levels, twelve blocks apart. Haulage drifts five wide run straight out from the station with a rail down the middle and a set of timber every four blocks; crosscuts branch off them, close into loops and end at working faces with the ore still in the rock. Inclines (stairs with a rail up the middle) and winzes (ladder raises under a hatch) link the levels, and on one of them the drift crosses a chasm on a trestle bridge, down to the floor of the level below.

• Ore stopes: caverns with the ore showing in their walls, props, scaffolding and a staging walk.
• The smithy, the foreman’s office (with a safe under the carpet), the bunkhouse, the storeroom, a mushroom farm and the pump room by the sump.
• The pony stable: mules and donkeys in their stall, hay and a trough.
• The powder magazine: stone all round, an iron door, TNT stacked to the ceiling.
• Spider and silverfish nests, thick with cobwebs or infested rock.
• The mother lode at the bottom of the mine: a cavern thick with ore and a few diamonds round the best chest of the mine.

Tripwires run across some crosscuts: one sets off the charges hidden in the wall, another the dispensers that shoot across. The chest of the mother lode is a trapped chest on TNT, the magazine is full of it, and a creeper has found its way in now and then. Zombies (husks in the badlands) and skeletons stand where the miners never came up, and spawners guard the nests and the mother lode.

In the badlands the mine is dug for gold: timbered in dark oak or acacia, with a badlands camp of terracotta and red sandstone over it, a water tower, and the canyons all round.

The ore the mine was dug for (coal, iron, copper, gold, redstone, lapis, or diamond deep down), the number of levels, the plan of every level, the rooms and where they are, the timber, the headframe, the camp, the state of the mine (kept, abandoned or ruined: fewer lamps, more cobwebs, broken sets) and its turn all come from its seed. Levels under y 0 are dug through deepslate. The mine belongs to the world it is dug in: tunnels leave the water and the lava of the world where they are, so some drifts are flooded; plank floors bridge the caves they cross, and the ore shows only where there is real rock.

NeoForge, Forge and Fabric, Minecraft 1.19 to 26.3 (78 files).
Requires TONI’s Structure Lib, and Fabric API on Fabric.

Does it need a new world? New mines are dug in the chunks you have not explored yet.
Can I find it? /locate structure minecraft:mineshaft, or minecraft:mineshaft_mesa for the gold rush mine.
Modpacks? Yes.