Adjusting Chest and TNT Minecart Spawn Rates in YUNG's Better Mineshafts

guide

YUNG's Better Mineshafts exposes its configuration through an in-game settings screen rather than through crafting or items. This guide covers the options that control how often chest minecarts and TNT minecarts appear in the main shaft and in small shafts, along with the chance for an Abandoned Miners' Outpost to generate.

Finding the Settings

Open the mod's configuration screen and look for the section titled Spawn Rates & More. Its tooltip explains that this is where you customize spawn rates for various mineshaft parts and decorations. Everything below lives in that section.

If you need to locate a mineshaft in your world, the mod provides a dedicated command form: use `/locate structure #bettermineshafts:better_mineshafts` rather than the plain mineshaft locate command.

Minecart Spawn Rates

Four separate options govern minecarts, split by what the minecart holds and by which part of the mineshaft it generates in.

Main Shaft Chest Minecart Spawn Rate — controls how often minecarts holding chests appear in the main shaft.
Small Shaft Chest Minecart Spawn Rate — controls how often minecarts holding chests appear in small shafts.
Main Shaft TNT Minecart Spawn Rate — controls how often minecarts holding TNT appear in the main shaft.
Small Shaft TNT Minecart Spawn Rate — controls how often minecarts holding TNT appear in small shafts.

Raising a value makes that type of minecart more common in its designated area; lowering it makes the minecart rarer. Because the main shaft and small shafts are tuned independently, you can, for example, keep TNT minecarts uncommon in the main shaft while making them more frequent in the side tunnels, or the reverse.

Abandoned Miners' Outpost Chance

The Abandoned Miners' Outpost Spawn Rate option sets the percent chance that an Abandoned Miners' Outpost generates at the end of a small mineshaft tunnel. This is a percentage, so it applies per applicable tunnel end rather than across the whole mineshaft at once.

Ore Deposit Chances

The same section also holds ore deposit configuration, introduced by a tooltip noting that it configures ore deposit spawn chances. An Enable Ore Deposits toggle turns the feature on or off. When it is on, individual percent chances are available for each deposit type: cobblestone only (an empty deposit), coal, iron, redstone, gold, lapis, emerald, and diamond.

A critical warning accompanies these values: all of the ore deposit percentages must add up to 100. If they do not total 100, the deposits will not behave the way you intend. Check your arithmetic after every change to this group.

Several other rates in the same section affect what you will encounter alongside minecarts:

Lantern Spawn Rate — how often lanterns appear in the main shaft.
Torch spawn rate — how often torches appear in small shafts.
Workstation Spawn Rate — how often workstation side rooms generate along the main shaft.
Workstation Cellar Spawn Rate — how often cellars generate below those workstations.
Small Shaft Spawn Rate — how often smaller tunnels branch off the main shaft.
Cobweb spawn rate — how often cobwebs appear.
Small Shaft Piece Chain Length — the number of pieces, such as straights and turns, in a single small shaft, which determines the overall size of small shafts.

Vertical Placement and Vanilla Mineshafts

Two coordinate options set the vertical band in which mineshaft floors can appear. Minimum y-coordinate is the lowest the floor of a mineshaft can be, and Maximum y-coordinate is the highest. Separately, Disable Vanilla Mineshafts determines whether vanilla mineshafts are disabled entirely.

A Note on Hotkeys

The settings above are changed through the mod's configuration interface. If any control in that interface is bound to a key rather than a click, use the corresponding hotkey and set it in the controls menu; no default key is assumed here.