Realistic mines

A realistic mine never refills its area. It looks after the blocks already standing in it: each one a player breaks disappears and grows back on its own, after a time set per material. It suits a natural cave, an ore wall built by hand, a quarry that should look untouched.

Nothing scans the area to find out what it holds. The mine's blocks are exactly the materials you add as levels.

Levels

Regen levels on the setup screen lists them in order.

Add level asks you to pick a block. A material that cannot be placed is refused, and so is one that already has a level. A new level starts with settings.default-realistic-regen-seconds from config.yml, 60 seconds by default.

Inside a level:

What a break does

Breaking a level's material inside the mine:

1. The block is broken by the mine, with the level's loot table if it has one and the tool's vanilla drop otherwise.
2. It turns to air, or to the first stage of its degrade chain.
3. Once the level's regen time has passed since that break, the block is back as it was.

sounds.block-mined in config.yml plays to the miner on every break of a realistic mine. It is empty — silent — by default.

Degrade chains

A degrade chain is what a broken block shows while it grows back, instead of a plain hole. Each stage is a block and a delay; Add stage asks for the delay first, then the block.

Stages run strictly in list order, and the player drives them: a stage stays until somebody mines it.

• The first stage appears its delay after the original break; until then the spot is air. A delay of 0 places it at once.
• Mining a stage brings in the next one, its delay counted from that break.
• Mining the last stage leaves the spot as air.
• Whatever stage the block has reached, it heals back to the level's material once the level's regen time has passed since the original break. That deadline is a safety net for a player who never comes back to finish the chain — and it also means a chain mined quickly still waits, as air, for the rest of the regen time.

For example, a DIAMOND_ORE level with a regen time of 2 minutes and a chain of STONE (0s) then COBBLESTONE (0s): the ore breaks into stone, the stone into cobblestone, the cobblestone into air, and the diamond ore is back two minutes after the first swing.

A stage pays its own loot table when it has one, and the vanilla drop of its block otherwise. Its break effects are the mine's global ones, unless the stage's block is also a level with effects of its own.

Only what the mine still owns grows back

When a block is due to come back — a stage appearing, or the final heal — the mine checks what is there first. It writes its block only over air, the level's own material or one of its stages. Anything else was put there by a player after the break, and overwriting it would delete it, together with whatever a chest held. That spot is left as the player made it and the mine stops regrowing it.

Placing the mine's own materials inside the area is refused anyway, so what a player can put in a hole is always something of their own. See Area and shapes.

Restarts

Every block mid-regeneration is written to the database (mines_broken_blocks). A block broken a moment ago goes out on the next tick; stage changes and heals are batched every five seconds.

When the plugin starts, every block still broken is healed at once, whatever time it had left: a restart or reload regrows them all rather than resuming their timers. Then:

• A block whose chunk is not loaded stays tracked and is retried every 10 seconds until it is; its row is only deleted once the block is back.
• A block in a world that is not loaded yet waits for that world to load.
• A row for a level or a mine that has been removed is discarded.
• A row for a mine this server does not know is left alone: on a shared database, that mine belongs to another server.

Entering a realistic mine shows no entry title and no "next reset" bar — there is no reset to count down to. Potion effects, the boost bar and everything else apply as in a classic mine.