Changes Affecting Ores & Mining

Fortune on Diamonds

The Fortune enchantment has a debuff on SMPOnline. 50% of the time, mining Diamond Ore will only drop 1 Diamond. However, the other 50% of the time, Fortune calculations are applied. This means that the benefit of Fortune when mining Diamond Ore is reduced by 50%. No others ores are affected at this time.

Diamond Generation Rates

As some of you may have already noticed, the Diamond generation rates have been reduced on the server by somewhere around 40-50% per generation type. This was done unilaterally across all Diamond generation, as similar as it could be for each setup. This reduces the amount of Diamond exposed in Caves, as well as generated underground, by a not insignificant amount.

The purpose of this, as well as the Fortune change, is to give Diamond a more "rare" status on SMPOnline. With the addition of Emeralds dropping from Mob kills, there's a secondary, fully player-controlled market of alternative currency that can be traded at variable rates between the two. Keep in mind that there is no official Diamond/Emerald exchange rate, so it's up to players to determine how much of X is worth Y and vice versa.