Buried treasure does not exist until a detector finds it
This is a Bedrock Edition add-on, not a Java mod. There is no launcher and no extra program to install: you open one file, the game imports it, and it works on phones, tablets, consoles and Windows. Craft a metal detector, hold it, and walk over sand, gravel and dirt. It beeps, faster and higher as you close in, and the beep comes from the treasure's direction, so you can follow it by ear. Dig the spot with a shovel and something comes out. Digging at random finds nothing at all, because until a detector sweeps a place, there is nothing buried there.
You stop looking at the ground and start listening to it. The beep is slow and low and boring, and then somewhere behind your left shoulder it is slightly less slow, so you turn, and it tightens, and you are walking a spiral over a beach with your head tilted. When the little green sparkles come up out of the sand you already know what is down there before you swing the shovel, and it is almost always three sticks and a rotten flesh. Almost always. That is the part that keeps you sweeping.
Everyone in a world shares the same hidden spots, and a spot somebody digs is gone for good
New to this mod? Do these in order and you will have seen the point of it.
Bedrock add-ons are not Java mods. Opening dist/metal-detector.mcaddon hands both packs to the game and you switch them on in the world's settings. No experimental features need turning on. A dedicated server takes the same two folders from dist/loose, listed in world_behavior_packs.json and world_resource_packs.json.
Nothing is buried in your world in advance. A hidden number rolled once for your world is mixed with a chunk's coordinates to decide, always the same way, whether that chunk hides something and where. About 40% of chunks host a candidate. The result is that your world's treasure is fixed and consistent, and none of it exists as data until a detector asks the question.
The detector reaches 16 blocks. Beyond 12 blocks it beeps once a second at a low pitch; inside 12 it goes to every 16 ticks, then 12, then 8, then within 3 blocks it is every 4 ticks and pitched high. The sound is the vanilla note.bit. Those five bands are copied unchanged from the Java version.
The sound is not played at your feet. It is emitted from a point two blocks toward the find, so the game's ordinary stereo panning does the pointing for free. When the treasure is straight below you the offset falls back to your own position, which is itself a signal: a beep with no direction means stop walking.
Inside 5 blocks the spot goes live: it sparkles every so often and it can be opened. Digging is done with any shovel, on the exact block. But the spot has to be your current, actively-beeping target. Blind-digging the whole beach must not work, and it does not. Relog beside a known spot and you have to let it beep at you once before it will open again.
Every dig rolls one to three junk items, then a 25% chance of a treasure matched to the terrain, then a 3% chance of a real prize. Junk is iron and gold nuggets, bone, string, rotten flesh, flint, clay, brick, coal, sticks, leather, paper, copper. Prizes are emeralds, gold, lapis, amethyst, a diamond, a name tag, a saddle, a golden apple. Identical items are merged so a dig drops three stacks rather than seven single items.
Gravel and clay give coastal loot: prismarine, nautilus shells. Sand gives desert, red sand gives badlands, both leaning gold. Snow lying on top overrides everything and gives snowy: iron and blue ice. Podzol, rooted dirt and moss give jungle; mud and mycelium give swamp; soul sand and nylium give nether; end stone gives end. Everything else is heartlands (iron and seeds), and plain ground is thinned to a third of its candidates, so travelling to real terrain pays.
This is the core loop only, and the Java original is far larger, at 239 classes. Not ported: the Prospector and Resonant detector tiers with their longer ranges and better odds; attunement, which points a detector at one specific item; the seven artifacts and their passive powers; the treasure journal and its collectible sets, which would need redesigning as a menu because Bedrock has no custom screens; the dozen decoration blocks; detection of vanilla buried treasure; and the config file. Bedrock also exposes no world seed, so spots are consistent within your world but cannot be derived from the seed the way the Java version's can.
Hold it in either hand and it sweeps automatically as you walk, beeping toward the nearest undug spot within 16 blocks. It is not used or aimed; carrying it is the whole interaction.
Where: Crafted: two iron ingots stacked as the shaft, one redstone beside the top one, three copper ingots across the bottom as the search coil.
Flavour, not rules. None of this changes how the mod behaves.
The premise is a small joke about observation. The world is not seeded with chests and lost coins waiting to be found; the ground is empty, and it stays empty, until a person with a detector walks over it and asks. Then it has always had something in it, and always had exactly that thing.
Anybody who has actually swung a detector over a field knows the ratio. Bottle caps, nails, a spoon, more bottle caps. This add-on keeps the ratio honest: three quarters of digs are junk and nothing else, and the reason people keep sweeping is a three-percent line in a table.
No. Those are Java Edition things. This is a Bedrock add-on: open the file, the game imports it, tick it on in your world's settings.
That is the point of a Bedrock port. Anything running Bedrock Edition can open a .mcaddon. It needs Minecraft 1.21.80 or newer and no experimental toggles.
Only about 40% of chunks hide anything, and plain dirt is thinned further. Walk a hundred blocks over sand or gravel before concluding it is broken.
No. A spot only opens if it is the thing your detector is currently beeping at, within five blocks. There is genuinely nothing buried anywhere else.
No. This is the core loop only: sweep, beep, dig, find. The detector tiers, attunement, the seven artifacts, the journal and the decoration blocks are all Java-only for now.
No. It builds, it validates and 11 offline tests pass, but it has never been run inside the game.
Status: The jar compiles and the author has tested it himself, but it has not had a real playtest yet.
.jar file into your mods folder.This wiki documents the mods; it does
not host them. Builds live in the project's own repository under
be-metal-detector/build/libs/.
Add-on by Bulletpies. Bedrock port of the Forge original, mc-metal-detector.