Minecraft - finding an ore

I have written a mod to produce a new ore which is working great. Then I added some more code so that veins of this ore would be randomly generated. I cannot tell if this is working as I cannot find any veins.

Is there a cheat in vanilla minecraft that could help me find a vein?

Many thanks

Solution 1:

One possible testing solution could be to edit your texture file and turn everything except for your new ore transparent. Then whenever you want to see where the ore has been placed, change skins back and forth between the transparent one and the original.

This solution isn't directly vanilla, but it is at least within the bounds if vanilla by just being a texture pack.

Solution 2:

The simplest and most reliable way is to simply print each ore vein's coordinates to the console when it's generated, so you merely have to enter creative mode and teleport yourself to one of the veins. This way, you'll get every single vein reliably and just by adding a single line of code to the ore generation.

Solution 3:

Just make the ore generate 1000 times per chunk! That's what I did. I then changed it back to 10 times per chunk for the actual mod release (it's in beta testing with my friends right now). If it spawns 1000 times a chunk, it'll be really easy to find.