To test the latest beta I decided to take the same seed I’ve been playing for a few years now and open a fresh instance. At first all was fascinating to see where the new version differed from my original, lakes and rivers where there were none before, changed shorelines, strange water filled holes leading into the depths. I set about gathering resources and I quickly noted I wasn’t finding coal. I knew ore distribution was changing which is where the first problem became evident. According to the chart I found abundant coal was only high up and my seed spawned me in lowlands with no highlands anywhere nearby, certainly not as high as the chart. It did indicate that coal  could be found but chances were low and likely not in the open air. I quickly found that I could not go surface caving near my spawn, all the caves I knew about were cone or replaced with lakes or deep aquifers, I could not find any surface caves heading underground. So I started mining. After hours of mining i rarely found more then 3 or 4 pieces of coal, and that was after a lot of exploratory digging first near the surface and then deeper and deeper. I also found in my digging that I couldn’t find an open air underground cavern to save my life above y=23 or so.  Plenty filled with water, huge ones. Note I rarely found other ores too though much more then coal. Once I safely dug into one of the new caverns I quickly set about resource gathering but at that depth coal has petered out. What I had gathered was not much help in lighting the gave even with the new lighting rules. The new ore distribution is going to need some tweaking