[nwiswell]

Can't you still gain an unfair advantage using Bayesian search theory where probability drops to zero at the "revealing radius"?

Or is the "revealing radius" somewhat randomized over time in a way that's invisible to the client?

[Qub3d]

I mean, if you can acquire or otherwise reverse-engineer[0] the game seed, you can also just find resources by loading a local copy and noting the coordinates of ore. For major servers, anti-xray plugins will be installed as due diligence, but most of the anti-cheat efforts are focused on detection, reverting, and banning.

Ultimately, if you have a big enough server to attract serious cheaters, you will (or at least should) have tools that can also detect suspicious behavior based on heuristics (i.e. see if a player mined straight to an ore block). Tools like CoreProtect[1] can help detect and revert this.

Ore obfuscation still works very well, however, for the majority of causal cheaters that just googled "hacked minecraft client" and installed the first result.

One ore obfuscation technique used in PaperMC actually sends intentionally fake data to the user to "muddy the waters"[2].

(I know a lot of this because I help develop a Minecraft server management tool)

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRurhiK-Lk

[1]:https://github.com/PlayPro/CoreProtect/

[2]:https://docs.papermc.io/paper/anti-xray