I assumed that the spawn chunks were where the Main Outposts were placed and therefore not a place that a normal player could build anything that requires a spawn chunk. Even if they are offset a little, building close to one is likely to cause misery. Rules aside, using World Downloader in the way discussed seems horribly impractical. You would have to record some random area, then mine it or examine it in some way, record locations and translate it into this server, then actually do the work of "finding" it. I can't imagine a reason you would want to bother. To use it to download the whole server in order to determine the seed... There have been a lot of medical advancements and I hope to be around for a long time, but I don't think I'll live that long.
That and digging straight to the goods is a sure sign of cheating. There is always someone who will ruin it for all. WD is great for building your area in SP first but someone always needs to take it too far.
Are you meant to just continue like you don't know it's there? The next time you need diamonds, you'll think.. well I could mine a cave, but there's that one thing I found..
But why would you download parts of the wastelands in the first place? I'm a little confused by your comments to be honest, you make it sound a bit as if this could be something done by accident, but that's most certainly not the case. So yeah, I fail to understand the problem here. Simply don't download the wastelands, problem solved.
Not the wastelands, the frontier. Hypothetically, - I'm 50,000 blocks out from the main outpost - I just built this beautiful Donald Trump statue that I would like to download. - I download it - While looking at it and taking all sorts of screenshots in the air in single player to capture this masterpiece, I see diamonds at the bottom.
I believe you understand by now, but I will just reiterate it one more time with a brief summary... The world seed is not disclosed for fear of exploitation. I promise you people (including myself ) have tried to get this information to locate the spawn chunks for things like iron farms that need to be constantly loaded. It unfortunately is just unfair when you have a server with potentially 100,000 other members all scrambling for those chunks to build their own farm. There are a multitude of iron farms that work very efficiently without being constantly loaded, they just require AFK time. I am more than happy to supply you with designs off the internet if you'd like.
Interesting example. No situation is the same of course, and this is just my 2 cents, but I wouldn't worry here too much. That is; if this is the first or second time it happened. I'd say it becomes peculiar if you'd find yourself in such a situation for 4 or more times. Another thing is how much you need the diamonds. If not that much I'd simply leave 'm for someone else to find. Which is IMO the most optimal solution of them all (provided this is still the first or second time it happened): tell someone else to search in the general direction of the diamonds. You see them at the back / fast right of the build? "Say, could you check if there are any diamonds around? Maybe search / replace 2 rows of blocks at the back of the build just to be sure". You didn't give any specific coordinates, you didn't specifically use the information you had for your own gain and you still have a good chance at getting those diamonds anyway. But yeah, no situation is the same of course.
