I recently started a world with a lot of limestone. Most of the starting area was limestone with some slate and Bauxite nearby. I searched forever and could never find native copper bits (new to the game, fyi) so went to google and found that in Limestone native copper doesn't occur (which isn't in the description for native copper, only that it doesn't spawn in Bauxite) but it does appear in Malachite. Per the wiki Malachite can be a surface ore.
Fast forward another 7-8 game days roaming around and hunting for Malachite and other things like bees and resin. Nada on Malachite. So I download the x-ray mod and find Malachite about 10 tiles deep right near my based area, yet it never spawned surface bits at all. That specific area may have been 11-12 tiles high from the copper originally, so not sure if there is a max depth for copper or Malachite to appear on the surface or not.
I also see a large deposit 14 tiles deep from the surface of a huge lake and like the other mineral spawn, no surface bits at all to indicate it was there.
Does Malachite spawn surface bits like the wiki says, or no? This was a world created with 1.19 rc1, and upgraded to rc2 and now rc3. Per the xray mod any 'native' bits of copper are 400+ tiles away otherwise.
Appreciate any clarity because it's been very frustrating to find the normally easy to source surface copper, and have had to pan every single nugget of it so far.