Your research and openness are very much appreciated and you have my respect for looking into this in an objective way.
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That branch mushroom is one hell of a drug!
A what now? Gotta love or hate acronyms!
ESP = ExtraSensory Perception
However In this case it is what they called the hack in minecraft that lets you be able to see the location of entities and/or objects and/or blocks that are not in line of sight, it doses this by highlighting the area the thing is at
For example
In this example , this one is designed to detect and locate chests, which you can now clearly see thru the wall seen in green outline, and get a very very good idea of the location of the chest, which you otherwise could not see and have no idea about,
This same thing can be used to locate ores or any block you want.
Disclaimer: Everything below is speculation based off of information from various players and as such SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN AS FACT by any means as I do not have any proof. and could very well be based on false data/info.
And the same thing can be done in boundless, there was a very strong rumor in the group of people I talk to, that someone had already done so. and that was part of the reason the devs pushed the atlas update for real time updates to try to compensate for the potential abuse of such things by trying to level out the playing field, because the devs do not seem to want to put in anti-cheat engines or other hard protections, to prevent this.
I knew that is what you meant but not what ESP meant in this context!
Anyways, even if something like that is not possible or not all that easy to do with Boundless, one can request the chunk data from the server and inspect those blocks and list the coords of interesting blocks in a nice little window on another monitor…
Afterall such programs already exist…
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Maybe boundless should have an equivalent of https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/orebfuscator.22818/ to gimp the memory reading. If a seam doesn’t have at least one side against a transparent block like air, water etc make the server send false data and turn seams in to rock. But that needs dev time and could be buggy at first. Eats server resources too.
Do we want content or security updates, I think content is more important.
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I really do not suggest that, As an admin of many minecraft servers in the past, I can tell you as fact that thing will create problems on machines that can not handle that,
As I am pretty sure the reason the devs won’t install an anti cheat engine or other things to protect the memory of the game, is due to it slowing things down, I am 100% sure they don’t want to do something that will create even more slow downs then a simple anti cheat engine would
Here is one of the statements made that they will not change such things
But isn’t that server side? Anyway, the cheating problem isn’t big, yet, since the population numbers don’t attract the professional cheat makers that also publish them, so there’s nothing public, easy to use cheat for a large number of players to use.
The other thing some games have done is encrypt the memory. Idk how exactly D3 did it, but it worked. But considering that boundless would probably have to encrypt much larger chunks of memory it might hurt client performance.
Would the anti-cheat engines even do anything to memory readers? Afaik they’re focused on recognizing input fabrication and client modifications, memory reading is a bit different.
Edit: Saw the post, interesting!
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Yes and no, While the blockob---- doses indeed work serverside, due to the way it works, also means quite a bit more network traffic has to be sent, because the client now haves invalid blocks saved in the locally stored chuck data, each time someone mines a block, now extra data needs to be sent from the server to the client, because otherwise the player will see the fake blocks that were being used to try to fool ESP and X-ray texture packs and other such things,
So the end result is more or less, more memory, Network and CPU costs for the server, and more Network use for the client. which can translate to a little more CPU use for the client as well
I am not a programmer, It is possible I am slightly misunderstanding what all an anti-cheat engine can do and can not do, but I would be slightly surprised if it did not also have ways for it to detect and reject things that can try to read the programs memory. I do know LoL haves a self defense where it will crash its self when select memory readers target the process. Rather or not that is from Riots own Anti-cheat engine or something else I am not sure.
True, and vanilla mc doesn’t even have supersonic 3x3 mining.
But thanks for that dev post, didn’t know this has had any input from the dev’s side 
I am very interested in this discussion because I think there’s a small group that might have a few different engines going…
That all being said, I love how the game broke for a moment. Wanted me to put on those red and blue 3d glasses.
It looks super trippy but those gem blocks look so good.
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I tested this pretty extensively and it doesn’t seem to be possible to make an x-ray texture mod easily, would need heavy client modification. Modified the files to make the client read the alpha texture and make a block act like glass.
Also tried to add a lava-like light source that glows through blocks, same result. So there seems to be server side protection on these 
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That is what I thought and figured would be the case.
I mean I did that, the server refuses the connection with the modification 
…! You decompiled the client?
No no just modified the data files so it reads the alpha info and has the properties of glass.
I thought or assumed this was hard coded into the client and not any external plain text files.
It’s not plain text, but it’s not hard coded either. Some “simple” hex editing is enough.
I see, I would like to talk to you about this more.
Why did I read this conversation as some masterminds with a certain kind of glint in their eye…
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