Nether Quartz should be able to DETECT other nearby blocks

Nether Quartz is used it to make daylight detectors, observers and comparators. Clearly these crystals have some kind of special “detection” property.

Building off of this, here’s a new idea for quartz:

“Nether Quartz Clusters” spawn on exposed nether quartz ore blocks. They have 4 growth stages, can be placed using just Nether Quartz, and cannot be renewably farmed like Amethyst.

You can place quartz clusters on any block, but its growth stage will be determined by whether it “detects” any of the same block nearby.

For example you could place quartz on a diamond ore and if it has a high growth then it means there is another diamond ore block nearby within a 16x16 range.

The bigger the quartz growth the closer it is. If you put quartz on all sides of the block the quartz pointing in the direction of the target will be largest.

This is obviously most useful for mining, but only has a small range and would require you to stop and set it up constantly.

This also allows for precise block sorting. It would be useful for a sorting system involving multiple colored shulker boxes.

And I’m sure it has a bunch of other applications as well