But, since you have the whole game state, you can sift through the data and pinpoint these resources and acquire them quickly and with almost no effort. In multiplayer this is generally considered cheating and is called an "xray" modification to the game client. There are other variations of this hack that involve changing the game's textures to transparent images except for the specific resources you want to find.
Mulitplayer server administrators don't like cheats so they created countermeasures for this. The best example is probably Orebfuscator which "hides" said valuable resources until the player is very close to them.