Mini 1 auto leveling over 30mm in air above bed

Revert to older firmware. The default height was adjusted for newer machines, so the old, unsupported machines no longer work well. You can do a search on here for others with the same issue. For the mini1, I think it was the last marlin 1.x firmware that worked well.

Or, you could modify the firmware and get it working on a more up-to-date marlin if you want to do a little math to fix the Z height issue.