I'm reckoning branch-mining is the most time-efficient (perhaps space-efficient too) method for finding diamonds, seeing everybody and their mother is doing it. However, for a branch-mining-free play-through, what's the best thing one can do?
I guess running around in any low-altitude caves found is a given, but what else to keep an eye for? One idea I'm pondering are lava lakes. I get that they don't influence ore generation by themselves, but how would lava lakes influence ore exposure for a non-branch-miner? How would the exposure be influenced with them being left intact, against with them being drained out?
Not a typical set of objectives, but come on, it's Minecraft. The only objective there is, is what we choose it to be
Well, it would give you more surface area to scan in the diamond bearing layers, I'd say it would be more work per diamond than branch mining but possibly produce more diamonds in a given amount of time than caving, most of which is at too high an altitude to find diamonds.
I'd say that if you can do it safely you should empty the lava lakes you come across while caving.
Variation is good, I almost always dig up and do some caving when I hear mob noises while branch mining.
What are your plans for clearing out the lakes?
Dropping sand/gravel?
Placing water and mining the obsidian with a good pickaxe?
How do you find the caves?
By running around on the surface?
Digging a sparse network of tunnels around level 15-20 to find the deep caves directly?
In the lakes' regard, I'm too under-developed for obsidian-mining, and I doubt bucket-spam is practical unless multiple source blocks could be placed over each other, effectively deleting each other. Bucket-method's speed would need to be tested against sand-dropping (gravel instead would cause interference), which will need to be shoveled back too for ore vision at least if not for preserving sand supply.
However, as my recent play-style is developing more into an environment-preserving one, I'm actually considering leaving the lakes intact, unless their yield is too much to skip relative to the yield defined by my other play-style elements. Also, if I'm going to stick with my style of preserving theoretically-finite resources, I'll need a $h!tload of iron for buckets & maybe transport. Dripstone just can't hit release fast enough XD
My cave approach is basically everyone's original: Coming across surface caves & ravines and exploring from there, adding to it internally digging towards any sounds such as mobs and liquids just like you do.
I've always been selective in what artificial practices I add to my game-play in Minecraft, branch-mining being one of the "not into it" group. After all, where some people get/have-to-get diamonds & netherite on day one, I might spend three days in this game on positioning a spoon on a table for decoration or optimization, or making a farm of some inferior passive mob just-because. I guess I'm just glad I never had to be on a server where I need to be really thorough & efficient, yet. Or, maybe I just wasn't a resident long enough to need it.
You can more than double the amount of diamond by caves if you drain lava lakes since the equivalent of about 4 layers at the peak density between layers 5-12 are exposed above lava level (layers 11 and 12 have 100%, layer 13 has 90%, layer 14 has 50%, layer 15 has 10%, for a total of 350%/3.5 layers. Layer 10 isn't always lava while diamond veins can extend deeper in areas of solid ground; a vein starting at layer 10 can extend down to layer 7, so an additional 50% might be reasonable for a total of 4 layers), while by draining the lava you can fully expose layer 10 as well as layers 5-9 (5.5 additional layers), then parts of layers 1-4 (most of this will be bedrock in the deepest caves).
It is also possible to use Fire Resistance potions to swim around and check for diamond around the edges without draining them; otherwise, the time spent on draining them likely far exceeds the time spent on exploring more caves; I don't have good figures myself since I don't go caving just to find diamonds (in fact, I only average about 4 diamond ore per hour, with everything below the surface explored) but I've seen competitions where the goal was to collect as many resources as possible within a time limit yield upwards of 30 diamond ore per hour per person (example; "On average, a 20-minute match consisting of 3 players in a good cave system will yield a total of 30 diamond ore, 40 lapis ore, 80 gold ore, 200 redstone ore, and 300 iron ore", which can also be read as the hourly rate for one player).
Of course, if you only explore caves the rate will also depend on how easy it is to find more (even in the version I play in, 1.6.4, where cave systems are much larger and more interconnected, they are not consistently near diamond level, and separate cave networks may only be connected in a few areas across dozens to hundreds of individual tunnels which require a lot of exploring to find).
It is also possible to use Fire Resistance potions to swim around and check for diamond around the edges without draining them [...]
O.O a very good idea. I've rarely progressed on my own to potion-era, that it just rarely occurs in any of my thoughts about anything.
Additionally, in the link you gave OP seems to believe that branch-mining on its own is less productive. I wonder why they'd think that with almost all people I see doing otherwise. Could it be due to the ridiculously long return trips, hence requiring higher efficiency per chunk? Maybe also guaranteeing availability of new search spaces? There is also the inherent dangers within already-open areas but armed & armored enough people wouldn't worry about that.
Additionally, in the link you gave OP seems to believe that branch-mining on its own is less productive. I wonder why they'd think that with almost all people I see doing otherwise. Could it be due to the ridiculously long return trips, hence requiring higher efficiency per chunk? Maybe also guaranteeing availability of new search spaces? There is also the inherent dangers within already-open areas but armed & armored enough people wouldn't worry about that.
This also contradicts what the Wiki says about branch-mining; they say that up to 1.7% of blocks mined can be diamond ore, which means nearly a stack per hour if you can mine one block per second, which is easily achieved with good tools (unenchanted stone pickaxes already take less than a second to mine stone, including a 0.25 second delay added between consecutive blocks; I upgrade to iron, then diamond as soon as I can):
A good efficiency is reached at a spacing of around 6 blocks (that is, 6 solid blocks left in-between the tunnels). At this spacing, efficiency is about 0.017, corresponding to 1.7% of blocks removed being a diamond.
Note that most players space their tunnels much closer together; a spacing of 2 gives an efficiency of only about 0.6% and 3 is about 0.9%, still only about half the optimal efficiency; for comparison, the raw abundance of diamond is about 0.12% of blocks, which will be the percentage of exposed blocks that are diamond in caves on layers 10-12 (the main reason why branch-mining is much more efficient than the raw abundance would suggest is because veins are usually multiple blocks, averaging around 5 or so (this is more than the ores per chunk due to ores being lost in bedrock, which is not a factor above layer 4), plus every block removed exposes multiple blocks. The former also applies to caves so you'll collect more ores than the surface area alone would indicate, plus mining out other ores can expose diamond behind them).
I also doubt that distance covered is a limitation; this branch-mine I made yielded 91 diamond ore in an area where I'd find an average of about 10 diamond by caving (on average, i explore about 30 chunks per hour of caving to find 4 diamonds, which is only 0.13 diamond per chunk; the branch-mine yielded about 1.2 per chunk). This would be less with a wider tunnel spacing (I used 3 blocks and got an efficiency of about 0.9%) but not as much as popularly assumed. Also, over an entire session I average about 14 diamond and walk about 18 km (for comparison, the branch-mine has about 5 km of tunnels, if I walked though each one twice that is 10 km for less than 1/10 the distance walked per diamond found; again though that 18 km includes many caves outside the diamond layer).
I think I get the reason for discrepancy now that I think about it: The competition link is considering several ores, not just diamond. Also, they are not valuing per ore found, but per ore found adjusted by an ore-specific modifier. They have different metrics for performance, and as such methods could possibly differ in relevance, hence branch-mining not being optimal for their purpose perhaps.
[...] the raw abundance of diamond is about 0.12% of blocks, which will be the percentage of exposed blocks that are diamond in caves on layers 10-12 [...]
Are you describing how many of the blocks visible (i.e. blocks neighboring air blocks) are diamond at said layers? Interesting... if I may, do you happen to have a source for this?
Also, the images you linked, I'm having a tricky time getting them... the first one seems like a snap-shot of a certain Y-level, the one you're mining I guess? Black are digged, and yellow are torches? You dig like 20 torches' worth before taking a 180 and digging back to your starting line? The rest is colored based on whatever blocks are at that Y-level? The second image is totally beyond my understanding. What did you use to generate them both anyways?
Are you describing how many of the blocks visible (i.e. blocks neighboring air blocks) are diamond at said layers? Interesting... if I may, do you happen to have a source for this?
Also, the images you linked, I'm having a tricky time getting them... the first one seems like a snap-shot of a certain Y-level, the one you're mining I guess? Black are digged, and yellow are torches? You dig like 20 torches' worth before taking a 180 and digging back to your starting line? The rest is colored based on whatever blocks are at that Y-level? The second image is totally beyond my understanding. What did you use to generate them both anyways?
This is based on various analysis of ore concentration, made by using a tool like MCEdit to count the number of each block on each layer; for example, this is one such chart which shows that diamond is around 0.12% of all blocks on each layer from 5 to 12 (it is harder to see but redstone is 8 times more common than diamond and is slightly less than 1% of blocks; 1% / 8 = 0.125%):
As for the maps of my branch-mine, the first map was made with Minutor and as you guessed the various colors represent different blocks; the tunnels themselves are actually black because the floor is bedrock (this was from a modded world with a single layer of bedrock on layer 0, with the mine just above it, as I was primarily looking for a rare mod ore (the purple blocks) which is most common on layer 1). The second map was made with Unmined and shows caves underground, shaded according to the altitude; the structures made of segmented lines are mineshafts and the red and blue blotches are water and lava lakes (mostly the ones generated at any altitude, most of the lava associated with caves was covered up as I explored literally all the caves shown with most underground blocks shown in shades of brown so you can't make out ores or obsidian).
Also, the area covered by the images is 720x700 blocks with the branch-mine itself measuring 227x81 blocks (21 main tunnels 227 blocks long, connected at the ends for a total length of 4929 blocks, plus a bit more where the staircase from the surface enters it. I mainly stopped after 227 blocks (just a random number) since I didn't feel the need to go further, even though there was plenty of space to the east; while the mine was below lava level I only ran into a few caves and just used water to convert most of them into obsidian and mined it with a diamond pickaxe). Also, I'd have mined about half as much if this were a vanilla world since I only need around 45 diamonds for all of my gear, including a few spares for repairs and pickaxes used while branch-mining (I play in 1.6.4 so there is no Mending, or not as it exists in 1.9+; later on the resources I collect while caving for fun meet all of my needs so I never need to branch-mine again, either way, I don't wait until I get Fortune to mine diamonds since I don't think they are too hard to get). Also, despite covering only a small area of the map the branch-mine yielded about a quarter of all the diamonds I collected within the entire area (91 from the branch-mine vs around 263 from caves, which would probably be less in modern versions since they have less caves and other underground features, if slightly more diamond per chunk).
But the... chart, that is the amount per chunk, not the exposed amount per chunk, correct? Or are you saying the same number would apply for both cases?
But the... chart, that is the amount per chunk, not the exposed amount per chunk, correct? Or are you saying the same number would apply for both cases?
The amount exposed for a given surface area would be the percentage of blocks times the number of blocks exposed; actually, it would be slightly higher since ores only generate in stone so the percentage as a fraction of non-air blocks is slightly higher; the charts in the following Reddit post show that diamond is a bit over 0.15% of non-air blocks, which would also apply to branch-mining as long as you remain in solid ground (these charts are also for 1.13, with slight changes to ore generation from 1.12, the version used for the chart I posted before):
Either way, this means that on average you need to expose about 667 blocks per diamond ore found (not including ores revealed after mining the exposed ones, which will increase the yield). I haven't made a through analysis of exactly how much ore is exposed per surface area but I did once count up all ores which were exposed by checking if any block in a vein was exposed to air and adding all blocks in the vein to a running total; this test was also done in 1.6.4, with slightly less ores and more caves than newer versions so the results won't be quite the same:
According to these results caves expose an average of 0.1466 diamond ore per chunk, slightly higher than the amount I find on average (I only explore interconnected caves and anything I happen to break into as a result of mining ores or into the ends of caves that go below lava level as long as there is lava at y=10, which occasionally do go back up before going deeper). Also, the much higher amount of coal found compared to the percentage of blocks for coal and iron shows how their larger vein size effectively exposes more blocks (most other ores have more or less the same vein structure; at the other extreme, emerald ore, not shown, is solely dependent on the number of blocks exposed since there is only one block per vein):
I'm reckoning branch-mining is the most time-efficient (perhaps space-efficient too) method for finding diamonds, seeing everybody and their mother is doing it. However, for a branch-mining-free play-through, what's the best thing one can do?
I guess running around in any low-altitude caves found is a given, but what else to keep an eye for? One idea I'm pondering are lava lakes. I get that they don't influence ore generation by themselves, but how would lava lakes influence ore exposure for a non-branch-miner? How would the exposure be influenced with them being left intact, against with them being drained out?
Not a typical set of objectives, but come on, it's Minecraft. The only objective there is, is what we choose it to be
- KitCat.
Well, it would give you more surface area to scan in the diamond bearing layers, I'd say it would be more work per diamond than branch mining but possibly produce more diamonds in a given amount of time than caving, most of which is at too high an altitude to find diamonds.
I'd say that if you can do it safely you should empty the lava lakes you come across while caving.
Variation is good, I almost always dig up and do some caving when I hear mob noises while branch mining.
What are your plans for clearing out the lakes?
Dropping sand/gravel?
Placing water and mining the obsidian with a good pickaxe?
How do you find the caves?
By running around on the surface?
Digging a sparse network of tunnels around level 15-20 to find the deep caves directly?
Just testing.
In the lakes' regard, I'm too under-developed for obsidian-mining, and I doubt bucket-spam is practical unless multiple source blocks could be placed over each other, effectively deleting each other. Bucket-method's speed would need to be tested against sand-dropping (gravel instead would cause interference), which will need to be shoveled back too for ore vision at least if not for preserving sand supply.
However, as my recent play-style is developing more into an environment-preserving one, I'm actually considering leaving the lakes intact, unless their yield is too much to skip relative to the yield defined by my other play-style elements. Also, if I'm going to stick with my style of preserving theoretically-finite resources, I'll need a $h!tload of iron for buckets & maybe transport. Dripstone just can't hit release fast enough XD
My cave approach is basically everyone's original: Coming across surface caves & ravines and exploring from there, adding to it internally digging towards any sounds such as mobs and liquids just like you do.
I've always been selective in what artificial practices I add to my game-play in Minecraft, branch-mining being one of the "not into it" group. After all, where some people get/have-to-get diamonds & netherite on day one, I might spend three days in this game on positioning a spoon on a table for decoration or optimization, or making a farm of some inferior passive mob just-because. I guess I'm just glad I never had to be on a server where I need to be really thorough & efficient, yet. Or, maybe I just wasn't a resident long enough to need it.
You can more than double the amount of diamond by caves if you drain lava lakes since the equivalent of about 4 layers at the peak density between layers 5-12 are exposed above lava level (layers 11 and 12 have 100%, layer 13 has 90%, layer 14 has 50%, layer 15 has 10%, for a total of 350%/3.5 layers. Layer 10 isn't always lava while diamond veins can extend deeper in areas of solid ground; a vein starting at layer 10 can extend down to layer 7, so an additional 50% might be reasonable for a total of 4 layers), while by draining the lava you can fully expose layer 10 as well as layers 5-9 (5.5 additional layers), then parts of layers 1-4 (most of this will be bedrock in the deepest caves).
It is also possible to use Fire Resistance potions to swim around and check for diamond around the edges without draining them; otherwise, the time spent on draining them likely far exceeds the time spent on exploring more caves; I don't have good figures myself since I don't go caving just to find diamonds (in fact, I only average about 4 diamond ore per hour, with everything below the surface explored) but I've seen competitions where the goal was to collect as many resources as possible within a time limit yield upwards of 30 diamond ore per hour per person (example; "On average, a 20-minute match consisting of 3 players in a good cave system will yield a total of 30 diamond ore, 40 lapis ore, 80 gold ore, 200 redstone ore, and 300 iron ore", which can also be read as the hourly rate for one player).
Of course, if you only explore caves the rate will also depend on how easy it is to find more (even in the version I play in, 1.6.4, where cave systems are much larger and more interconnected, they are not consistently near diamond level, and separate cave networks may only be connected in a few areas across dozens to hundreds of individual tunnels which require a lot of exploring to find).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
O.O a very good idea. I've rarely progressed on my own to potion-era, that it just rarely occurs in any of my thoughts about anything.
Additionally, in the link you gave OP seems to believe that branch-mining on its own is less productive. I wonder why they'd think that with almost all people I see doing otherwise. Could it be due to the ridiculously long return trips, hence requiring higher efficiency per chunk? Maybe also guaranteeing availability of new search spaces? There is also the inherent dangers within already-open areas but armed & armored enough people wouldn't worry about that.
This also contradicts what the Wiki says about branch-mining; they say that up to 1.7% of blocks mined can be diamond ore, which means nearly a stack per hour if you can mine one block per second, which is easily achieved with good tools (unenchanted stone pickaxes already take less than a second to mine stone, including a 0.25 second delay added between consecutive blocks; I upgrade to iron, then diamond as soon as I can):
Note that most players space their tunnels much closer together; a spacing of 2 gives an efficiency of only about 0.6% and 3 is about 0.9%, still only about half the optimal efficiency; for comparison, the raw abundance of diamond is about 0.12% of blocks, which will be the percentage of exposed blocks that are diamond in caves on layers 10-12 (the main reason why branch-mining is much more efficient than the raw abundance would suggest is because veins are usually multiple blocks, averaging around 5 or so (this is more than the ores per chunk due to ores being lost in bedrock, which is not a factor above layer 4), plus every block removed exposes multiple blocks. The former also applies to caves so you'll collect more ores than the surface area alone would indicate, plus mining out other ores can expose diamond behind them).
I also doubt that distance covered is a limitation; this branch-mine I made yielded 91 diamond ore in an area where I'd find an average of about 10 diamond by caving (on average, i explore about 30 chunks per hour of caving to find 4 diamonds, which is only 0.13 diamond per chunk; the branch-mine yielded about 1.2 per chunk). This would be less with a wider tunnel spacing (I used 3 blocks and got an efficiency of about 0.9%) but not as much as popularly assumed. Also, over an entire session I average about 14 diamond and walk about 18 km (for comparison, the branch-mine has about 5 km of tunnels, if I walked though each one twice that is 10 km for less than 1/10 the distance walked per diamond found; again though that 18 km includes many caves outside the diamond layer).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I think I get the reason for discrepancy now that I think about it: The competition link is considering several ores, not just diamond. Also, they are not valuing per ore found, but per ore found adjusted by an ore-specific modifier. They have different metrics for performance, and as such methods could possibly differ in relevance, hence branch-mining not being optimal for their purpose perhaps.
Are you describing how many of the blocks visible (i.e. blocks neighboring air blocks) are diamond at said layers? Interesting... if I may, do you happen to have a source for this?
Also, the images you linked, I'm having a tricky time getting them... the first one seems like a snap-shot of a certain Y-level, the one you're mining I guess? Black are digged, and yellow are torches? You dig like 20 torches' worth before taking a 180 and digging back to your starting line? The rest is colored based on whatever blocks are at that Y-level? The second image is totally beyond my understanding. What did you use to generate them both anyways?
This is based on various analysis of ore concentration, made by using a tool like MCEdit to count the number of each block on each layer; for example, this is one such chart which shows that diamond is around 0.12% of all blocks on each layer from 5 to 12 (it is harder to see but redstone is 8 times more common than diamond and is slightly less than 1% of blocks; 1% / 8 = 0.125%):
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/File:PercentOfOreByHeight.png
As for the maps of my branch-mine, the first map was made with Minutor and as you guessed the various colors represent different blocks; the tunnels themselves are actually black because the floor is bedrock (this was from a modded world with a single layer of bedrock on layer 0, with the mine just above it, as I was primarily looking for a rare mod ore (the purple blocks) which is most common on layer 1). The second map was made with Unmined and shows caves underground, shaded according to the altitude; the structures made of segmented lines are mineshafts and the red and blue blotches are water and lava lakes (mostly the ones generated at any altitude, most of the lava associated with caves was covered up as I explored literally all the caves shown with most underground blocks shown in shades of brown so you can't make out ores or obsidian).
Also, the area covered by the images is 720x700 blocks with the branch-mine itself measuring 227x81 blocks (21 main tunnels 227 blocks long, connected at the ends for a total length of 4929 blocks, plus a bit more where the staircase from the surface enters it. I mainly stopped after 227 blocks (just a random number) since I didn't feel the need to go further, even though there was plenty of space to the east; while the mine was below lava level I only ran into a few caves and just used water to convert most of them into obsidian and mined it with a diamond pickaxe). Also, I'd have mined about half as much if this were a vanilla world since I only need around 45 diamonds for all of my gear, including a few spares for repairs and pickaxes used while branch-mining (I play in 1.6.4 so there is no Mending, or not as it exists in 1.9+; later on the resources I collect while caving for fun meet all of my needs so I never need to branch-mine again, either way, I don't wait until I get Fortune to mine diamonds since I don't think they are too hard to get). Also, despite covering only a small area of the map the branch-mine yielded about a quarter of all the diamonds I collected within the entire area (91 from the branch-mine vs around 263 from caves, which would probably be less in modern versions since they have less caves and other underground features, if slightly more diamond per chunk).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
But the... chart, that is the amount per chunk, not the exposed amount per chunk, correct? Or are you saying the same number would apply for both cases?
The amount exposed for a given surface area would be the percentage of blocks times the number of blocks exposed; actually, it would be slightly higher since ores only generate in stone so the percentage as a fraction of non-air blocks is slightly higher; the charts in the following Reddit post show that diamond is a bit over 0.15% of non-air blocks, which would also apply to branch-mining as long as you remain in solid ground (these charts are also for 1.13, with slight changes to ore generation from 1.12, the version used for the chart I posted before):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/bn00cf/ore_distributions_for_specific_biomes/
Either way, this means that on average you need to expose about 667 blocks per diamond ore found (not including ores revealed after mining the exposed ones, which will increase the yield). I haven't made a through analysis of exactly how much ore is exposed per surface area but I did once count up all ores which were exposed by checking if any block in a vein was exposed to air and adding all blocks in the vein to a running total; this test was also done in 1.6.4, with slightly less ores and more caves than newer versions so the results won't be quite the same:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2529746-how-many-ores-do-caves-expose
According to these results caves expose an average of 0.1466 diamond ore per chunk, slightly higher than the amount I find on average (I only explore interconnected caves and anything I happen to break into as a result of mining ores or into the ends of caves that go below lava level as long as there is lava at y=10, which occasionally do go back up before going deeper). Also, the much higher amount of coal found compared to the percentage of blocks for coal and iron shows how their larger vein size effectively exposes more blocks (most other ores have more or less the same vein structure; at the other extreme, emerald ore, not shown, is solely dependent on the number of blocks exposed since there is only one block per vein):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?