Suggestion to further improve the usefulness and desirability of gold pickaxes:
Following the last update, gold pickaxes now cut stone like butter. For the gold-hoarder with no use for his hoard, they are the ultimate quarrying tool... Almost. Their limited uses definitely impede their overall usefulness when it comes to collecting massive amounts of stone for very large projects. It's just too inconvenient to make an inventory full of gold picks and constantly switch them out as they die (Automatically equipping your next best pick after each pick-death is a suggestion for another day.)
My suggestion to make them more desirable for specialized tasks would be to have them produce upon destroying a stone block... ready for it?... a stone block! 1:1 smoothstone blocks as apposed to cobble could be produced by the gold pick. Kinda like they're a more 'precise' brand of pick. So now the extra little bit of time required to make a bunch of and switch out gold picks is well worth it to avoid smelting tons of cobbles.
A final suggestion would be to give gold picks the potential to produce two of an ore when mining a deposit block. Maybe with a sliding scale, with the odds of producing two iron per deposit slightly higher than the odds of getting two diamonds. Gambling, basically. Even a 1-3% chance of an extra diamond would definitely get me to carry around a gold pick or two, for when I come across such a deposit.
Following the last update, gold pickaxes now cut stone like butter. For the gold-hoarder with no use for his hoard, they are the ultimate quarrying tool... Almost. Their limited uses definitely impede their overall usefulness when it comes to collecting massive amounts of stone for very large projects. It's just too inconvenient to make an inventory full of gold picks and constantly switch them out as they die (Automatically equipping your next best pick after each pick-death is a suggestion for another day.)
My suggestion to make them more desirable for specialized tasks would be to have them produce upon destroying a stone block... ready for it?... a stone block! 1:1 smoothstone blocks as apposed to cobble could be produced by the gold pick. Kinda like they're a more 'precise' brand of pick. So now the extra little bit of time required to make a bunch of and switch out gold picks is well worth it to avoid smelting tons of cobbles.
A final suggestion would be to give gold picks the potential to produce two of an ore when mining a deposit block. Maybe with a sliding scale, with the odds of producing two iron per deposit slightly higher than the odds of getting two diamonds. Gambling, basically. Even a 1-3% chance of an extra diamond would definitely get me to carry around a gold pick or two, for when I come across such a deposit.
lol, yeah MC isn't the most realistic of games. It's already kinda silly that gold picks are now the fastest at cutting stone.
You can't mine more than coal with a gold pickaxe. Good luck with that.