What I'm calling "mid-game" is when you already have all of the essentials, enchanted diamond gear (and probably a backup set), plus a good amount of resources. Whether you have taken on the Ender Dragon yet or not, you could without difficulty. You have a good base going, probably a few farms, and are generally not starving for anything.
So, do you still use Fortune-enchanted pickaxes? If so, do you use them on everything they benefit, or only certain types of ores (e.g., Diamond and Emerald)? Or do you say, "forget it, too expensive", and switch to typical Efficiency + Unbreaking picks?
In previous (and current) worlds, I have always used Fortune pickaxes for everything (even coal!) because even though they are more expensive to repair, they only account for (maximum) 12.1% of blocks mined (considering only natural stone and ore blocks in the overworld) based on the stats from my newest world with ~200k blocks mined, which has been mostly done with beacons (so would contain a higher proportion of stone mined versus branch mining). And I'm pretty good at switching picks, so it doesn't exactly slow me down.
However, I guess I'm looking at my double chest full of redstone, and the other double chest full of coal (despite smelting a mountain of cobblestone and netherrack), and the big Lapis statue I built, and am considering just hanging up my Fortune pick. I need to carry around Silk Touch for my Ender Chest anyway, so I'll mine Diamond (and Emerald when in Extreme Hills) with that, but more or less just plow through everything else.
I'm sure this has been asked before (but I surprisingly couldn't find a great deal of useful info), and it's something I haven't really given much thought to until now. What do you think? Remember, I'm talking specifically about the "mid-game" (my loose definition is above), not the early game (where every diamond is precious!) or the late game where, almost no matter what you do, you probably never need to mine again.
This is pretty self-explanatory, from the last time I played:
Now imagine if I had used Fortune on all of that... and for a time I actually did just that, using a backpack mod so I could cave for a reasonable amount of time, filling up double chest after double chest with coal blocks in particular - even without Fortune I'm on the way to my third double chest (10,368 blocks, 93,312 coal) in my current world, and in another world I filled up more than 17 double chests (some mined with Fortune, but most wasn't; in that world I also only started mining all coal when 1.6 came out; until then I only used Fortune on diamonds and emeralds).
Even early in a world I don't see any point in using it since you can just branch-mine and get plenty of diamonds; I even use diamond pickaxes to mine with after I find my first diamonds, even before I am able to enchant them (i.e. Unbreaking III gives you 4x the uses per pickaxe; I just save nearly depleted pickaxes for enchanting later). In fact, even in my modded world, where the material I use for my gear, amethyst, is 3 times rarer than diamond (8 times when found in caves, which is intentional so branch-mining is practical but I don't find much during my "normal" gameplay), while I did enchant a diamond pickaxe with Fortune III to mine it, looking back it doesn't look like it was worthwhile; the time spent getting it might as well have been spent on mining some more. While caving I've gotten about twice as much as I've used; the higher durability helps but the rarity more than offsets any advantage, even if I used Fortune; similarly, I have no problem finding more diamonds than I use in vanilla.
However, I do use Fortune III to harvest potatoes for food, as you get double the yield, although that is more convenience than necessity; I did just fine without it for a long time, and in one world I just used a book I found in a dungeon to enchant a pickaxe for this purpose, not enchanting it directly.
Also, even if it worked on iron and gold I don't see any point in using Fortune on those either:
That's 30 furnaces, each with half a stack of iron or gold ore (864 iron and 99 gold, including 2 I'd mined previously to make 11 blocks with no leftover ingots), which I mined over the course of a few hours; just two sessions is enough to make a beacon (if I ever thought that it was worth making one). I also went from level 32 to level 39 after taking it out; in the same play session I spent 47 and 39 levels to repair my sword and pickaxe, so XP is no problem either; I've never seen any point in making an XP farm since the time it takes to mine quartz to get XP for initially enchanting my gear is likely comparable to the time needed to make a good XP farm, which I'd never need afterwards (in other words, an XP farm is sort of comparable to using Fortune to mine ore, both make it easier to get the respective resources, but I get so many there is no point).
Note that in my case caving is a "late-game" thing; my general progression doesn't really leave much of a mid-game to speak of and caving is just something that I do for fun, not to get resources that I need (I do use some, such as rails from mineshafts to make railways to secondary bases, plus a small amount of gold and redstone for powered rails; said gold is more than supplied from chests).
Now imagine if I had used Fortune on all of that...
[...]
Thanks for the input! Correct me if I'm wrong, but if your name is TheMasterCaver, is it fair to say that your gameplay is pretty heavily slanted towards caving and gathering resources as opposed to building? Don't get me wrong; you imply an important point: everyone has their own point on the gathering vs. consuming continuum. I feel like I'm somewhere near the median.
Keeping in mind the differences in our playstyles, you have said that you have double chests full of certain materials, so using Fortune would just make that more excessive. In your estimation, if you were closer to the middle of the continuum (not saying you should be, mind you!), might you use Fortune then (and on what?) to reduce the time you'd need to spend gathering?
Been waiting to tidy up a few loose ends before posting to this...
I do still use my fortune pick on everything except emeralds- those I've started silk-touching again to preserve the ore (now that I've been been spending a lot of time in an NPC village emeralds aren't quite as interesting anymore and any that I trade for go right back into buying glowstone).
Do I *need* my fortune pick? Heck no. I use it to gather materials for my "mineral cube" project- a cross between installation art and a monument to obsessive-compulsive hoarding. I'll post a few more pictures on the "what have you done lately" thread, but these will give you an idea of what I do with my extra coal, redstone, etc...
The view from my "farm base".
And from a little closer up...
Here's a shot of one of my recent loot hauls that I minecarted back to my base-
I still use a bit of diamond and lapis for occasional repairs, otherwise pretty much everything in here is useless other than to stack up into pretty piles (I don't even use coal anymore- only charcoal). Why do I still do this? I dunno. Why not, I guess...
I do have to add that TheMasterCaver is correct in that they are *extremely* handy in harvesting potatoes. I prefer the saturation of beef myself, but you can get potatoes out the wazoo with a fortune III pick in no time.
cheers,
thebugguy
PS: I just noticed that I must've turned the clouds off... hmmm...
With all those things being able to be turned into blocks now I still would, just to have the option to use the blocks in large builds. I would have to have several double chests full of blocks before I thought about doing something different. Likely what I would do is just not mine the ores at all or just switch to silk touch mining them to have a larger collection of the ore versions for building/decoration (or for mining later).
Silk touch is much more efficient for inventory space...
Not if you craft them into blocks; this is how it is possible at all for me to mine so much in a caving trip, never mind a single play session (typically two per trip) and be able to carry it all - a stack of resource blocks is 576 resources, a compression ratio of up to ninefold (Fortune III averages a 120% increase, or 2.2 times the drops) and only lapis averages more than 9 drops per ore when Fortune is used.
I even smelt iron and gold ore while still caving to make more room; as shown in my previous post I'll just set up furnaces in a safe area and continue exploring nearby areas while they smelt. Excluding four Ender chests slots for supplies, I have 23 spaces free (24 in vanilla since I always carry a few diamonds for repairs and put them in the same slot where I have the amethyst), which can hold as much as 13,248 resources, though in practice many of them get filled up with other stuff and I've never gotten enough diamonds to warrant making blocks, only very rarely getting more than a stack, so that's just 64 per stack but generally at least half of the slots get filled up with resource blocks by the time I return.
By comparison, 23 slots can only hold 1,472 ore - less than half of what I'd mined (including my inventory wouldn't be enough either), and I'd need coal to make torches so I'd have to carry another pickaxe in any case (I could otherwise use the same pickaxe used on Ender chests, at least in vanilla), although it would be possible to just take a few stacks of coal or even charcoal with me (if I did that I could pretty much completely eliminate any usage of what I mine in my modded world, otherwise only using a portion of the diamonds I mine). Also, stuff like iron ingots from chests don't stack with ore; when smelting I smelt enough to make an even multiple of 9 including whatever ingots I have so there is no leftover; so you'd need extra slots (obviously not an issue with branch-mining, unless you run into a mineshaft/dungeon and explore it).
Of course, I suppose it doesn't matter unless you mine a very lot all at once, and if you branch-mine cobblestone is a more significant limiting factor (thebugguy, how many trips/sessions did it take for you to mine all of that (the minecart); a trip meaning coming back from mining to unload your inventory and restock?).
Of course, I suppose it doesn't matter unless you mine a very lot all at once, and if you branch-mine cobblestone is a more significant limiting factor (thebugguy, how many trips/sessions did it take for you to mine all of that (the minecart); a trip meaning coming back from mining to unload your inventory and restock?).
Uy. I dunno. A lot. I'm guessing that represents 20 or 30 1x2x100 tunnels, maybe more- it's kind of hard to say. I don't use an enderchest, so I do have to go back and forth to my collection point after every third or fourth tunnel (depending on how fastidious I am about filling in gaps in my tunnels and how many different kinds of ore/stone I'm carrying). In this case the max distance from tunnel to cart was about 240 to 250 blocks. That's farther away from my rail line than I usually go (this is a pretty good size mountain chain), so I've been considering building a spur line to reduce carrying time.
I even smelt iron and gold ore while still caving to make more room; as shown in my previous post I'll just set up furnaces in a safe area and continue exploring nearby areas while they smelt.
As I recall, you play on an older version that has more robust cave generation, plus you modded it to make it even more epic. How do you not get lost? I tried doing it your way, but I ended up losing all my stuff because I got so horribly lost. Somewhere in my world there's 20 furnaces with tons of iron and gold and stacks upon stacks of everything else in chests waiting for me to come back...
As I recall, you play on an older version that has more robust cave generation, plus you modded it to make it even more epic. How do you not get lost? I tried doing it your way, but I ended up losing all my stuff because I got so horribly lost. Somewhere in my world there's 20 furnaces with tons of iron and gold and stacks upon stacks of everything else in chests waiting for me to come back...
I only smelt half a stack per furnace, which takes about 5 minutes to smelt, so I don't go that far before I know it has finished. Not that I haven't lost them before, usually when I get sidetracked, but I can usually find them again without much problem. Other than that, for general navigation I just explore everything around each exit/entrance I mark on the surface (as in this example), then move on to the next one, usually when I find something that is clearly new or get too far away from my original entrance, using a fully zoomed in-game map to help show where I've been; obviously, these maps don't show the underground but just knowing the general area I am in helps a lot.
I sometimes do miss some areas, as shown on the map in the spoiler but in general you can say that if there is a cave I'll explore it:
(a low-level rendering of a copy of my current world after I trimmed away all unexplored areas; the presence of exposed lava indicates I didn't fully explore an area, and/or are caves that don't connect to anything else; I don't intentionally mine tunnels to find caves except where they skim the lava surface, as those caves can come back up or lead to another cave)
I generally use Fortune because at *some* point I'll generally have a use for the materials. I play a modded game with more uses for coal. Redstone I admit I have too much of - maybe I'll build something with it someday.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
This is pretty self-explanatory, from the last time I played:
Now imagine if I had used Fortune on all of that... and for a time I actually did just that, using a backpack mod so I could cave for a reasonable amount of time, filling up double chest after double chest with coal blocks in particular - even without Fortune I'm on the way to my third double chest (10,368 blocks, 93,312 coal) in my current world, and in another world I filled up more than 17 double chests (some mined with Fortune, but most wasn't; in that world I also only started mining all coal when 1.6 came out; until then I only used Fortune on diamonds and emeralds).
Even early in a world I don't see any point in using it since you can just branch-mine and get plenty of diamonds; I even use diamond pickaxes to mine with after I find my first diamonds, even before I am able to enchant them (i.e. Unbreaking III gives you 4x the uses per pickaxe; I just save nearly depleted pickaxes for enchanting later). In fact, even in my modded world, where the material I use for my gear, amethyst, is 3 times rarer than diamond (8 times when found in caves, which is intentional so branch-mining is practical but I don't find much during my "normal" gameplay), while I did enchant a diamond pickaxe with Fortune III to mine it, looking back it doesn't look like it was worthwhile; the time spent getting it might as well have been spent on mining some more. While caving I've gotten about twice as much as I've used; the higher durability helps but the rarity more than offsets any advantage, even if I used Fortune; similarly, I have no problem finding more diamonds than I use in vanilla.
However, I do use Fortune III to harvest potatoes for food, as you get double the yield, although that is more convenience than necessity; I did just fine without it for a long time, and in one world I just used a book I found in a dungeon to enchant a pickaxe for this purpose, not enchanting it directly.
Also, even if it worked on iron and gold I don't see any point in using Fortune on those either:
That's 30 furnaces, each with half a stack of iron or gold ore (864 iron and 99 gold, including 2 I'd mined previously to make 11 blocks with no leftover ingots), which I mined over the course of a few hours; just two sessions is enough to make a beacon (if I ever thought that it was worth making one). I also went from level 32 to level 39 after taking it out; in the same play session I spent 47 and 39 levels to repair my sword and pickaxe, so XP is no problem either; I've never seen any point in making an XP farm since the time it takes to mine quartz to get XP for initially enchanting my gear is likely comparable to the time needed to make a good XP farm, which I'd never need afterwards (in other words, an XP farm is sort of comparable to using Fortune to mine ore, both make it easier to get the respective resources, but I get so many there is no point).
Note that in my case caving is a "late-game" thing; my general progression doesn't really leave much of a mid-game to speak of and caving is just something that I do for fun, not to get resources that I need (I do use some, such as rails from mineshafts to make railways to secondary bases, plus a small amount of gold and redstone for powered rails; said gold is more than supplied from chests).
I mine all the ores that are affected by fortune with fortune. Also, since I don't feel like making and carrying 3 picks, I waste my silk touch and fortune III picks on caving and any other time I need to use a pickaxe (except for mining).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're interested in an awesome, white-listed, pure vanilla server, consider applying!
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Location:
Toronto
Join Date:
7/30/2014
Posts:
46
Minecraft:
Stone_Snake
Member Details
I sometimes will go down into my mines when I'm bored and mine in a straight line for an hour. Mining everything with fortune can really clog up your inventory, especially when mining redstone/lapis lazuli since they can drop over 4 pieces when mined with fortune. Instead, I simply silk touch everything, then I fortune my earnings when I get back.
What I'm calling "mid-game" is when you already have all of the essentials, enchanted diamond gear (and probably a backup set), plus a good amount of resources. Whether you have taken on the Ender Dragon yet or not, you could without difficulty. You have a good base going, probably a few farms, and are generally not starving for anything.
So, do you still use Fortune-enchanted pickaxes? If so, do you use them on everything they benefit, or only certain types of ores (e.g., Diamond and Emerald)? Or do you say, "forget it, too expensive", and switch to typical Efficiency + Unbreaking picks?
In previous (and current) worlds, I have always used Fortune pickaxes for everything (even coal!) because even though they are more expensive to repair, they only account for (maximum) 12.1% of blocks mined (considering only natural stone and ore blocks in the overworld) based on the stats from my newest world with ~200k blocks mined, which has been mostly done with beacons (so would contain a higher proportion of stone mined versus branch mining). And I'm pretty good at switching picks, so it doesn't exactly slow me down.
However, I guess I'm looking at my double chest full of redstone, and the other double chest full of coal (despite smelting a mountain of cobblestone and netherrack), and the big Lapis statue I built, and am considering just hanging up my Fortune pick. I need to carry around Silk Touch for my Ender Chest anyway, so I'll mine Diamond (and Emerald when in Extreme Hills) with that, but more or less just plow through everything else.
I'm sure this has been asked before (but I surprisingly couldn't find a great deal of useful info), and it's something I haven't really given much thought to until now. What do you think? Remember, I'm talking specifically about the "mid-game" (my loose definition is above), not the early game (where every diamond is precious!) or the late game where, almost no matter what you do, you probably never need to mine again.
Fortune 1-2 for coal, lapis, redstone. Fortune 3 for diamonds, emeralds, and quartz
This is pretty self-explanatory, from the last time I played:
Now imagine if I had used Fortune on all of that... and for a time I actually did just that, using a backpack mod so I could cave for a reasonable amount of time, filling up double chest after double chest with coal blocks in particular - even without Fortune I'm on the way to my third double chest (10,368 blocks, 93,312 coal) in my current world, and in another world I filled up more than 17 double chests (some mined with Fortune, but most wasn't; in that world I also only started mining all coal when 1.6 came out; until then I only used Fortune on diamonds and emeralds).
Even early in a world I don't see any point in using it since you can just branch-mine and get plenty of diamonds; I even use diamond pickaxes to mine with after I find my first diamonds, even before I am able to enchant them (i.e. Unbreaking III gives you 4x the uses per pickaxe; I just save nearly depleted pickaxes for enchanting later). In fact, even in my modded world, where the material I use for my gear, amethyst, is 3 times rarer than diamond (8 times when found in caves, which is intentional so branch-mining is practical but I don't find much during my "normal" gameplay), while I did enchant a diamond pickaxe with Fortune III to mine it, looking back it doesn't look like it was worthwhile; the time spent getting it might as well have been spent on mining some more. While caving I've gotten about twice as much as I've used; the higher durability helps but the rarity more than offsets any advantage, even if I used Fortune; similarly, I have no problem finding more diamonds than I use in vanilla.
However, I do use Fortune III to harvest potatoes for food, as you get double the yield, although that is more convenience than necessity; I did just fine without it for a long time, and in one world I just used a book I found in a dungeon to enchant a pickaxe for this purpose, not enchanting it directly.
Also, even if it worked on iron and gold I don't see any point in using Fortune on those either:
That's 30 furnaces, each with half a stack of iron or gold ore (864 iron and 99 gold, including 2 I'd mined previously to make 11 blocks with no leftover ingots), which I mined over the course of a few hours; just two sessions is enough to make a beacon (if I ever thought that it was worth making one). I also went from level 32 to level 39 after taking it out; in the same play session I spent 47 and 39 levels to repair my sword and pickaxe, so XP is no problem either; I've never seen any point in making an XP farm since the time it takes to mine quartz to get XP for initially enchanting my gear is likely comparable to the time needed to make a good XP farm, which I'd never need afterwards (in other words, an XP farm is sort of comparable to using Fortune to mine ore, both make it easier to get the respective resources, but I get so many there is no point).
Note that in my case caving is a "late-game" thing; my general progression doesn't really leave much of a mid-game to speak of and caving is just something that I do for fun, not to get resources that I need (I do use some, such as rails from mineshafts to make railways to secondary bases, plus a small amount of gold and redstone for powered rails; said gold is more than supplied from chests).
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?
Fortune for lapis and diamonds. The reason is simple: easier to get fortune again.
My Signature
Thanks for the input! Correct me if I'm wrong, but if your name is TheMasterCaver, is it fair to say that your gameplay is pretty heavily slanted towards caving and gathering resources as opposed to building? Don't get me wrong; you imply an important point: everyone has their own point on the gathering vs. consuming continuum. I feel like I'm somewhere near the median.
Keeping in mind the differences in our playstyles, you have said that you have double chests full of certain materials, so using Fortune would just make that more excessive. In your estimation, if you were closer to the middle of the continuum (not saying you should be, mind you!), might you use Fortune then (and on what?) to reduce the time you'd need to spend gathering?
Been waiting to tidy up a few loose ends before posting to this...
I do still use my fortune pick on everything except emeralds- those I've started silk-touching again to preserve the ore (now that I've been been spending a lot of time in an NPC village emeralds aren't quite as interesting anymore and any that I trade for go right back into buying glowstone).
Do I *need* my fortune pick? Heck no. I use it to gather materials for my "mineral cube" project- a cross between installation art and a monument to obsessive-compulsive hoarding. I'll post a few more pictures on the "what have you done lately" thread, but these will give you an idea of what I do with my extra coal, redstone, etc...
The view from my "farm base".
And from a little closer up...
Here's a shot of one of my recent loot hauls that I minecarted back to my base-
I still use a bit of diamond and lapis for occasional repairs, otherwise pretty much everything in here is useless other than to stack up into pretty piles (I don't even use coal anymore- only charcoal). Why do I still do this? I dunno. Why not, I guess...
I do have to add that TheMasterCaver is correct in that they are *extremely* handy in harvesting potatoes. I prefer the saturation of beef myself, but you can get potatoes out the wazoo with a fortune III pick in no time.
cheers,
thebugguy
PS: I just noticed that I must've turned the clouds off... hmmm...
With all those things being able to be turned into blocks now I still would, just to have the option to use the blocks in large builds. I would have to have several double chests full of blocks before I thought about doing something different. Likely what I would do is just not mine the ores at all or just switch to silk touch mining them to have a larger collection of the ore versions for building/decoration (or for mining later).
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
Not if you craft them into blocks; this is how it is possible at all for me to mine so much in a caving trip, never mind a single play session (typically two per trip) and be able to carry it all - a stack of resource blocks is 576 resources, a compression ratio of up to ninefold (Fortune III averages a 120% increase, or 2.2 times the drops) and only lapis averages more than 9 drops per ore when Fortune is used.
I even smelt iron and gold ore while still caving to make more room; as shown in my previous post I'll just set up furnaces in a safe area and continue exploring nearby areas while they smelt. Excluding four Ender chests slots for supplies, I have 23 spaces free (24 in vanilla since I always carry a few diamonds for repairs and put them in the same slot where I have the amethyst), which can hold as much as 13,248 resources, though in practice many of them get filled up with other stuff and I've never gotten enough diamonds to warrant making blocks, only very rarely getting more than a stack, so that's just 64 per stack but generally at least half of the slots get filled up with resource blocks by the time I return.
By comparison, 23 slots can only hold 1,472 ore - less than half of what I'd mined (including my inventory wouldn't be enough either), and I'd need coal to make torches so I'd have to carry another pickaxe in any case (I could otherwise use the same pickaxe used on Ender chests, at least in vanilla), although it would be possible to just take a few stacks of coal or even charcoal with me (if I did that I could pretty much completely eliminate any usage of what I mine in my modded world, otherwise only using a portion of the diamonds I mine). Also, stuff like iron ingots from chests don't stack with ore; when smelting I smelt enough to make an even multiple of 9 including whatever ingots I have so there is no leftover; so you'd need extra slots (obviously not an issue with branch-mining, unless you run into a mineshaft/dungeon and explore it).
Of course, I suppose it doesn't matter unless you mine a very lot all at once, and if you branch-mine cobblestone is a more significant limiting factor (thebugguy, how many trips/sessions did it take for you to mine all of that (the minecart); a trip meaning coming back from mining to unload your inventory and restock?).
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?
Uy. I dunno. A lot. I'm guessing that represents 20 or 30 1x2x100 tunnels, maybe more- it's kind of hard to say. I don't use an enderchest, so I do have to go back and forth to my collection point after every third or fourth tunnel (depending on how fastidious I am about filling in gaps in my tunnels and how many different kinds of ore/stone I'm carrying). In this case the max distance from tunnel to cart was about 240 to 250 blocks. That's farther away from my rail line than I usually go (this is a pretty good size mountain chain), so I've been considering building a spur line to reduce carrying time.
cheers,
tbg
As I recall, you play on an older version that has more robust cave generation, plus you modded it to make it even more epic. How do you not get lost? I tried doing it your way, but I ended up losing all my stuff because I got so horribly lost. Somewhere in my world there's 20 furnaces with tons of iron and gold and stacks upon stacks of everything else in chests waiting for me to come back...
I only smelt half a stack per furnace, which takes about 5 minutes to smelt, so I don't go that far before I know it has finished. Not that I haven't lost them before, usually when I get sidetracked, but I can usually find them again without much problem. Other than that, for general navigation I just explore everything around each exit/entrance I mark on the surface (as in this example), then move on to the next one, usually when I find something that is clearly new or get too far away from my original entrance, using a fully zoomed in-game map to help show where I've been; obviously, these maps don't show the underground but just knowing the general area I am in helps a lot.
I sometimes do miss some areas, as shown on the map in the spoiler but in general you can say that if there is a cave I'll explore it:
(a low-level rendering of a copy of my current world after I trimmed away all unexplored areas; the presence of exposed lava indicates I didn't fully explore an area, and/or are caves that don't connect to anything else; I don't intentionally mine tunnels to find caves except where they skim the lava surface, as those caves can come back up or lead to another cave)
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 generally use Fortune because at *some* point I'll generally have a use for the materials. I play a modded game with more uses for coal. Redstone I admit I have too much of - maybe I'll build something with it someday.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
You.... i like you
I'm just a very boring person.
I use fortune III on everything generally, even cobblestone mining, simply because I have 6-7 of them and they are not particularly hard to make.
Any pickaxe that doesn't have my preferred set of enchants is used to repair my good pickaxes.
I mine all the ores that are affected by fortune with fortune. Also, since I don't feel like making and carrying 3 picks, I waste my silk touch and fortune III picks on caving and any other time I need to use a pickaxe (except for mining).
If you're interested in an awesome, white-listed, pure vanilla server, consider applying!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/servers/pc-servers/2811770-axiba-smp-community-focused-vanilla-survival#c4
I sometimes will go down into my mines when I'm bored and mine in a straight line for an hour. Mining everything with fortune can really clog up your inventory, especially when mining redstone/lapis lazuli since they can drop over 4 pieces when mined with fortune. Instead, I simply silk touch everything, then I fortune my earnings when I get back.
Only for mining, otherwise my normal pickaxe would (obviously) be silk touch. I use it on all ores, I love the surplus.