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Do you prefer exploring caves or mining shafts? Why or why not? Discuss!
My pick: Cave exploring
Why: Personally, I think shafts just take up way too many resources, and gives you a lot of excess Cobblestone that you might not even need. I also feel like it's a lot more time consuming as opposed to simply sprinting through a cave. In personal experience, I have always found myself obtaining a lot more ores, finding more Dungeons, killing more Mobs, and running into more Lava and Water respectively all in a natural cave instead of a shaft. I might sound like a noob saying that cave exploring is the better choice, but I honestly can't see the point in spending so much Iron or Diamond creating your own shaft, filling your inventory with a lot of Cobblestone in the process, when you could simply explore a cave that was already sort of mined out for you, complete with a whole bunch of ores inside those caves.
And to be fair, unless an experienced player knows how to properly make a shaft in the most effective way possible, then there really is no point in mining one out. As if that's not enough, you'll need a lot more torches to keep your shaft lit, unlike a natural cave where a Lava deposit can keep your cave lit up for you, not to mention that Lava serves as a convenient and useful incinerator for your junk blocks, and can be used as a good supply of Obsidian for your Nether Portal or base on a server to protect your chests full of valuables. Finally, hostile mobs that spawn in a naturally dark cave means that you can farm a lot of experience points for Enchanting by setting up a simple makeshift mob trap around a Dungeon spawner, which in itself is fairly easy to find in a natural cave. A natural cave close to the surface can also be shaped into a makeshift house with a little Cobblestone and some creativity. Some would argue that you can easily get long in a big cave system, but a smart player would always know to block off dead ends and have signs or other markers to let a player find their way out without having to use up durability on your pickaxe mining a staircase to the surface.
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A very generic and bland signature because I can't decide what to write here. I also hate my profile name. Refer to me as Cheese, my Steam name.
Depends on what I need most of the time. If I need cobblestone for building, then shaft mining where you dig in a straight line is what I do. That way I get a ton of cobble as well as various ore. If I only really ore and don't care about not getting much cobblestone, then caving is the way to go.
Caving is generally more exciting since it's not just mining in a straight line and lighting the tunnel behind you with no danger at all.
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Caving was a hobby of mine, and still is. When I need stone and an easier time finding diamonds, however, I'll go shaft (strip) mining. But overall, for the sake of tools and time, caving is much preferred.
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Despite being my favorite thing to do in the game I do not go caving to get my first resources; it is much faster and safer to branch-mine for diamonds - on average I only find about 4 diamonds per hour of caving - that's 6 hours just to get a full set of diamond armor, or 2-3 hours plus the time needed to get a full enchanting setup and a Fortune III pickaxe. By contrast, you can easily find that many diamonds in less than an hour of branch-mining, without using Fortune (when mining 1x2 tunnels spaced every 4 blocks at y=11 you can expect to find one diamond ore per 114 blocks mined; if you mine one block per second that is about 32 diamonds per hour. Even a stone pickaxe mines stone in less than a second). The excess cobblestone that you get can be saved for later; when I recently dug a 1200 block long railway I used it to fill in rooms excavated for sandstone underneath a village and the rest I took with me when caving, using it up over a few days; in one world I used it to make stone bricks to build my main base.
True, I've found diamonds much faster before and tend to find them in a relatively short period of time since I explore all layers of a cave, usually saving the lowest layers for last (easier to deal with mobs coming from below and no surprises from above), but you aren't going to find diamond-level mineshafts that often (one gave me a stack of diamonds) and unless you are playing in 1.6.4 or earlier you can't just run into a random surface opening and reliably find a huge cave at diamond level. Plus, diamond veins in caves tend to be smaller; yesterday I found 4 separate veins in close proximity - but only got 8 diamonds from them (1, 2, 2, 3 ores each) - while a large intact vein can have up to 10, averaging 5-6 (bedrock is largely responsible for the lower amount of ore per chunk, 3.1; caves eliminate about 10% of ore around diamond level).
Actually, given how I mine every single ore in sight branch-mining is even more efficient in terms of tool wear; out of more than 1.7 million blocks mined I've only found about 7,100 diamond ore, or about 240 blocks mined per diamond - double the figure for branch-mining (excluding other ores you mine from the walls, but it won't be much higher). Overall though about three-quarters of all blocks I've mined have been ore, and closer to 4/5 when including rails (I've never needed to make normal rails) and moss stone.
Also, I convert all lava in sight into obsidian so the only advantage lava gives is less mobs on those layers; better to be safe and eliminate the possibility of falling in lava, which is easily the deadliest thing in the game for an experienced player with enchanted gear and the worst way to die (besides falling into the void); and it is much easier to navigate caves that aren't filled with lava (I've converted around half a million lava into obsidian in one world). Using more torches is also not a problem since a stack of logs together with mined coal lets you craft 2,048 torches and coal is so common many players do not mine it all (I've mined over 3,000 coal ore on multiple occasions; coal is 2/3rds of all ores I mine so by not mining it all I could reduce pickaxe wear by nearly that much and get more diamonds per block than by branch-mining, as well as get more per hour).
My preferred method is "build" mining. With this method, you just dig out spots where you will place your builds, whether that be buildings, farms, rail tunnels, or whatever else you can think of.
I prefer caving because it's a lot more interesting than strip mining, but strip mining is something that's required to get ores more efficiently. I don't usually find myself doing it since it's sooooooo boring.
Most of the time, I will find a really good cave or ravine and manage to find a ton of ores. Once i get down to diamond level, if there are no diamonds in plain sight and i want to find some, i will do a bit of strip mining. I make sure to have a really good pick on me though if i strip mine, because it makes it a lot faster.
I will say though, i much prefer exploring a cave and finding Mine Shafts. Strip mining can get super boring.
I usually do shaft and strip mines. First I dig a large vertical shaft down to level 5 or so. I almost always expose caves in the process to explore later, and I find enough ore in the shaft to. Once I reach level 5 I dig either 2x2 or 1x2 tunnels which gets me a lot more ore.
I have always liked to do mining that way because I find the most diamonds and other valuables, and I get plenty of cobblestone to build with. My tunnels run into caves sometimes, and I will usually explore those within a short while, as well as any I find in my vertical shaft.
But yeah, I've always had a lot of fun mining tunnels and shafts, and exploring caves once in a while.
For mining, I prefer shaft mining. I haven't found a single diamond yet by caving. Nor have I found that caving typically gets me down to the levels where diamonds can be found. (Occasionally I'll use a cave as the top of a new mine shaft to avoid having to spiral down so many levels.)
However, shaft mining does lead to an awful lot of caving too -- when your mining shaft runs into a cave, I feel like I must explore and light up or block off the entire thing to prevent mobs spawning behind me. I do a lot of jumping and screaming (in real life) when in caves.
Generally branch mining for me. Caving can be fun at times but when you're out to find resources for a project, branch mining is the way to go. I tend to use a fair bit of cobblestone anyway (e.g. to build roads between towns).
Generally branch mining for me. Caving can be fun at times but when you're out to find resources for a project, branch mining is the way to go. I tend to use a fair bit of cobblestone anyway (e.g. to build roads between towns).
How do you build roads? Making a trench and then filling it up with cobblestone?
Yep, but I personally use quartz and clay brick stairs for guttering (I really like the way the quarter-block gap in the stair block looks next to the road surface). If I'm playing modded, my roads are exclusively using clay brick stairs with a road surface of hardened dirt (a block that can be found in smooth stone/cobblestone-like quantities in a Biomes o Plenty canyon biome).
For mining, I prefer shaft mining. I haven't found a single diamond yet by caving. Nor have I found that caving typically gets me down to the levels where diamonds can be found. (Occasionally I'll use a cave as the top of a new mine shaft to avoid having to spiral down so many levels.)
However, shaft mining does lead to an awful lot of caving too -- when your mining shaft runs into a cave, I feel like I must explore and light up or block off the entire thing to prevent mobs spawning behind me. I do a lot of jumping and screaming (in real life) when in caves.
This pretty much mirrors my sentiment. I do shaft mining to get diamonds, but if they break into caves I dive right in and explore the caves extensively as well.
If my goal is to get diamonds, redstone, and lapis, then there is no better way than mining shafts at y11. However, coal and iron are found more easily while caving. I'm pretty sure it's either or for gold.
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I previously mentioned how unreliable caving can be when you want to find diamonds; the last couple times I played proves that pretty well:
Over 4,000 ore mined but only 2 diamond ore; I also found two diamonds in a minecart for a total of 4:
The next day I decided to take screenshots each time my inventory was full, showing how not only diamond but other ores vary; I only mined a bit over half as much ore from the same area before returning to my base after I'd completely explored the area:
That's not actually the same golden helmet seen above; I found another one:
I managed to find an emerald ore in part of the mineshaft that extended into an extreme hills biome. Notice also how little food I ate between the last few screenshots, since I was mostly eating bread found in minecarts:
In this case I cut it short after finding a dungeon (2 golden apples!) and set up furnaces to smelt iron and gold; the amount of gold I found was particularly high:
My Ender chest; the stack of 18 diamonds includes 2 that I had beforehand, I found none in minecarts today. I only did a bit more caving before returning to my main base, overall I mined a total of about 2,500 ore:
Here is a map of the area I explored, which includes a triple mineshaft (three separate mineshaft rooms); below sea level, below y=32, and below y=16:
So, as you can see the number and rate at which I find diamonds is very inconsistent; in the second play session all the diamonds I found were within the first period and I found none afterwards, and I found only 18 out of a total of 6,600 ore, including more than 1,650 iron - or more than 90 times more iron than diamond (my overall ratio is about half this; all the mineshafts were well above the diamond layer and skewed it higher; including the two found in a minecart only slightly improves this). I also spent about 7 hours caving across both days for only 2 diamonds per hour. Branch-mining has some luck in it as well but since you are always within the diamond layer it is much more consistent and faster, averaging about 8 times faster than my overall rate, more if you use faster tools.
In my modded worlds I have even more reason to branch-mine, since I added a new ore which is 8 times rarer than diamond when found in caves but only 3 times when branch-mining as deep as possible (at y=1, with one layer of bedrock at y=0); when caving I often went for days without finding any, finding just enough to keep up with repairs with a surplus of less than a stack after 5 months.
I did get stuff that you won't get by solely branch-mining though, including 1,124 rails (equivalent to 421.5 iron, and also about the number I used for my latest railway extension), golden apples (since 1.9 Notch apples), diamond horse armor (plus several iron I did not take), name tags, enchanted books, and so on (a lot of this stuff has been significantly devalued since 1.6.4, where name tags are only found in chests, moss stone is uncraftable, etc).
I personally do both. I like to dig either a 4x4 or 12x12 hole straight to y11 or 12 and I start mining 2x2 or 3x3 tunnels in the north, south, east, and west. Doing this eventually brings me to caves and ravines and stuff.
Do you prefer exploring caves or mining shafts? Why or why not? Discuss!
My pick: Cave exploring
Why: Personally, I think shafts just take up way too many resources, and gives you a lot of excess Cobblestone that you might not even need. I also feel like it's a lot more time consuming as opposed to simply sprinting through a cave. In personal experience, I have always found myself obtaining a lot more ores, finding more Dungeons, killing more Mobs, and running into more Lava and Water respectively all in a natural cave instead of a shaft. I might sound like a noob saying that cave exploring is the better choice, but I honestly can't see the point in spending so much Iron or Diamond creating your own shaft, filling your inventory with a lot of Cobblestone in the process, when you could simply explore a cave that was already sort of mined out for you, complete with a whole bunch of ores inside those caves.
And to be fair, unless an experienced player knows how to properly make a shaft in the most effective way possible, then there really is no point in mining one out. As if that's not enough, you'll need a lot more torches to keep your shaft lit, unlike a natural cave where a Lava deposit can keep your cave lit up for you, not to mention that Lava serves as a convenient and useful incinerator for your junk blocks, and can be used as a good supply of Obsidian for your Nether Portal or base on a server to protect your chests full of valuables. Finally, hostile mobs that spawn in a naturally dark cave means that you can farm a lot of experience points for Enchanting by setting up a simple makeshift mob trap around a Dungeon spawner, which in itself is fairly easy to find in a natural cave. A natural cave close to the surface can also be shaped into a makeshift house with a little Cobblestone and some creativity. Some would argue that you can easily get long in a big cave system, but a smart player would always know to block off dead ends and have signs or other markers to let a player find their way out without having to use up durability on your pickaxe mining a staircase to the surface.
A very generic and bland signature because I can't decide what to write here. I also hate my profile name. Refer to me as Cheese, my Steam name.
Depends on what I need most of the time. If I need cobblestone for building, then shaft mining where you dig in a straight line is what I do. That way I get a ton of cobble as well as various ore. If I only really ore and don't care about not getting much cobblestone, then caving is the way to go.
Caving is generally more exciting since it's not just mining in a straight line and lighting the tunnel behind you with no danger at all.
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Caving was a hobby of mine, and still is. When I need stone and an easier time finding diamonds, however, I'll go shaft (strip) mining. But overall, for the sake of tools and time, caving is much preferred.
I post pretty rarely nowadays. Gosh, I wish this place weren't so... empty...
Despite being my favorite thing to do in the game I do not go caving to get my first resources; it is much faster and safer to branch-mine for diamonds - on average I only find about 4 diamonds per hour of caving - that's 6 hours just to get a full set of diamond armor, or 2-3 hours plus the time needed to get a full enchanting setup and a Fortune III pickaxe. By contrast, you can easily find that many diamonds in less than an hour of branch-mining, without using Fortune (when mining 1x2 tunnels spaced every 4 blocks at y=11 you can expect to find one diamond ore per 114 blocks mined; if you mine one block per second that is about 32 diamonds per hour. Even a stone pickaxe mines stone in less than a second). The excess cobblestone that you get can be saved for later; when I recently dug a 1200 block long railway I used it to fill in rooms excavated for sandstone underneath a village and the rest I took with me when caving, using it up over a few days; in one world I used it to make stone bricks to build my main base.
True, I've found diamonds much faster before and tend to find them in a relatively short period of time since I explore all layers of a cave, usually saving the lowest layers for last (easier to deal with mobs coming from below and no surprises from above), but you aren't going to find diamond-level mineshafts that often (one gave me a stack of diamonds) and unless you are playing in 1.6.4 or earlier you can't just run into a random surface opening and reliably find a huge cave at diamond level. Plus, diamond veins in caves tend to be smaller; yesterday I found 4 separate veins in close proximity - but only got 8 diamonds from them (1, 2, 2, 3 ores each) - while a large intact vein can have up to 10, averaging 5-6 (bedrock is largely responsible for the lower amount of ore per chunk, 3.1; caves eliminate about 10% of ore around diamond level).
Actually, given how I mine every single ore in sight branch-mining is even more efficient in terms of tool wear; out of more than 1.7 million blocks mined I've only found about 7,100 diamond ore, or about 240 blocks mined per diamond - double the figure for branch-mining (excluding other ores you mine from the walls, but it won't be much higher). Overall though about three-quarters of all blocks I've mined have been ore, and closer to 4/5 when including rails (I've never needed to make normal rails) and moss stone.
Also, I convert all lava in sight into obsidian so the only advantage lava gives is less mobs on those layers; better to be safe and eliminate the possibility of falling in lava, which is easily the deadliest thing in the game for an experienced player with enchanted gear and the worst way to die (besides falling into the void); and it is much easier to navigate caves that aren't filled with lava (I've converted around half a million lava into obsidian in one world). Using more torches is also not a problem since a stack of logs together with mined coal lets you craft 2,048 torches and coal is so common many players do not mine it all (I've mined over 3,000 coal ore on multiple occasions; coal is 2/3rds of all ores I mine so by not mining it all I could reduce pickaxe wear by nearly that much and get more diamonds per block than by branch-mining, as well as get more per hour).
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?
My preferred method is "build" mining. With this method, you just dig out spots where you will place your builds, whether that be buildings, farms, rail tunnels, or whatever else you can think of.
I prefer caving because it's a lot more interesting than strip mining, but strip mining is something that's required to get ores more efficiently. I don't usually find myself doing it since it's sooooooo boring.
You can just call me Canary.
How not to look like a total fool in the forum games
I'm too terrified of caves and ravines to stay in them very long, so I guess shaft mining wins by default?
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I usually do both.
Most of the time, I will find a really good cave or ravine and manage to find a ton of ores. Once i get down to diamond level, if there are no diamonds in plain sight and i want to find some, i will do a bit of strip mining. I make sure to have a really good pick on me though if i strip mine, because it makes it a lot faster.
I will say though, i much prefer exploring a cave and finding Mine Shafts. Strip mining can get super boring.
I prefer to make shafts, I have found over 110+ Diamonds in about a week. And as far as the worthless blocks, I just dump them in the lake.
I branch mine at level 5, when I hear mobs I dig up and explore the cave system and return to my branch mining.
Mining for relaxation and diamonds, caving for excitement and mob drops.
Just testing.
I usually do shaft and strip mines. First I dig a large vertical shaft down to level 5 or so. I almost always expose caves in the process to explore later, and I find enough ore in the shaft to. Once I reach level 5 I dig either 2x2 or 1x2 tunnels which gets me a lot more ore.
I have always liked to do mining that way because I find the most diamonds and other valuables, and I get plenty of cobblestone to build with. My tunnels run into caves sometimes, and I will usually explore those within a short while, as well as any I find in my vertical shaft.
But yeah, I've always had a lot of fun mining tunnels and shafts, and exploring caves once in a while.
For mining, I prefer shaft mining. I haven't found a single diamond yet by caving. Nor have I found that caving typically gets me down to the levels where diamonds can be found. (Occasionally I'll use a cave as the top of a new mine shaft to avoid having to spiral down so many levels.)
However, shaft mining does lead to an awful lot of caving too -- when your mining shaft runs into a cave, I feel like I must explore and light up or block off the entire thing to prevent mobs spawning behind me. I do a lot of jumping and screaming (in real life) when in caves.
Generally branch mining for me. Caving can be fun at times but when you're out to find resources for a project, branch mining is the way to go. I tend to use a fair bit of cobblestone anyway (e.g. to build roads between towns).
How do you build roads? Making a trench and then filling it up with cobblestone?
Yep, but I personally use quartz and clay brick stairs for guttering (I really like the way the quarter-block gap in the stair block looks next to the road surface). If I'm playing modded, my roads are exclusively using clay brick stairs with a road surface of hardened dirt (a block that can be found in smooth stone/cobblestone-like quantities in a Biomes o Plenty canyon biome).
This pretty much mirrors my sentiment. I do shaft mining to get diamonds, but if they break into caves I dive right in and explore the caves extensively as well.
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..
If my goal is to get diamonds, redstone, and lapis, then there is no better way than mining shafts at y11. However, coal and iron are found more easily while caving. I'm pretty sure it's either or for gold.
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I previously mentioned how unreliable caving can be when you want to find diamonds; the last couple times I played proves that pretty well:
The next day I decided to take screenshots each time my inventory was full, showing how not only diamond but other ores vary; I only mined a bit over half as much ore from the same area before returning to my base after I'd completely explored the area:
That's not actually the same golden helmet seen above; I found another one:
I managed to find an emerald ore in part of the mineshaft that extended into an extreme hills biome. Notice also how little food I ate between the last few screenshots, since I was mostly eating bread found in minecarts:
In this case I cut it short after finding a dungeon (2 golden apples!) and set up furnaces to smelt iron and gold; the amount of gold I found was particularly high:
My Ender chest; the stack of 18 diamonds includes 2 that I had beforehand, I found none in minecarts today. I only did a bit more caving before returning to my main base, overall I mined a total of about 2,500 ore:
Here is a map of the area I explored, which includes a triple mineshaft (three separate mineshaft rooms); below sea level, below y=32, and below y=16:
So, as you can see the number and rate at which I find diamonds is very inconsistent; in the second play session all the diamonds I found were within the first period and I found none afterwards, and I found only 18 out of a total of 6,600 ore, including more than 1,650 iron - or more than 90 times more iron than diamond (my overall ratio is about half this; all the mineshafts were well above the diamond layer and skewed it higher; including the two found in a minecart only slightly improves this). I also spent about 7 hours caving across both days for only 2 diamonds per hour. Branch-mining has some luck in it as well but since you are always within the diamond layer it is much more consistent and faster, averaging about 8 times faster than my overall rate, more if you use faster tools.
In my modded worlds I have even more reason to branch-mine, since I added a new ore which is 8 times rarer than diamond when found in caves but only 3 times when branch-mining as deep as possible (at y=1, with one layer of bedrock at y=0); when caving I often went for days without finding any, finding just enough to keep up with repairs with a surplus of less than a stack after 5 months.
I did get stuff that you won't get by solely branch-mining though, including 1,124 rails (equivalent to 421.5 iron, and also about the number I used for my latest railway extension), golden apples (since 1.9 Notch apples), diamond horse armor (plus several iron I did not take), name tags, enchanted books, and so on (a lot of this stuff has been significantly devalued since 1.6.4, where name tags are only found in chests, moss stone is uncraftable, etc).
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?
Well I'm straight, so I definitely prefer a cave than shaft. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I don't waste my diamonds on hoes.
I personally do both. I like to dig either a 4x4 or 12x12 hole straight to y11 or 12 and I start mining 2x2 or 3x3 tunnels in the north, south, east, and west. Doing this eventually brings me to caves and ravines and stuff.