There is a non redstone automatic farm. Not sure if that's a problem for you. The basic style to spawning platforms and villager cells on each side. There not terribly quick but they function as long as there loaded. If that's not for you get to mining. Only other way really.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Yes i know, my spelling sucks.
Check out my You-Tube Channel (BringerofKaos) for plenty of Minecraft Content and my Lets Play series:
There is a non redstone automatic farm. Not sure if that's a problem for you. The basic style to spawning platforms and villager cells on each side. There not terribly quick but they function as long as there loaded. If that's not for you get to mining. Only other way really.
Yeah, I also don't like those iron titan farms.
Mining in caves it is then! At least I can repair my mending gear with the ores. I also do have a 500 block long tunnel so I can grab some leftover ores from that.
Go caving; I regularly mine 700+ iron in a 3-4 hour session, which is two sessions to get enough for a beacon, and have collected well over half a million iron in one world, far more than I could ever use, even in an entire IRL lifetime of playtime (for perspective, a single village iron farm gives around 40 iron per hour - that's well over a year of 24/7 operation just to get the same amount; of course, you can get multiple villages). My rates would be even higher if I did not stop to mine absolutely everything (coal alone makes up 2/3 of all ores I mine and I've collected more than 3 million resources overall).
(Personally, I think automated farms ruin the game - what fun is it if the game plays itself for you and you basically have Creative mode access to resources in Survival. I really don't understand why everybody thinks resource/mob/XP farms, besides basic crop/animal farms, are so important as I progress very nicely without ever using them)
A few farmers and a decent spread of crops may be a viable alternative if you want to do things manually....
Unless you already have large automated farms set up It is far faster to mine iron/gold than it is to farm emeralds; I collected 726 iron and 96 gold in 3 1/2 hours today (plus some ingots from chests. Note that you can mix minerals, so both iron and gold can be used); if you wanted to get the emeralds you need to make a beacon you'd have to trade some 20-30,000 items (e.g. 26,568 wheat at 18 wheat per emerald and 1,476 emeralds required, plus additional emeralds and other items needed to unlock trades; you'll also be spending a lot of time trading). Even over 7 hours that means you need to grow/trade upwards of one item per second, if not more.
quote=TheMasterCaver
Unless you already have large automated farms set up It is far faster to mine iron/gold than it is to farm emeralds; I collected 726 iron and 96 gold in 3 1/2 hours today (plus some ingots from chests. Note that you can mix minerals, so both iron and gold can be used); if you wanted to get the emeralds you need to make a beacon you'd have to trade some 20-30,000 items (e.g. 26,568 wheat at 18 wheat per emerald and 1,476 emeralds required, plus additional emeralds and other items needed to unlock trades; you'll also be spending a lot of time trading). Even over 7 hours that means you need to grow/trade upwards of one item per second, if not more.
My understanding is that you have customized world generation in respect to caves which may make your productivity numbers higher than vanilla 1.12.2.
I see you are also aware of the quote I cited about mixing block types in a beacon; I was not suggesting using emeralds exclusively as I thought the citation made clear...
"Viable alternative" was not meant to imply faster and was actually directed at the OP in comparsion to the declined method of iron farming.
As crops will grow as long as the farm is in the entity loaded chucks, trading the crops that grew while one was mining would at minimum suppliment the mined minerals.
Minimum time zero to beacon via mining:
Your 3.5 hour take was 822 ore or ~55% of the needed 1476; this would mean ~6.28 hours to mine 1476 ore. [This is assuming you have already included (or corrected for) any time needed to repair tools, fetch torches, drop mined materials, etc.]
While I would assume your mining also generates a supply of coal sufficient to smelt the ores, smelting time ought to be added to the calculations. At 1476 minerals needed for a single beacon 4-level pyramid and 10 seconds per smelting process this would equate to ~4 hours (246 minutes) divided by the number of furnaces used. [This might be partly offset if the ore from early mining was smelted while later mining was in process.]
Making some fairly liberal assumptions (half the ore smelted while mining continues with no lose of time, fuel not an issue, 12 furnaces available, amounts mined evenly divisible by nine, ingot to block crafting time effectively nil)…
I get a minimal overal time from zero to 164 mineral blocks as ~6.5 hours with the player continually active and the only useful byproducts being coincidently mined blocks.
[You make no mention of your non-iron+gold take, but I am assuming it is non-zero.]
Minimum time zero to beacon via trading:
Calculating emerald production from trading under some fairly restrictive assumptions:
using only inputs requiring neither effective grinders (eg. rotten flesh, string) nor any manufacturing (wool requires shears, paper from cane, basic books from leather and paper, etc) and also disallowing non-easily resettable trades (eg. leather to leatherworker) leaves farmers. [I have treated raw chicken and pork as manufactured for these puposes.]
Taking a farmer with straight average trades:
20 wheat / 17 potatoes / 17 carrots / 10.5 pumpkins / 9.5 melons per emerald and assuming each trade can be used an average of 7 times before needing to be reset... [I do not have good data on this, but the 7 estimate seems approximately accurate if a bit low based on empirical observation.]
one cycle of trading with a single farmer would thus consume 140 wheat / 119 potatoes / 119 carrots / 73.5 pumpkins / 66.5 melons and generate 35 emeralds.
35 trades would mean only a 0.8^35 or approximately a ~0.04% [ 0.8^35 = ~0.0004056] chance (1 in ~2465) the farmer would not refresh trades.
1476 / 35 = 42 or one chance in 42 that the trades would not refresh once while getting the emeralds needed for a beacon.
Taking a test harvest (without fortune, but using a silk touch axe on the melons) from what I consider a midsized manual farm (132 wheat / 132 potatoes / 234 carrots / 135 pumpkins / 135 melons) yielded ~2 stacks wheat / ~3.5 stacks potatoes / ~6.25 stacks carrots / ~3 stacks pumpkins / ~3 stacks melons after replanting. [Note this involved harvesting pumpkins and melons both before and after the rest. ]
While this farm has not been optimized for supporting trade with a single average farmer, one growth cycle will support the following trades (with some residual produce): 6 wheat / 13 potato / 23 carrot / 18 pumpkin / 20 melon trades.
With some crop rebalancing it ought to be able to support 2 complete trade cycles (70 emeralds) per harvest.
At this rate it would require 21 harvests (assuming accumulating residual produce accounted the final 6 emeralds as well as any possible purchases required to reset the trades).
Assuming the farmer was 'close', and emerald to block crafting time was effectively nil, this would require ~21 hours zero to beacon.
If, however, the effect of the roughly 75% of this time that involves only waiting is taken into account, the actual player time drops to 5.25 hours with the balance being available for other activities within a radius to keep the farm loaded.
If some of the 15.75 hours waiting time is given to beacon production: eg. farming chickens and pork (using a secondary farm) to support butcher trades and/or cows and cane to support librarian trades – the zero to beacon time will drop.
Even if none of the waiting time is given to beacon production, it remains available for other activities such as tree farming or building.
Conclusions:
Without any automation, caving likely represents the fastest route from zero to beacon in terms of RL clock hours.
Without any automation, trading (limited to crops for emeralds with farmers) likely represents more RL clock hours but less active playing time to go zero to beacon.
Optimal strategy thus depends (assuming one declines to mix the two techniques) on either the metric choosen to measure required time or ones preferred playstyle.
With automation, the balance shifts toward trading with greater degrees of automation making trading increasingly favorable as a strategy.
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"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
Go caving; I regularly mine 700+ iron in a 3-4 hour session, which is two sessions to get enough for a beacon, and have collected well over half a million iron in one world, far more than I could ever use, even in an entire IRL lifetime of playtime (for perspective, a single village iron farm gives around 40 iron per hour - that's well over a year of 24/7 operation just to get the same amount; of course, you can get multiple villages). My rates would be even higher if I did not stop to mine absolutely everything (coal alone makes up 2/3 of all ores I mine and I've collected more than 3 million resources overall).
(Personally, I think automated farms ruin the game - what fun is it if the game plays itself for you and you basically have Creative mode access to resources in Survival. I really don't understand why everybody thinks resource/mob/XP farms, besides basic crop/animal farms, are so important as I progress very nicely without ever using them)
I agree with the automated farms. Thanks for the tips. I guess I'll go on a huge mining adventure next time I play Minecraft.
quote=Jay29
Hey everyone! So yesterday I battled the Wither and won the fight. I got a beacon now.
But I'm trying to get a full beacon. How can I get tons of iron easily? I won't be using those automatic redstone farms.
Nothing requires iron for beacon pyramids, it is merely one of the possibilities. [The others are gold, emerald, and diamond.]
Note also "Several different block types can be mixed without affecting functionality."
A few farmers and a decent spread of crops may be a viable alternative if you want to do things manually....
I think I'll use you and TheMasterCaver's ideas together. Trade my crops for emeralds, which I already frequently do, and then go mining for iron or gold.
Thank you for the tips everyone!
My understanding is that you have customized world generation in respect to caves which may make your productivity numbers higher than vanilla 1.12.2.
Sure, like my first world was not created in vanilla... try creating a world with the seed "-123775873255737467" in 1.6.4 and see if you don't get this:
A couple renderings of the spawn area; the one one the right was recreated in vanilla 1.6.4 (the world was started in 1.5.1):
A few Minutor renderings of some of the largest cave systems that I've found, with the coordinates shown at the bottom:
A seeds website even claims that the seed for my world has the "biggest cave ever", which likely came from a thread mentioning the cave system (which is not even close to the largest cave system I've found, if still the densest for its size): https://minecraft-seeds.net/seed/1.6-1.6.2/123775873255737467/
My ore collection rate has been nearly identical in my various modded worlds - all that really matters is how quickly I can explore caves and the density of ore pockets, which are the same in my modded worlds as in vanilla 1.6.4 (which as I mentioned is less than in more recent versions; see this thread). In fact, the largest cave system I've ever explored (by volume) in a modded world yielded less ore and less ore over time than a complex of mineshafts with only 1/4 the volume in vanilla; considerably more torches were also needed to light it up (volume increases as the cube of the radius while surface area is only the square, so bigger caves expose less area per unit of volume). Plus, in one such cave alone I killed more than 600 mobs which came in waves which would be all but impossible to defeat in 1.9 or later (in my last modded world I averaged about 50% more mobs killed per session, in part because of changes to mob spawning; by contrast, I've seen less since 1.9, which significantly reduced the sight range of zombies (by far the most common mob I encounter in 1,.6.4; they even cause lag without a patch I modded in) and lowered the mob cap from 79 to 70 due to fixing an incorrect calculation (more mobs = more fun though, if talking longer to collect resources).
Also, while 1.7 reduced the number of caves this is mostly offset by a reduction in the density of cave systems (less overlapping caves means each individual cave contributes more to the volume) and more than offset by the increase in ores, and when I played a bit in newer version just to compare caving (with unmodified cave generation) I actually collected far more ores than I do in 1,6,4; in fact, one run averaged 1,600 ore per hour - double my (long term) average rate in 1.6.4!
(Personally, I think automated farms ruin the game - what fun is it if the game plays itself for you and you basically have Creative mode access to resources in Survival. I really don't understand why everybody thinks resource/mob/XP farms, besides basic crop/animal farms, are so important as I progress very nicely without ever using them)
Personally I think your grindy repetitive play-style sounds incredibly boring. What fun is it to do only one thing in the game, caving for hours and hours and hours, and how is your huge cache of unused resources any different from farm generated Creative mode access to resources in Survival? I really don't understand why you think everyone should play the game YOUR way, and what you call progress I call stagnation.
Progress to me is mastering the environment and reducing the need to grind for resources. Progress is building advanced machines and inventing new things to help me survive, and to give me more time to create and build even more interesting things. Progress is what lead us to the invention of computers, and the game Minecraft that we love playing.
Personally I think your grindy repetitive play-style sounds incredibly boring. What fun is it to do only one thing in the game, caving for hours and hours and hours, and how is your huge cache of unused resources any different from farm generated Creative mode access to resources in Survival? I really don't understand why you think everyone should play the game YOUR way, and what you call progress I call stagnation.
Progress to me is mastering the environment and reducing the need to grind for resources. Progress is building advanced machines and inventing new things to help me survive, and to give me more time to create and build even more interesting things. Progress is what lead us to the invention of computers, and the game Minecraft that we love playing.
I actually worked to get those resources - spending some 3,000 hours of my own time - as opposed to what? 3 hours to build an iron farm that requires zero additional investment? Also, I don't even cave to get resources - I branch-mine for the resources that I need when I start out, otherwise they are simply a byproduct of caving for fun which just does happen to meet all of my needs, including XP needs; I reached level 74 yesterday - 10175 XP just from mining ores and killing mobs, before spending 31 levels to repair my pickaxe, which means I spent 10 times the XP than if I had only 31 levels; if I really did it for the resources I'd use Fortune to double what I get.
Not to mention that a major reason why I don't play in newer versions is because Mojang thought it would be fun to make caves much less interesting, in a game that focuses around mining (after all, it is in the name of the game and the earliest versions were even called "Cave Game"); if only they would see what I've done in my mods and add them to the game, or at least some customization options, but oh well.
Also, how many people can claim to have set a world record (well, not official but I have looked around and have not found anybody else who has come even close - and I am not the only one with my playstyle, or at least who spends a lot of time mining)? You probably think that Kurt's Far Lands or Bust series (officially recognized by Guinness) is just as boring since about all they do is walk in one direction but to them it is a major accomplishment to actually get there by walking.
Define ‘tons’ and ‘easily’. A basic iron farm where you got a 16*16*6 double decker water funnel with village around it going to a lava blade and hoppered chests is fairly basic and will yield 40-60 iron per hour while you are around just doing stuff. And no need to smelt. You can just leave the game running while you sleep/at work and you will have the needed amount soon enough.
Heavy duty branch mining at sub-16 level is more labor intensive, but can yield a lot more iron (and other resources) a great deal faster, especially once you have diamond tools with E5/F3(ST)/U3/M.
I personally just leave my auto farms running while I mine underground.
Hey everyone! So yesterday I battled the Wither and won the fight. I got a beacon now.
But I'm trying to get a full beacon. How can I get tons of iron easily? I won't be using those automatic redstone farms.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC21Z2rupws5IulGQMxB1Plg
There is a non redstone automatic farm. Not sure if that's a problem for you. The basic style to spawning platforms and villager cells on each side. There not terribly quick but they function as long as there loaded. If that's not for you get to mining. Only other way really.
Yeah, I also don't like those iron titan farms.
Mining in caves it is then! At least I can repair my mending gear with the ores. I also do have a 500 block long tunnel so I can grab some leftover ores from that.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC21Z2rupws5IulGQMxB1Plg
There are iron farms that don't use any game glitches or exploits.
Go caving; I regularly mine 700+ iron in a 3-4 hour session, which is two sessions to get enough for a beacon, and have collected well over half a million iron in one world, far more than I could ever use, even in an entire IRL lifetime of playtime (for perspective, a single village iron farm gives around 40 iron per hour - that's well over a year of 24/7 operation just to get the same amount; of course, you can get multiple villages). My rates would be even higher if I did not stop to mine absolutely everything (coal alone makes up 2/3 of all ores I mine and I've collected more than 3 million resources overall).
(Personally, I think automated farms ruin the game - what fun is it if the game plays itself for you and you basically have Creative mode access to resources in Survival. I really don't understand why everybody thinks resource/mob/XP farms, besides basic crop/animal farms, are so important as I progress very nicely without ever using them)
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?
quote=Jay29
Hey everyone! So yesterday I battled the Wither and won the fight. I got a beacon now.
But I'm trying to get a full beacon. How can I get tons of iron easily? I won't be using those automatic redstone farms.
Nothing requires iron for beacon pyramids, it is merely one of the possibilities. [The others are gold, emerald, and diamond.]
Note also "Several different block types can be mixed without affecting functionality."
A few farmers and a decent spread of crops may be a viable alternative if you want to do things manually....
Unless you already have large automated farms set up It is far faster to mine iron/gold than it is to farm emeralds; I collected 726 iron and 96 gold in 3 1/2 hours today (plus some ingots from chests. Note that you can mix minerals, so both iron and gold can be used); if you wanted to get the emeralds you need to make a beacon you'd have to trade some 20-30,000 items (e.g. 26,568 wheat at 18 wheat per emerald and 1,476 emeralds required, plus additional emeralds and other items needed to unlock trades; you'll also be spending a lot of time trading). Even over 7 hours that means you need to grow/trade upwards of one item per second, if not more.
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?
quote=TheMasterCaver
Unless you already have large automated farms set up It is far faster to mine iron/gold than it is to farm emeralds; I collected 726 iron and 96 gold in 3 1/2 hours today (plus some ingots from chests. Note that you can mix minerals, so both iron and gold can be used); if you wanted to get the emeralds you need to make a beacon you'd have to trade some 20-30,000 items (e.g. 26,568 wheat at 18 wheat per emerald and 1,476 emeralds required, plus additional emeralds and other items needed to unlock trades; you'll also be spending a lot of time trading). Even over 7 hours that means you need to grow/trade upwards of one item per second, if not more.
My understanding is that you have customized world generation in respect to caves which may make your productivity numbers higher than vanilla 1.12.2.
I see you are also aware of the quote I cited about mixing block types in a beacon; I was not suggesting using emeralds exclusively as I thought the citation made clear...
"Viable alternative" was not meant to imply faster and was actually directed at the OP in comparsion to the declined method of iron farming.
As crops will grow as long as the farm is in the entity loaded chucks, trading the crops that grew while one was mining would at minimum suppliment the mined minerals.
Minimum time zero to beacon via mining:
Your 3.5 hour take was 822 ore or ~55% of the needed 1476; this would mean ~6.28 hours to mine 1476 ore. [This is assuming you have already included (or corrected for) any time needed to repair tools, fetch torches, drop mined materials, etc.]
While I would assume your mining also generates a supply of coal sufficient to smelt the ores, smelting time ought to be added to the calculations. At 1476 minerals needed for a single beacon 4-level pyramid and 10 seconds per smelting process this would equate to ~4 hours (246 minutes) divided by the number of furnaces used. [This might be partly offset if the ore from early mining was smelted while later mining was in process.]
Making some fairly liberal assumptions (half the ore smelted while mining continues with no lose of time, fuel not an issue, 12 furnaces available, amounts mined evenly divisible by nine, ingot to block crafting time effectively nil)…
I get a minimal overal time from zero to 164 mineral blocks as ~6.5 hours with the player continually active and the only useful byproducts being coincidently mined blocks.
[You make no mention of your non-iron+gold take, but I am assuming it is non-zero.]
Minimum time zero to beacon via trading:
Calculating emerald production from trading under some fairly restrictive assumptions:
using only inputs requiring neither effective grinders (eg. rotten flesh, string) nor any manufacturing (wool requires shears, paper from cane, basic books from leather and paper, etc) and also disallowing non-easily resettable trades (eg. leather to leatherworker) leaves farmers. [I have treated raw chicken and pork as manufactured for these puposes.]
Taking a farmer with straight average trades:
20 wheat / 17 potatoes / 17 carrots / 10.5 pumpkins / 9.5 melons per emerald and assuming each trade can be used an average of 7 times before needing to be reset... [I do not have good data on this, but the 7 estimate seems approximately accurate if a bit low based on empirical observation.]
one cycle of trading with a single farmer would thus consume 140 wheat / 119 potatoes / 119 carrots / 73.5 pumpkins / 66.5 melons and generate 35 emeralds.
35 trades would mean only a 0.8^35 or approximately a ~0.04% [ 0.8^35 = ~0.0004056] chance (1 in ~2465) the farmer would not refresh trades.
1476 / 35 = 42 or one chance in 42 that the trades would not refresh once while getting the emeralds needed for a beacon.
Taking a test harvest (without fortune, but using a silk touch axe on the melons) from what I consider a midsized manual farm (132 wheat / 132 potatoes / 234 carrots / 135 pumpkins / 135 melons) yielded ~2 stacks wheat / ~3.5 stacks potatoes / ~6.25 stacks carrots / ~3 stacks pumpkins / ~3 stacks melons after replanting. [Note this involved harvesting pumpkins and melons both before and after the rest. ]
While this farm has not been optimized for supporting trade with a single average farmer, one growth cycle will support the following trades (with some residual produce): 6 wheat / 13 potato / 23 carrot / 18 pumpkin / 20 melon trades.
With some crop rebalancing it ought to be able to support 2 complete trade cycles (70 emeralds) per harvest.
At this rate it would require 21 harvests (assuming accumulating residual produce accounted the final 6 emeralds as well as any possible purchases required to reset the trades).
Assuming the farmer was 'close', and emerald to block crafting time was effectively nil, this would require ~21 hours zero to beacon.
If, however, the effect of the roughly 75% of this time that involves only waiting is taken into account, the actual player time drops to 5.25 hours with the balance being available for other activities within a radius to keep the farm loaded.
If some of the 15.75 hours waiting time is given to beacon production: eg. farming chickens and pork (using a secondary farm) to support butcher trades and/or cows and cane to support librarian trades – the zero to beacon time will drop.
Even if none of the waiting time is given to beacon production, it remains available for other activities such as tree farming or building.
Conclusions:
Without any automation, caving likely represents the fastest route from zero to beacon in terms of RL clock hours.
Without any automation, trading (limited to crops for emeralds with farmers) likely represents more RL clock hours but less active playing time to go zero to beacon.
Optimal strategy thus depends (assuming one declines to mix the two techniques) on either the metric choosen to measure required time or ones preferred playstyle.
With automation, the balance shifts toward trading with greater degrees of automation making trading increasingly favorable as a strategy.
I agree with the automated farms. Thanks for the tips. I guess I'll go on a huge mining adventure next time I play Minecraft.
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC21Z2rupws5IulGQMxB1Plg
I think I'll use you and TheMasterCaver's ideas together. Trade my crops for emeralds, which I already frequently do, and then go mining for iron or gold.
Thank you for the tips everyone!
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC21Z2rupws5IulGQMxB1Plg
Sure, like my first world was not created in vanilla... try creating a world with the seed "-123775873255737467" in 1.6.4 and see if you don't get this:
A few Minutor renderings of some of the largest cave systems that I've found, with the coordinates shown at the bottom:
A seeds website even claims that the seed for my world has the "biggest cave ever", which likely came from a thread mentioning the cave system (which is not even close to the largest cave system I've found, if still the densest for its size): https://minecraft-seeds.net/seed/1.6-1.6.2/123775873255737467/
My ore collection rate has been nearly identical in my various modded worlds - all that really matters is how quickly I can explore caves and the density of ore pockets, which are the same in my modded worlds as in vanilla 1.6.4 (which as I mentioned is less than in more recent versions; see this thread). In fact, the largest cave system I've ever explored (by volume) in a modded world yielded less ore and less ore over time than a complex of mineshafts with only 1/4 the volume in vanilla; considerably more torches were also needed to light it up (volume increases as the cube of the radius while surface area is only the square, so bigger caves expose less area per unit of volume). Plus, in one such cave alone I killed more than 600 mobs which came in waves which would be all but impossible to defeat in 1.9 or later (in my last modded world I averaged about 50% more mobs killed per session, in part because of changes to mob spawning; by contrast, I've seen less since 1.9, which significantly reduced the sight range of zombies (by far the most common mob I encounter in 1,.6.4; they even cause lag without a patch I modded in) and lowered the mob cap from 79 to 70 due to fixing an incorrect calculation (more mobs = more fun though, if talking longer to collect resources).
Also, while 1.7 reduced the number of caves this is mostly offset by a reduction in the density of cave systems (less overlapping caves means each individual cave contributes more to the volume) and more than offset by the increase in ores, and when I played a bit in newer version just to compare caving (with unmodified cave generation) I actually collected far more ores than I do in 1,6,4; in fact, one run averaged 1,600 ore per hour - double my (long term) average rate in 1.6.4!
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?
Personally I think your grindy repetitive play-style sounds incredibly boring. What fun is it to do only one thing in the game, caving for hours and hours and hours, and how is your huge cache of unused resources any different from farm generated Creative mode access to resources in Survival? I really don't understand why you think everyone should play the game YOUR way, and what you call progress I call stagnation.
Progress to me is mastering the environment and reducing the need to grind for resources. Progress is building advanced machines and inventing new things to help me survive, and to give me more time to create and build even more interesting things. Progress is what lead us to the invention of computers, and the game Minecraft that we love playing.
I actually worked to get those resources - spending some 3,000 hours of my own time - as opposed to what? 3 hours to build an iron farm that requires zero additional investment? Also, I don't even cave to get resources - I branch-mine for the resources that I need when I start out, otherwise they are simply a byproduct of caving for fun which just does happen to meet all of my needs, including XP needs; I reached level 74 yesterday - 10175 XP just from mining ores and killing mobs, before spending 31 levels to repair my pickaxe, which means I spent 10 times the XP than if I had only 31 levels; if I really did it for the resources I'd use Fortune to double what I get.
Not to mention that a major reason why I don't play in newer versions is because Mojang thought it would be fun to make caves much less interesting, in a game that focuses around mining (after all, it is in the name of the game and the earliest versions were even called "Cave Game"); if only they would see what I've done in my mods and add them to the game, or at least some customization options, but oh well.
Also, how many people can claim to have set a world record (well, not official but I have looked around and have not found anybody else who has come even close - and I am not the only one with my playstyle, or at least who spends a lot of time mining)? You probably think that Kurt's Far Lands or Bust series (officially recognized by Guinness) is just as boring since about all they do is walk in one direction but to them it is a major accomplishment to actually get there by walking.
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?
Define ‘tons’ and ‘easily’. A basic iron farm where you got a 16*16*6 double decker water funnel with village around it going to a lava blade and hoppered chests is fairly basic and will yield 40-60 iron per hour while you are around just doing stuff. And no need to smelt. You can just leave the game running while you sleep/at work and you will have the needed amount soon enough.
Heavy duty branch mining at sub-16 level is more labor intensive, but can yield a lot more iron (and other resources) a great deal faster, especially once you have diamond tools with E5/F3(ST)/U3/M.
I personally just leave my auto farms running while I mine underground.