I'm wondering what people's opinions are in terms of what to make minepicks out of for maximum efficiency. Back when I started I used stone, then i realized with iron you almost always get more than 3 iron from one iron pick. Now with enchanting I don't see any reason not to use diamond picks, with unbreakable they last an insane amount of time I think I got 10-12 diamonds with my last one. Thoughts?
Also what depth do you mine at? I make tunnels at bedrock and space them so each tunnel has two blocks between them.
I like to use Iron picks (since iron is very easy to get tons of) until I get a really good efficiency/unbreaking diamond pickaxe. Combined with another diamond pickaxe with Fortune III, you wont run out of diamonds EVER. In fact, in my world I have like 6 blocks of diamond and 15 diamonds (that is over a stack of diamonds). I just don't waste them on armor, even though I have a complete diamond set with enchantments to fight Wither and Enderdragon...
BTW, sometimes I do the same mining that you do (brach mining), but it's actually to get cobblestone, since it's not very efficient to get diamonds. Going cave hunting near lava pools is the best way to get diamonds. Just make sure you have good iron set and a water bucket to make lava into obsidian.
Don't be afraid of dying. Fear is what kills you. My world is Hardcore and when I started it I was like "lol f*** this I'll probably just die even before I get diamonds". But then I actually managed to survive thanks to the iron armor set... seriously, if you have an iron armor set, and never fall in lava, and don't do stupid things like jumping into a monster spawner... you are going to survive. (yesterday I even managed to successfully kill 3 cave spider spawners in a mineshaft... my hertbeat was probably over 130, lol).
All that is to convince you to not go branch-mining. Real minecrafters that have a lust for diamonds go cave hunting with fortune III diamond picks.
Stone picks with level 1 enchant (giving you Efficiency I most of the time). Bring along a fortune III iron pick for the good stuff. If stone is too slow for you, use a beacon instead of wasting your iron, diamonds, or emeralds on fancy picks.
I usually mine at y<14. Take a peek at some ore distribution charts to see why.
Stone picks with level 1 enchant (giving you Efficiency I most of the time). Bring along a fortune III iron pick for the good stuff. If stone is too slow for you, use a beacon instead of wasting your iron, diamonds, or emeralds on fancy picks.
I usually mine at y<14. Take a peek at some ore distribution charts to see why.
>use a beacon
First of all, you need 34 blocks of iron/gold/diamond/emerald to get the haste buff for the beacon. Second, every time you get out of range, you have to go back and pick up the beacon and the 34 base blocks, then replace them. Tell me that's faster than just using stone tools.
>emeralds on fancy picks
Can't make tools with emeralds. DERP.
---
Ever since I got an iron farm working, I have more iron than I know what to do with, so I just make everything out of iron.
Also, I can't remember the last time I went mining. Branch mining is tedious and it's damn obnoxious spending 10 minutes just trying to find my way out of a cave. Instead, I built a villager trading machine and I trade for all my diamond gear. I use iron tools for pretty much everything, and I have a couple of silk touch and fortune diamond picks that I keep on hand in case I need them for anything. As for gear, I have a set of diamond armor that I bought from a villager and it hasn't broken yet. I think once it breaks, I'll switch back to iron since I could build a house out of iron blocks.
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Quote from Albert Einstein »
There are two things that are infinite: the Universe and Human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the Universe.
First of all, you need 34 blocks of iron/gold/diamond/emerald to get the haste buff for the beacon. Second, every time you get out of range, you have to go back and pick up the beacon and the 34 base blocks, then replace them. Tell me that's faster than just using stone tools.
Learn math then speak. It is faster, since the 9x9 beacon requires 164 iron blocks and gives you a 81x81x81 zone of effectiveness (531,441 blocks). Even if you are only mining out a small fraction of that, the time spent moving it is negligible compared to the 40% speed boost. It is trivial to get 164 iron blocks if you know anything about the game.
BTW, sometimes I do the same mining that you do (brach mining), but it's actually to get cobblestone, since it's not very efficient to get diamonds. Going cave hunting near lava pools is the best way to get diamonds.
Caving to get diamonds isn't even close to what you can get from branch mining. Either you're not doing it right or you're just one of those people that doesn't like the somewhat boring aspect of branch mining. Many of the exposed diamond deposits found when caving are missing blocks because when the caves generated they destroyed some of them.
And OP I do 3 blocks between branches. Very unlikely that an ore deposit is going to be perfectly flat to hide in the middle and not worth the extra branches you would have to dig to avoid that rare possibility.
Learn math then speak. It is faster, since the 9x9 beacon requires 164 iron blocks and gives you a 81x81x81 zone of effectiveness (531,441 blocks). Even if you are only mining out a small fraction of that, the time spent moving it is negligible compared to the 40% speed boost. It is trivial to get 164 iron blocks if you know anything about the game.
I do know anything about the game, so I know that iron is easy to get. I also know that, for mining stone, iron pickaxes are 33% faster than stone pickaxes (0.4s for iron versus 0.6s for stone). It also takes 1.9 seconds for a stone pick to break an iron block. Breaking even 34 of these means you take an extra minute to pick up your beacon (less if you use efficiency).
The only reason to use stone picks is if you don't have enough iron. With 34 blocks of iron, you could make 102 iron picks.
I do know anything about the game, so I know that iron is easy to get. I also know that, for mining stone, iron pickaxes are 33% faster than stone pickaxes (0.4s for iron versus 0.6s for stone). It also takes 1.9 seconds for a stone pick to break an iron block. Breaking even 34 of these means you take an extra minute to pick up your beacon (less if you use efficiency).
The only reason to use stone picks is if you don't have enough iron. With 34 blocks of iron, you could make 102 iron picks.
Assume it takes 1.8 seconds for an efficiency I stone pick to break an iron block, and assume you are using a 164-block beacon, since that is most sensible. Then the pickup time for that beacon is 1.8*164=4.92 minutes. Let's call it 5 minutes for buffer.
Now make a conservative estimate and assume you will mine about 100,000 of the 500,000-odd blocks within the area of effect of the beacon. Assume they are all stone. Applying the 40% speed boost from the beacon to unenchanted stone picks,
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
I just play the one survival world, and these days I'm pretty well-established so I just trade meat and charcoal, usually, for emeralds and then buy diamond tools with the emeralds. I'll enchant them, and use 'em till they break, or if I get certain combinations I'll keep them around forever, repairing them with fresh tools (not raw diamonds -- it's cheaper, in levels, but levels are renewable, as are the completed tools, while raw diamonds are not) on an anvil. I make sure to rename them the first time so the cost doesn't go up. I had one pick, for example, with Efficiency IV, and another with Eff. IV and Unbreaking III. I merged these two together (Eff. V, Unb. III), called them "Stonebreaker," and now instead of rolling the dice every time and getting something random for 30 levels (and a new diamond pick), instead I just spend 3 extra levels (33 levels total, and still the new pick) and know exactly what I'm getting, which I could never get from the enchanting table anyway, at level V.
When I first started, or when I occasionally do begin a new world, I've never had the need to go back to stone tools after upgrading to iron, unless I was caught unprepared away from home without any spare ingots on me. Before I built a villager trading machine, I used almost exclusively iron tools because I didn't want to "waste" my diamonds on things like everyday digging.
I only use diamond tools, it's very easy to get more when I need them and since they mine quicker it saves me time. And with fortune III I'm able to get around 60 an hour while mining. If I just need to collect cobblestone/stone I can use an efficiency V diamond pick along with my beacon and I can instantly mine stone.
I use iron, is what I usually use. But when I find diamond, I always use diamond pick. I always enchant it to, since you now get XP from mining ores it makes it much easier to enchant it at a good enchantment.
I use stone and iron until I can enchant a diamond pick and get fortune. Then I use that to mine the diamonds.
Later, I enchant picks until I manage to secure an efficiency IV Unbreaking III diamond pick. I rename this pick in the anvil, which prevents the repair cost from rising over time. This means that I can literally keep that digging pickaxe FOREVER, as long as it isn't dropped into lava. I reassigned my drop key to i long ago to avoid things like that. Every time the pick gets low, back to the anvil and repair.
For the actual mining, once I have my two amazing picks, I pick a spot and dig a roughly ten-block diameter pit all the way to bedrock. I dig out a square room for my mining base and then begin branch mining around the circumference, three blocks between branches, using Zisteau's Mindcrack technique. The second level of branches go on top of those spaces, meaning that I expose literally every ore block there is. Use the Fortune III on everything but iron and gold, and if you mine under an extreme hills biome, you can actually amass a respectable emerald stock without trading at all. Once the walls of the base are all fully mined, I pick a corner and extend that wall. The result, once all the walls are extended, is something like a pinwheel.
This design can theoretically be expanded forever, but once you clean out a relatively small area you can be set with over two stacks of diamonds and then you will only really ever go branch mining again to get other things like iron, gold, or redstone.
People underestimate the value of the anvil. ALWAYS rename your good tools, and do it early on. I have been using the same set of tools and weapons for about three months, and now that I have an xp farm set up, I can use my enormous diamond supply to keep them alive. I don't forsee needing to replace them anytime soon.
Assume it takes 1.8 seconds for an efficiency I stone pick to break an iron block, and assume you are using a 164-block beacon, since that is most sensible. Then the pickup time for that beacon is 1.8*164=4.92 minutes. Let's call it 5 minutes for buffer.
Now make a conservative estimate and assume you will mine about 100,000 of the 500,000-odd blocks within the area of effect of the beacon. Assume they are all stone. Applying the 40% speed boost from the beacon to unenchanted stone picks,
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
Assume it takes 1.8 seconds for an efficiency I stone pick to break an iron block, and assume you are using a 164-block beacon, since that is most sensible. Then the pickup time for that beacon is 1.8*164=4.92 minutes. Let's call it 5 minutes for buffer.
Now make a conservative estimate and assume you will mine about 100,000 of the 500,000-odd blocks within the area of effect of the beacon. Assume they are all stone. Applying the 40% speed boost from the beacon to unenchanted stone picks,
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
We're talking mining here. You're not going to be mining even a fifth of the blocks within range of the beacon. It's safe to assume that you aren't going to be mining above y=16. Far less than 100 000 blocks.
Also, your calculation is comparing haste stone tools to normal stone tools is a bit misleading. You should be comparing it to iron tools:
Iron pick = 0.4 seconds per block
Stone pick with haste = (0.6 seconds per block)/1.4 = 0.42 seconds per block
I'd still rather use all the beacon blocks for iron picks, thanks.
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
Yes I am. Still don't see what that has to do with getting emerald tools in vanilla, though...
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Quote from Albert Einstein »
There are two things that are infinite: the Universe and Human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the Universe.
Assume it takes 1.8 seconds for an efficiency I stone pick to break an iron block, and assume you are using a 164-block beacon, since that is most sensible. Then the pickup time for that beacon is 1.8*164=4.92 minutes. Let's call it 5 minutes for buffer.
Now make a conservative estimate and assume you will mine about 100,000 of the 500,000-odd blocks within the area of effect of the beacon. Assume they are all stone. Applying the 40% speed boost from the beacon to unenchanted stone picks,
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
You're comparing haste stone tools to normal stone tools. Compare it to iron tools instead. That's my argument.
Iron pick = 0.4 seconds per block
Stone pick with haste = 0.6 seconds per block / 1.4 = 0.42 seconds per block.
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
Yes I am aware of that. Not sure what that has to do with getting emerald tools in vanilla, though...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Albert Einstein »
There are two things that are infinite: the Universe and Human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the Universe.
If you spend the iron on picks, you can't get it back. If you use stone picks with a beacon, you don't actually lose iron. Do it the idiot way if you want. You are a complete moron and I am done trying to help you.
If you spend the iron on picks, you can't get it back. If you use stone picks with a beacon, you don't actually lose iron. Do it the idiot way if you want. You are a complete moron and I am done trying to help you.
It's not that hard to make an iron farm.....
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Quote from Albert Einstein »
There are two things that are infinite: the Universe and Human stupidity. And I'm not so sure about the Universe.
Aside from the ing match above me I have some input for you OP.
I find that, depending on what depth I am digging at and if I'm new to the world, I would use iron tools all the time. Stone may be great and all that jazz for being common as heck, it just takes so long to do any sort of mining large scale.
Now some people are saying having a beacon. Sure having a beacon would be great. Infact my current project is doing a 4 beacon set up for my new branch mine so I can go out 160 x 160 blocks with some effect drop off at teh edges/corners. However to get a nether start, wither skele heads andwhat have you, you need soem pretty good gear, atleast iron armor for the skelies and unless you cheese the wither, some good gear, preferably diamond.
What I would suggest is get your dirst 3 diamonds, make a diamond pick and enchant it at level 30 before you use it to hope you get a good enchant combo.
I dig my branch mines at y:15 / 12 / 9. I sometimes go higher if I'm not interested in diamonds but gold/iron for blocks for my beacons.
Also what depth do you mine at? I make tunnels at bedrock and space them so each tunnel has two blocks between them.
BTW, sometimes I do the same mining that you do (brach mining), but it's actually to get cobblestone, since it's not very efficient to get diamonds. Going cave hunting near lava pools is the best way to get diamonds. Just make sure you have good iron set and a water bucket to make lava into obsidian.
Don't be afraid of dying. Fear is what kills you. My world is Hardcore and when I started it I was like "lol f*** this I'll probably just die even before I get diamonds". But then I actually managed to survive thanks to the iron armor set... seriously, if you have an iron armor set, and never fall in lava, and don't do stupid things like jumping into a monster spawner... you are going to survive. (yesterday I even managed to successfully kill 3 cave spider spawners in a mineshaft... my hertbeat was probably over 130, lol).
All that is to convince you to not go branch-mining. Real minecrafters that have a lust for diamonds go cave hunting with fortune III diamond picks.
Cheers!
I usually mine at y<14. Take a peek at some ore distribution charts to see why.
>use a beacon
First of all, you need 34 blocks of iron/gold/diamond/emerald to get the haste buff for the beacon. Second, every time you get out of range, you have to go back and pick up the beacon and the 34 base blocks, then replace them. Tell me that's faster than just using stone tools.
>emeralds on fancy picks
Can't make tools with emeralds. DERP.
---
Ever since I got an iron farm working, I have more iron than I know what to do with, so I just make everything out of iron.
Also, I can't remember the last time I went mining. Branch mining is tedious and it's damn obnoxious spending 10 minutes just trying to find my way out of a cave. Instead, I built a villager trading machine and I trade for all my diamond gear. I use iron tools for pretty much everything, and I have a couple of silk touch and fortune diamond picks that I keep on hand in case I need them for anything. As for gear, I have a set of diamond armor that I bought from a villager and it hasn't broken yet. I think once it breaks, I'll switch back to iron since I could build a house out of iron blocks.
Learn math then speak. It is faster, since the 9x9 beacon requires 164 iron blocks and gives you a 81x81x81 zone of effectiveness (531,441 blocks). Even if you are only mining out a small fraction of that, the time spent moving it is negligible compared to the 40% speed boost. It is trivial to get 164 iron blocks if you know anything about the game.
See below, fool
Caving to get diamonds isn't even close to what you can get from branch mining. Either you're not doing it right or you're just one of those people that doesn't like the somewhat boring aspect of branch mining. Many of the exposed diamond deposits found when caving are missing blocks because when the caves generated they destroyed some of them.
And OP I do 3 blocks between branches. Very unlikely that an ore deposit is going to be perfectly flat to hide in the middle and not worth the extra branches you would have to dig to avoid that rare possibility.
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..
I do know anything about the game, so I know that iron is easy to get. I also know that, for mining stone, iron pickaxes are 33% faster than stone pickaxes (0.4s for iron versus 0.6s for stone). It also takes 1.9 seconds for a stone pick to break an iron block. Breaking even 34 of these means you take an extra minute to pick up your beacon (less if you use efficiency).
The only reason to use stone picks is if you don't have enough iron. With 34 blocks of iron, you could make 102 iron picks.
>implying I use mods
Assume it takes 1.8 seconds for an efficiency I stone pick to break an iron block, and assume you are using a 164-block beacon, since that is most sensible. Then the pickup time for that beacon is 1.8*164=4.92 minutes. Let's call it 5 minutes for buffer.
Now make a conservative estimate and assume you will mine about 100,000 of the 500,000-odd blocks within the area of effect of the beacon. Assume they are all stone. Applying the 40% speed boost from the beacon to unenchanted stone picks,
(0.6s/block) * (100,000 blocks) * (1 - 1/1.4) = 17,143 seconds = 4.76 hours saved
Are you feeling stupid yet?
Excuse me? Are you 9? Below where I typed that, I quoted you, where you said yourself you bought diamond armor from villagers. Are you not aware you can also buy diamond tools from villagers?
When I first started, or when I occasionally do begin a new world, I've never had the need to go back to stone tools after upgrading to iron, unless I was caught unprepared away from home without any spare ingots on me. Before I built a villager trading machine, I used almost exclusively iron tools because I didn't want to "waste" my diamonds on things like everyday digging.
Village Mechanics: A not-so-brief guide - Update 2017! Now with 1.8 breeding mechanics! Long-overdue trading info, coming soon!
You think magic isn't real? Consider this: for every person, there is a sentence -- a series of words -- which has the power to destroy them.
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Later, I enchant picks until I manage to secure an efficiency IV Unbreaking III diamond pick. I rename this pick in the anvil, which prevents the repair cost from rising over time. This means that I can literally keep that digging pickaxe FOREVER, as long as it isn't dropped into lava. I reassigned my drop key to i long ago to avoid things like that. Every time the pick gets low, back to the anvil and repair.
For the actual mining, once I have my two amazing picks, I pick a spot and dig a roughly ten-block diameter pit all the way to bedrock. I dig out a square room for my mining base and then begin branch mining around the circumference, three blocks between branches, using Zisteau's Mindcrack technique. The second level of branches go on top of those spaces, meaning that I expose literally every ore block there is. Use the Fortune III on everything but iron and gold, and if you mine under an extreme hills biome, you can actually amass a respectable emerald stock without trading at all. Once the walls of the base are all fully mined, I pick a corner and extend that wall. The result, once all the walls are extended, is something like a pinwheel.
This design can theoretically be expanded forever, but once you clean out a relatively small area you can be set with over two stacks of diamonds and then you will only really ever go branch mining again to get other things like iron, gold, or redstone.
People underestimate the value of the anvil. ALWAYS rename your good tools, and do it early on. I have been using the same set of tools and weapons for about three months, and now that I have an xp farm set up, I can use my enormous diamond supply to keep them alive. I don't forsee needing to replace them anytime soon.
We're talking mining here. You're not going to be mining even a fifth of the blocks within range of the beacon. It's safe to assume that you aren't going to be mining above y=16. Far less than 100 000 blocks.
Also, your calculation is comparing haste stone tools to normal stone tools is a bit misleading. You should be comparing it to iron tools:
Iron pick = 0.4 seconds per block
Stone pick with haste = (0.6 seconds per block)/1.4 = 0.42 seconds per block
I'd still rather use all the beacon blocks for iron picks, thanks.
Yes I am. Still don't see what that has to do with getting emerald tools in vanilla, though...
You're comparing haste stone tools to normal stone tools. Compare it to iron tools instead. That's my argument.
Iron pick = 0.4 seconds per block
Stone pick with haste = 0.6 seconds per block / 1.4 = 0.42 seconds per block.
I'm not feeling stupid in the slightest.
Yes I am aware of that. Not sure what that has to do with getting emerald tools in vanilla, though...
If you spend the iron on picks, you can't get it back. If you use stone picks with a beacon, you don't actually lose iron. Do it the idiot way if you want. You are a complete moron and I am done trying to help you.
It's not that hard to make an iron farm.....
I find that, depending on what depth I am digging at and if I'm new to the world, I would use iron tools all the time. Stone may be great and all that jazz for being common as heck, it just takes so long to do any sort of mining large scale.
Now some people are saying having a beacon. Sure having a beacon would be great. Infact my current project is doing a 4 beacon set up for my new branch mine so I can go out 160 x 160 blocks with some effect drop off at teh edges/corners. However to get a nether start, wither skele heads andwhat have you, you need soem pretty good gear, atleast iron armor for the skelies and unless you cheese the wither, some good gear, preferably diamond.
What I would suggest is get your dirst 3 diamonds, make a diamond pick and enchant it at level 30 before you use it to hope you get a good enchant combo.
I dig my branch mines at y:15 / 12 / 9. I sometimes go higher if I'm not interested in diamonds but gold/iron for blocks for my beacons.
I knew that....DERP