This is a "circular room" cave, which can be found everywhere; there is a 25% chance per iteration of the cave generator that one will be added at the start of a tunnel, with 0-3 more tunnels added for a total of 1-4 tunnels leading from it. Here are maps showing all caves and circular rooms only (using a 1.6.4 seed; cave systems in 1.7+ are much less dense with 77% as many caves overall but the way rooms and tunnels generate was not changed):
Circular formations can also occur at the end of larger tunnels which end as they are going downwards (most tunnels widen until they branch into two smaller tunnels; they are made up of a string of semi-spherical sections which are flattened on the bottom and the sudden end of the main tunnel causes it to take on a teardrop shape); for example, a while ago I found this large cave which ended at a circular lava pool:
Of note, this cave is the largest single cave that I've found in a vanilla Survival world, with a total area of around 120,000 chunks (about 5543x5543 blocks) explored, giving you an idea of how rare this is (it can be found at 2851 27 1678 in the seed "-123775873255737467" in 1.6.4. Also notable in this seed is a cave system around -800, -1050 which is far denser than anything that can ever possibly generate in 1.7+; it appears as a solid mass even when only looking at the lowest layers).
I've found a far larger cave than that under and inside a mountain, it had basically hollowed the interior out. Never bothered to save the seed though as I didn't realize it was rare.
I've found rooms like this before, just your average obsidian mine, nothing special.
Actually this is the ideal obsidian mine since as you say the lava is one block deep, meaning it's easy to get the obsidian without destroying it in lava.
Other lava pools are not so ideal for mining obsidian however, they can either be deeper lava or be in large dark caves or be in a ravine
where a Slime could potentially fall off an upper level and push you in, killing you.
Ravines have the worst lava pits imo,
obvious death traps to any unfortunate soul who plummets from the top without armour,
but even being at the bottom of the ravine next to them can be a huge risk.
I've found rooms like this before, just your average obsidian mine, nothing special.
Actually this is the ideal obsidian mine since as you say the lava is one block deep, meaning it's easy to get the obsidian without destroying it in lava.
Other lava pools are not so ideal for mining obsidian however, they can either be deeper lava or be in large dark caves or be in a ravine
where a Slime could potentially fall off an upper level and push you in, killing you.
Ravines have the worst lava pits imo,
obvious death traps to any unfortunate soul who plummets from the top without armour,
but even being at the bottom of the ravine next to them can be a huge risk.
This is why you bring a water bucket and use it on any lava before you even have a chance of falling in; when I explore ravines I get up to the highest ledges and pour water down the side as I go along them; likewise, when I explore extremely dense cave systems I pour water down onto any lava I see below (in 1.6.4 cave systems can be so dense you can have 30-40+ block drops just from intersecting caves - one cave even had sunlight all the way down at y=11). In my first world I've converted over a million lava into obsidian; you can easily tell where I've been because there is almost no exposed lava left (mostly isolated caves and the lava pools which occur at any altitude):
This was taken while I was exploring a massive ravine in TMCWv4, note the strip of obsidian along the side I'm going along; you certainly want to take more care while exploring these, which can even go all the way from above sea level to lava level (as can ravines in Bedrock, but not Java, for whatever reason; IDK about 1.18 but I assume they made ravines larger, if not, then why did they even make the ground deeper? My triple-height terrain mod even has ravines up to 200 blocks deep - lethal regardless of what protection you have):
Likewise, I first explored around the edge of this gigantic lava lake before completely flooding it out (some people will actually mine around lava pools instead of simply converting them into obsidian, which costs far more time and tool durability; sure, I spend some time and resources crafting and placing torches but it can be done much faster and there is plenty of coal):
Some people don't want to do this because they fear it destroys a non-renewable resource but less than 10% of the lava in the world has been converted into obsidian - leaving enough to smelt more than a billion items (even I have smelted less than a million, 1/1000th of this); even a single large cave or ravine can have several thousand lava blocks; in fact, only coal is more common than lava:
Obviously, I also wear good armor while caving, in fact, I don't even think of caving until the "end-game", prior to then I obtain the resources that I need by branch-mining, which is a dozen times more time and area efficient when it comes to diamonds.
This is why you bring a water bucket and use it on any lava before you even have a chance of falling in; when I explore ravines I get up to the highest ledges and pour water down the side as I go along them; likewise, when I explore extremely dense cave systems I pour water down onto any lava I see below (in 1.6.4 cave systems can be so dense you can have 30-40+ block drops just from intersecting caves - one cave even had sunlight all the way down at y=11). In my first world I've converted over a million lava into obsidian; you can easily tell where I've been because there is almost no exposed lava left (mostly isolated caves and the lava pools which occur at any altitude):
This was taken while I was exploring a massive ravine in TMCWv4, note the strip of obsidian along the side I'm going along; you certainly want to take more care while exploring these, which can even go all the way from above sea level to lava level (as can ravines in Bedrock, but not Java, for whatever reason; IDK about 1.18 but I assume they made ravines larger, if not, then why did they even make the ground deeper? My triple-height terrain mod even has ravines up to 200 blocks deep - lethal regardless of what protection you have):
Likewise, I first explored around the edge of this gigantic lava lake before completely flooding it out (some people will actually mine around lava pools instead of simply converting them into obsidian, which costs far more time and tool durability; sure, I spend some time and resources crafting and placing torches but it can be done much faster and there is plenty of coal):
Some people don't want to do this because they fear it destroys a non-renewable resource but less than 10% of the lava in the world has been converted into obsidian - leaving enough to smelt more than a billion items (even I have smelted less than a million, 1/1000th of this); even a single large cave or ravine can have several thousand lava blocks; in fact, only coal is more common than lava:
Obviously, I also wear good armor while caving, in fact, I don't even think of caving until the "end-game", prior to then I obtain the resources that I need by branch-mining, which is a dozen times more time and area efficient when it comes to diamonds.
I wouldn't consider lengthy mining sessions to be practical without armour either, in fact not wearing armour while doing a mining session that is several hours long is a foolish thing to do in my honest opinion because dying in lava would mean wasted resources, especially rare ones like Silk Touched diamond and emerald ore. Even if you water the lava pools down with a water bucket you've still got to keep a sharp eye out for Creepers and Witches, and if you're next to pitfalls which you would be half away to the bottom of a ravine, a Skeleton could ruin 50 or goodness knows how many hours worth of work, without Feather Falling you're presumably dead because you don't have enough buffs to your stats to protect you from the fall damage.
And I reiterate, although I'm sure you understand I want to make sure others here do too, it's not the larger cave systems I have a problem with in 1.18, in fact the bigger and darker caves with stalactites and stalagmites are an interesting challenge in my opinion because they facilitate more hostile mob spawning which is a huge plus as far as survival goes, and it introduces a new hazard which means players need to be more careful.
The negative is the massively reduced ore generation which makes a long known staple of the game a real pain in the rear,
I thought the game was supposed to be about mining? but here we have Mojang punishing players for actually mining for their resources
instead of relying on their AFK farms. All stupid decisions like this are going to do is encourage people like us to play older versions on Java edition, and other people to mod the game.
See, I prefer to use lava as a tool and weapon in big caves. I pour it off the top of areas to light up the center and reduce mob spawning as well as kill any mobs happening to be in contact. If there are any lava-vulnerable structures or plant-life, they can be given away by light emitted by plants/torches and turning up brightness.
I'm not worried about running out of lava but that the rest is harder to access (mostly under obsidian). Anyway 1.17 makes lava renewable so I care less now. Still easier to get it from a pool than the nether or a cauldron drip though. That's on par with not mining coal with fortune when available because withr skeletons exist, there's efficiency and you never can unmine ore to get fortune used on it.
As for armour and mining...I don't think strip mining is all that efficient in my experience. It's also boring and I get lost in my own mines more easily than in caves. I prefer to mine to the bottom and explore lava-level smaller caves. If you go through caves fast, it's more efficient many times. before 1.18, anyway. (To be fair, caves are scary though).
As for armour and mining...I don't think strip mining is all that efficient in my experience. It's also boring and I get lost in my own mines more easily than in caves. I prefer to mine to the bottom and explore lava-level smaller caves. If you go through caves fast, it's more efficient many times. before 1.18, anyway. (To be fair, caves are scary though).
Not in my case when it comes to diamonds:
Considering that I play for an average of 3.6 hours per day that's not much at all, as little as 3 diamond ore per hour (though October is a bit low since I spent a couple days on building a base and railway extension, and regional variances in caves/mineshafts affect the distribution of exposed ores; either way, 3-4 per hour is typical) - that's 8 hours just to get a full set of armor (4 with Fortune) - absolutely awful when I can easily find that much within half an hour of branch-mining, which is one reason why I do it at the start of a new world; caving may be more efficient when it comes to coal and iron, which are more than 90% of all the ores I find, but my needs for those fall far short of what I can find (I use barely any iron at all late game, only for the occasional anvil, and 115 anvils crafted in over 4300 hours of playtime isn't much).
By contrast, you can easily find half a stack of diamond ore per hour of branch-mining, even a stack if the Wiki's claim of 1.7% of all mined blocks being diamond ore is accurate, based on a tunnel spacing of at least 6 blocks between tunnel (most players use less; a spacing of 2 blocks achieves just 1/3 of this efficiency while the 3 blocks that I use is about half), and mining at the rate of one block per second (3600 per hour * 1.7% = 61.2), which is easily achievable as even stone pickaxes take less than a second to mine stone (even when caving I average more than a thousand blocks mined per hour despite most of the time not spent on actually mining).
Mind you, I do explore literally everything underground that is interconnected in some way, not just the deepest layers, so the ores I collect reflect this, and the number of mobs I encounter is much higher than what you'd experience if you did this due to the fact that lighting up caves, which I do very thoroughly, concentrates them in the remaining dark areas (I once had somebody tell me that there weren't that many mobs in caves when playing on my mod, whereas I regularly kill 400+ per session, even nearly a thousand in one case, and 600+ in a single giant cave. I doubt that 1.18 will be like this if the mob cap is still 70 as it is now distributed over twice the volume; of course, the volume/surface area of caves matters more, where TMCW has about twice the volume as vanilla 1.6.4, which is in turn about 33% higher than 1.7-1.17 (surface area in TMCW is only about 33% higher than vanilla 1.6.4 based on exposed ore per chunk; this increase in exposed ore does not translate to increased mining rates though, which are very similar to vanilla).
I had just found this cool lava pool 1 block deep and in a perfect circle formation
What other things have you found?
This is a "circular room" cave, which can be found everywhere; there is a 25% chance per iteration of the cave generator that one will be added at the start of a tunnel, with 0-3 more tunnels added for a total of 1-4 tunnels leading from it. Here are maps showing all caves and circular rooms only (using a 1.6.4 seed; cave systems in 1.7+ are much less dense with 77% as many caves overall but the way rooms and tunnels generate was not changed):
Circular formations can also occur at the end of larger tunnels which end as they are going downwards (most tunnels widen until they branch into two smaller tunnels; they are made up of a string of semi-spherical sections which are flattened on the bottom and the sudden end of the main tunnel causes it to take on a teardrop shape); for example, a while ago I found this large cave which ended at a circular lava pool:
Of note, this cave is the largest single cave that I've found in a vanilla Survival world, with a total area of around 120,000 chunks (about 5543x5543 blocks) explored, giving you an idea of how rare this is (it can be found at 2851 27 1678 in the seed "-123775873255737467" in 1.6.4. Also notable in this seed is a cave system around -800, -1050 which is far denser than anything that can ever possibly generate in 1.7+; it appears as a solid mass even when only looking at the lowest layers).
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've found a far larger cave than that under and inside a mountain, it had basically hollowed the interior out. Never bothered to save the seed though as I didn't realize it was rare.
I've found rooms like this before, just your average obsidian mine, nothing special.
Actually this is the ideal obsidian mine since as you say the lava is one block deep, meaning it's easy to get the obsidian without destroying it in lava.
Other lava pools are not so ideal for mining obsidian however, they can either be deeper lava or be in large dark caves or be in a ravine
where a Slime could potentially fall off an upper level and push you in, killing you.
Ravines have the worst lava pits imo,
obvious death traps to any unfortunate soul who plummets from the top without armour,
but even being at the bottom of the ravine next to them can be a huge risk.
This is why you bring a water bucket and use it on any lava before you even have a chance of falling in; when I explore ravines I get up to the highest ledges and pour water down the side as I go along them; likewise, when I explore extremely dense cave systems I pour water down onto any lava I see below (in 1.6.4 cave systems can be so dense you can have 30-40+ block drops just from intersecting caves - one cave even had sunlight all the way down at y=11). In my first world I've converted over a million lava into obsidian; you can easily tell where I've been because there is almost no exposed lava left (mostly isolated caves and the lava pools which occur at any altitude):
This was taken while I was exploring a massive ravine in TMCWv4, note the strip of obsidian along the side I'm going along; you certainly want to take more care while exploring these, which can even go all the way from above sea level to lava level (as can ravines in Bedrock, but not Java, for whatever reason; IDK about 1.18 but I assume they made ravines larger, if not, then why did they even make the ground deeper? My triple-height terrain mod even has ravines up to 200 blocks deep - lethal regardless of what protection you have):
Likewise, I first explored around the edge of this gigantic lava lake before completely flooding it out (some people will actually mine around lava pools instead of simply converting them into obsidian, which costs far more time and tool durability; sure, I spend some time and resources crafting and placing torches but it can be done much faster and there is plenty of coal):
Some people don't want to do this because they fear it destroys a non-renewable resource but less than 10% of the lava in the world has been converted into obsidian - leaving enough to smelt more than a billion items (even I have smelted less than a million, 1/1000th of this); even a single large cave or ravine can have several thousand lava blocks; in fact, only coal is more common than lava:
Obviously, I also wear good armor while caving, in fact, I don't even think of caving until the "end-game", prior to then I obtain the resources that I need by branch-mining, which is a dozen times more time and area efficient when it comes to diamonds.
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 wouldn't consider lengthy mining sessions to be practical without armour either, in fact not wearing armour while doing a mining session that is several hours long is a foolish thing to do in my honest opinion because dying in lava would mean wasted resources, especially rare ones like Silk Touched diamond and emerald ore. Even if you water the lava pools down with a water bucket you've still got to keep a sharp eye out for Creepers and Witches, and if you're next to pitfalls which you would be half away to the bottom of a ravine, a Skeleton could ruin 50 or goodness knows how many hours worth of work, without Feather Falling you're presumably dead because you don't have enough buffs to your stats to protect you from the fall damage.
And I reiterate, although I'm sure you understand I want to make sure others here do too, it's not the larger cave systems I have a problem with in 1.18, in fact the bigger and darker caves with stalactites and stalagmites are an interesting challenge in my opinion because they facilitate more hostile mob spawning which is a huge plus as far as survival goes, and it introduces a new hazard which means players need to be more careful.
The negative is the massively reduced ore generation which makes a long known staple of the game a real pain in the rear,
I thought the game was supposed to be about mining? but here we have Mojang punishing players for actually mining for their resources
instead of relying on their AFK farms. All stupid decisions like this are going to do is encourage people like us to play older versions on Java edition, and other people to mod the game.
See, I prefer to use lava as a tool and weapon in big caves. I pour it off the top of areas to light up the center and reduce mob spawning as well as kill any mobs happening to be in contact. If there are any lava-vulnerable structures or plant-life, they can be given away by light emitted by plants/torches and turning up brightness.
I'm not worried about running out of lava but that the rest is harder to access (mostly under obsidian). Anyway 1.17 makes lava renewable so I care less now. Still easier to get it from a pool than the nether or a cauldron drip though. That's on par with not mining coal with fortune when available because withr skeletons exist, there's efficiency and you never can unmine ore to get fortune used on it.
As for armour and mining...I don't think strip mining is all that efficient in my experience. It's also boring and I get lost in my own mines more easily than in caves. I prefer to mine to the bottom and explore lava-level smaller caves. If you go through caves fast, it's more efficient many times. before 1.18, anyway. (To be fair, caves are scary though).
Not in my case when it comes to diamonds:
Considering that I play for an average of 3.6 hours per day that's not much at all, as little as 3 diamond ore per hour (though October is a bit low since I spent a couple days on building a base and railway extension, and regional variances in caves/mineshafts affect the distribution of exposed ores; either way, 3-4 per hour is typical) - that's 8 hours just to get a full set of armor (4 with Fortune) - absolutely awful when I can easily find that much within half an hour of branch-mining, which is one reason why I do it at the start of a new world; caving may be more efficient when it comes to coal and iron, which are more than 90% of all the ores I find, but my needs for those fall far short of what I can find (I use barely any iron at all late game, only for the occasional anvil, and 115 anvils crafted in over 4300 hours of playtime isn't much).
By contrast, you can easily find half a stack of diamond ore per hour of branch-mining, even a stack if the Wiki's claim of 1.7% of all mined blocks being diamond ore is accurate, based on a tunnel spacing of at least 6 blocks between tunnel (most players use less; a spacing of 2 blocks achieves just 1/3 of this efficiency while the 3 blocks that I use is about half), and mining at the rate of one block per second (3600 per hour * 1.7% = 61.2), which is easily achievable as even stone pickaxes take less than a second to mine stone (even when caving I average more than a thousand blocks mined per hour despite most of the time not spent on actually mining).
Mind you, I do explore literally everything underground that is interconnected in some way, not just the deepest layers, so the ores I collect reflect this, and the number of mobs I encounter is much higher than what you'd experience if you did this due to the fact that lighting up caves, which I do very thoroughly, concentrates them in the remaining dark areas (I once had somebody tell me that there weren't that many mobs in caves when playing on my mod, whereas I regularly kill 400+ per session, even nearly a thousand in one case, and 600+ in a single giant cave. I doubt that 1.18 will be like this if the mob cap is still 70 as it is now distributed over twice the volume; of course, the volume/surface area of caves matters more, where TMCW has about twice the volume as vanilla 1.6.4, which is in turn about 33% higher than 1.7-1.17 (surface area in TMCW is only about 33% higher than vanilla 1.6.4 based on exposed ore per chunk; this increase in exposed ore does not translate to increased mining rates though, which are very similar to vanilla).
Also, this is a good thread to continue any discussion of ore mining efficiency / caving vs branch-mining, even if it is a bit old: https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2812077-mining-rates
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?