I would defintely love to see copper become iron alternative for tools and armor. Hoppers and cauldrons too.
As it is now, copper is about as usefull as diorite.
However, about iron... I got to say that earlier MC versions weren't that iron-rich either. Plenty if you wanted iron for tools/armor, or smaller-sized farms that might need 20-30 hoppers. But if you needed really lots or iron, and actually have time left to build something from it, you built an iron farm.
Where are you looking anyway? Best places are cave systems around Y+15, and high in the mountains.
In 1.18 (all snapshots so far), there simply isn't enough iron and other resources. Most other resources aren't too bad, but iron is abysmally-low.
Please correct this major failing in 1.18. Here are some suggestions:
Give us copper shears and buckets for the very early game.
Increase the overall rate of iron spawns.
Eliminate the 50% reduction when in contact with air.
Make veins always contiguous (horizontally and vertically) so they can at least be followed when found.
Add iron (and other resources) to dripstone caves.
(And, don't tell me to create an iron farm. My gaming group doesn't like terrorizing villagers.)
It's a very weird situation, on the one hand we're expected to mine for our resources and not rely on some overpowered automated resource farm
but then we get punished for using strip mining to earn the resources legitimately and as intended by developers with ore generation nerfs. You can't have your cake and eat it too, do Mojang want us to be less dependent on AFK farms or not? because the more of these awkward nerfing decisions they continue to make the more they confuse us gamers, people who purchased copies of said game legally. And with daft decisions like this I could certainly see why other people would be tempted to cheat.
You can already find Iron ingots in Villager chests, which can be used to make buckets and shears early game, which wouldn't have been a problem in your case if your group didn't dislike theft from Villagers, just tell them it's a game, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to empathize with video game characters.
I would defintely love to see copper become iron alternative for tools and armor. Hoppers and cauldrons too.
As it is now, copper is about as usefull as diorite.
However, about iron... I got to say that earlier MC versions weren't that iron-rich either. Plenty if you wanted iron for tools/armor, or smaller-sized farms that might need 20-30 hoppers. But if you needed really lots or iron, and actually have time left to build something from it, you built an iron farm.
Where are you looking anyway? Best places are cave systems around Y+15, and high in the mountains.
I shaft-mine wherever my base is. I go all the way to the bottom.
Regarding iron farms, my gaming group doesn't like terrorizing villagers, so I don't do it.
I pretty much only use iron for shears, buckets, hoppers, and anvils. I used to use the excess to promote certain villagers, but there usually isn't even enough to build just those listed items for my base. 1.18 has left a very sour taste in my mouth, and it's all because of this one element.
It's a very weird situation, on the one hand we're expected to mine for our resources and not rely on some overpowered automated resource farm
but then we get punished for using strip mining to earn the resources legitimately and as intended by developers with ore generation nerfs. You can't have your cake and eat it too, do Mojang want us to be less dependent on AFK farms or not? because the more of these awkward nerfing decisions they continue to make the more they confuse us gamers, people who purchased copies of said game legally. And with daft decisions like this I could certainly see why other people would be tempted to cheat.
You can already find Iron ingots in Villager chests, which can be used to make buckets and shears early game, which wouldn't have been a problem in your case if your group didn't dislike theft from Villagers, just tell them it's a game, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to empathize with video game characters.
Oh, it's not theft from villagers that's the problem. I figure any chest is the player's chest; they'll never use it anyhow.
it's the use of a villager being accosted by mobs to attract iron golems that's the problem for us. If I DO play 1.18 at all, it will likely only be solo, and then I might make an iron farm (since we're effectively forced to). But, my group won't allow it.
Oh, it's not theft from villagers that's the problem. I figure any chest is the player's chest; they'll never use it anyhow.
it's the use of a villager being accosted by mobs to attract iron golems that's the problem for us. If I DO play 1.18 at all, it will likely only be solo, and then I might make an iron farm (since we're effectively forced to). But, my group won't allow it.
All I can say is playing on older versions of Java is our only option here, I would've loved this to be a feature on bedrock edition
but right now it just can't be done, not officially anyway. But Java edition lets you play older Minecraft and with servers too, which makes it a true sandbox.
I shaft-mine wherever my base is. I go all the way to the bottom.
That is no longer optimal. There is very little iron to be had at the bottom. Best bet now is going caving around Y15. If there are tall mountains close to your base, try branch mining there, prefferably at Y150+
That is no longer optimal. There is very little iron to be had at the bottom. Best bet now is going caving around Y15. If there are tall mountains close to your base, try branch mining there, prefferably at Y150+
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I effectively strip mine from just below my base all the way to the bottom of the world. My first shaft checks 86% of all blocks in the shaft, plus any uncovered by resource blobs. From level 64 down to level -59, that's almost 7000 blocks I check. (Then I make the shaft bigger, but that's later in the game.)
I fully expect to see the most iron around level 15, as per the distribution charts.
Of course, if there's a cave on the way down, all of the resources that would have been in the shaft have been removed by world generation. This is helped by the cave being bigger than my shaft, showing a lot of interior (to the cave) surface area, some of which happens to intersect resource blobs. But it doesn't make up for the missing resources unless it's a small cave. (Smaller caves have more surface area per volume, thus potentially exposing some resources.)
Strip-mining (meaning digging out a bit pit, which sounds like what you are doing, as opposed to the common usage of this term when referring to branch-mining) is absolutely the worst possible way to find resources, unless you want stone - you want to branch-mine, which can be orders of magnitude more efficient:
The results indicate what is expected — that when tunnels are close together they are not efficient because the miner will encounter diamonds which were already removed by the adjacent tunnel(s). A good efficiency is reached at a spacing of around 6 blocks (that is, 6 solid blocks left in-between the tunnels). At this spacing, efficiency is about 0.017, corresponding to 1.7% of blocks removed being a diamond.
In summary:
The term "efficiency" is often applied to the practice of making every block observable, however this is not usually the objective of a miner.
A more practical definition of "efficiency" describes the percentage of blocks removed that are ores, in other words efficiency = (ores removed / blocks removed).
To put this into perspective, if you can mine one block per second, which is achievable with good tools (even stone pickaxes mine stone in less than a second, with better tools allowing for more time spent on walking to/from where you are mining as you clear your inventory or get more food/wood), you can expect to find about one diamond ore per minute, nearly a stack per hour (the time between diamond deposits will be longer due to veins usually having multiple blocks, plus random variation means you can go anywhere from 0-infinity (in practice, up to several hundred) blocks between veins). Obviously, this will be different from 1.18, depending on the changes in ore density.
For comparison, if you simply removed every block from a chunk below sea level, assuming no caves, you'd mine around 15,000 blocks and find an average of 3.7 diamond ore (in 1.17) - that's only 0.025% of blocks, or 68 times worse than the optimal efficiency described above (which could actually be even better if you mined 1x1 tunnels, but the slow movement may not be worth it). A diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III can only mine about 6240 blocks so you'd find only half the diamonds needed to repair/replace it; otherwise, with Mending you'd certainly need an XP farm to repair it. Even just removing everything below layer 15 (layer 15 doesn't need to be removed since any diamonds in it will be visible from below) would still only net about 0.12% of blocks being diamond, 14 times worse.
Also, this is what my mines look like (I branch-mine at the start of a new world because it is far more efficient than caving at finding rarer resources, which will be even more true in 1.18 because of the reduced air exposure); I found 91 diamond out of about 10,000 blocks mined, closely matching the chart in the link above for a spacing of 3 blocks:
Interestingly, according to the Wiki doubling the spacing to 6 blocks roughly doubles the amount of ore extracted from the same area (since now about 1.7% of mined blocks are diamond, up from 0.9%, while you are removing half as many blocks from the area) - it seems that you don't actually miss that much between tunnels, and in the majority of cases there is no point in trying to extract every single ore from the area (I didn't even mine the diamond I found with Fortune because I didn't need that much, I only mined that much because of a rarer mod ore, which is also why I mined below lava level (which is not as bad as often thought), and in vanilla around 30 would be enough for all my gear).
The main change in 1.18 is that you'll want branch-mines at multiple levels, one for each resource, possibly less depending on whether any are most abundant on the same layers (redstone and diamond seem to still have the same peak layers).
It could be called either. I don't actually strip-mine. I dig an oval two blocks tall every third level. I dig the oval 7x8 around a 1x2 shaft in the center. This means I see every block except the ones at floor level that are also between the walls and the shaft (and just under the outside wall). It's the most efficient method of seeing resources in a given volume that's possible. (Well, there is one other way and that's to build 1x1 tunnels, but that's too cheesy for me.)
Branch-mining is very similar to what I do. However, I only make my grid 7x8 rather than dozens or hundreds of blocks.
But, that's not the point. My point is that there is so little iron available by ANY mining method that it's hard to play the game.
I don't need that many resources. Around 10-15 hoppers, a couple of shears, buckets, anvils, and a few other things. I only ever need five diamonds for a game (three for a pick and two more for an enchanting table). I never use iron for armor and only rarely for tools or weapons. My desires aren't high, but iron is so hard to get in the early game that it makes the game no longer fun.
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I effectively strip mine from just below my base all the way to the bottom of the world. My first shaft checks 86% of all blocks in the shaft, plus any uncovered by resource blobs. From level 64 down to level -59, that's almost 7000 blocks I check. (Then I make the shaft bigger, but that's later in the game.)
I fully expect to see the most iron around level 15, as per the distribution charts.
Of course, if there's a cave on the way down, all of the resources that would have been in the shaft have been removed by world generation. This is helped by the cave being bigger than my shaft, showing a lot of interior (to the cave) surface area, some of which happens to intersect resource blobs. But it doesn't make up for the missing resources unless it's a small cave. (Smaller caves have more surface area per volume, thus potentially exposing some resources.)
If you want to get iron more efficiently you should expand horizontally around level 15 more rather than always creating a tower-shaped mine, or alternatively dig sparse tunnels in deepslate layer and investigate tuff blobs, since some of them are actually iron ore veins that have a fraction of the tuff replaced by deepslate iron ore and raw iron blocks. As a bonus, tuff is as easy to mine as stone, despite being in tough deepslate layer.
Also, you can gather modest amounts of iron when engaging in peaceful trade with Piglins, but that's RNG-dependent and nowhere as effective as villager labor camps.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
Thanks. That works for iron, but I would also need coal, redstone, lapiz, and even gold. That's why I go top-to-bottom.
Cave mining DOES supplement branch-mining, but it requires so much travel. And without a good in-game mapping system for it, I just don't like it much.
Again, top-to-bottom is a serious waste of effort. Even when done at efficient removed to exposed ratio. Pre-1.18, going horizontal below Y15, you had the same exact chance to find iron and coal as your method, but also, 100% of your effort had a chance of finding any other resource. In your case, less than 50% of your effort had chance of finding lapis/gold and less than 25% of your effort could yield redstone or diamond. But that is pre-1.18
Mining (as in digging tunnels to find stuff) is dead. Compared to 1.17, mining is grossly inefficient.
If one to go by the wiki, 1.17 and before, iron was 20 attempts of 0-13 size blobs per chunk, uniformly between 0 and 64, average 112 per chunk.
1.18, iron is 6 attempts 0-13 blobs between -24 and 54, plus 3 attempts of 0-5 size blobs from -64 to 64. Which averages about 3x less iron in 2x as much height, most of it deepslate. Most likely to be found at Y15, but looks like even there, it is a whole lot less likely to be found than anywhere below 64 in 1.17.
Gold, according to wiki, there's 2x more of it, (4 blobs per chunk) but it generates in 3x the thickness. 66% of which is deepslate. So on average, over 2x time spent per ore gained.
There is supposed to be lots of iron in tall mountains, starting at 84 and maxing at 255. But good luck finding any sizable mountains even reaching 150. I mapped a 4000x4000 area of a world, and aside from very amplified-looking savannah cliffs, there was literally nothing above cloud level.
All in all, anytime I tried actual mining in 1.18 worlds, the results were downright abysmal. Yes, going vertical means you run a chance of happening across every kind of resource. Except a typical -60 - 64 shaft will take about 3x longer to dig than a 4-64 shaft in pre-1.18, And in this shaft, you are about 3x less likely to find any iron, 2x more likely to find gold, and so on. In other words, resources gained per time invested has taken a massive nerf.
I would say that new cave generation can be blamed squarely for this. The devs were most likely balancing the availability/distribution of ores based on how much ore got exposed in the caves.
I.e. in my current world, A screenshot of a portion of a cave, shown here in a creative version of the world. And this is just one of many such caves, they are everywhere. Sure it took a fair bit of mob fighting and quite a few torches, but in just this part of cave, the amount of resources exposed for the taking was just incredible. Even with 'reduced air exposure', we are talking tens of thousands blocks exposed with practically zero digging.
So in 1.18, I no longer mine. I locate and cultivate a village until I got access to diamond pickaxes and Fortune III, then I go caving for things I need.
There are not enough if you DIG for them. Looking for resources by making shafts/tunnels in solid rock has been made in some cases as much as 10x less effective, in terms of resources found per time spent.
The new mega-cave systems - many of which can often be accessed from surface - has made caving for resources several times more effective. More effective, IMHO, than branch mining used to be.
Perhaps, but since no provision has been made for MAPPING these caves, I find it impossible to navigate all but the smallest of them. And the resources in these caves are so sparsely populated and spread out, I stand by my assertion: there are not enough resources.
Perhaps, but since no provision has been made for MAPPING these caves, I find it impossible to navigate all but the smallest of them. And the resources in these caves are so sparsely populated and spread out, I stand by my assertion: there are not enough resources.
I carry a map with me so I can see where I've been in general, even if they only show the surface, and caves in 1.6.4 are most likely way more complex than 1.18 since they are mostly narrow tunnels, not larger open spaces (but much denser than since 1.7; I've found cave systems with large semi-open areas up to 100 blocks across due to the sheer number of intersecting tunnels), along with an extremely high frequency of mineshafts which themselves over overlap multiple times (a few areas I've found had so many intersecting mineshafts that there was literally no solid ground left). My main form of navigation is simply the presence of torches and mined-out ores; otherwise, I make "return points", a staircase up to a cobblestone pillar at the surface, when I have to return to empty my inventory/ender chest. Even in my most extreme modded worlds I had little issue in thoroughly exploring a cave system (the average cave system in "triple height terrain" was around 30 times larger than in 1.6.4, around 200 blocks wide and deep with around 500 individual tunnels with 2-3 times the length, merged with other cave systems to form even larger complexes).
That said, they certainly could and should add "cave maps" to vanilla, which I've added myself for an upcoming release, although they do not show depth with caves higher up obscuring those below; cave systems appear as solid masses even when they are still separate tunnels, and this would be more of an issue in 1.18 due to the increased ground depth, but it does show you where caves are and which direction to go in to get somewhere, and surface openings can be identified by the groundcover in them (grass, sand, etc; areas below sea level are always mapped while above sea level they must be below the highest solid block so this works best when the surface is near sea level):
A 3x3 level 0 map area (384x384 blocks) of an area over a giant cave region I explored in TMCWv4:
A close-up of an area I explored in one play session while testing TMCWv5:
Note that these maps only show areas lit up to a light level of at least 6 within an 8 block radius of a player-placed torch, which is based on the mapping utility I use to make underground renderings of my worlds (except in 2D), so they will not reveal anything that hasn't been explored yet, and gives the player reason to use torches rather than Night Vision (a light level of 0 is totally pitch black and gamma can't be edited so light sources or Night Vision are mandatory):
Note that the isolated area near the upper-left is a stronghold I originally found with eyes of ender; none of the caves leading to it appear until I explored them later on, same as my cave maps:
Also, cave maps can also be used in the Nether, which currently can't be mapped at all and you can't reliably see which direction you are facing; I even added coordinates when you are holding a map, a feature which was present in old Console editions and which provides a "legit" way to see them (for a time they were seen as a cheat in Bedrock, disabling achievements if enabled, and on Java "reducedDebugInfo" can disable them in the debug screen; if this is added to maps it could still be disabled with a similar gamerule, e.g. "allowCoordinates", which could also specifically hide them in the debug screen (reducedDebugInfo is not redundant as there is other information that can be exploited, such as "looking at" to find diamonds under lava):
This is actaully from my "World1" mod, which includes many of the small QOL features that TMCW has/will have (I use my own worlds as testbeds for many new features, TMCW does not officially have this feature yet); both surface and cave maps will display coordinates when held:
An example of maps with coordinates in the XBox 360 edition (coordinates were on the map itself, I placed them in the top-left corner of the screen so they are more out of the way):
In 1.18 (all snapshots so far), there simply isn't enough iron and other resources. Most other resources aren't too bad, but iron is abysmally-low.
Please correct this major failing in 1.18. Here are some suggestions:
Give us copper shears and buckets for the very early game.
Increase the overall rate of iron spawns.
Eliminate the 50% reduction when in contact with air.
Make veins always contiguous (horizontally and vertically) so they can at least be followed when found.
Add iron (and other resources) to dripstone caves.
(And, don't tell me to create an iron farm. My gaming group doesn't like terrorizing villagers.)
i like your suggestions about using copper to do shears and buckets. at least for water. iron should be used for lava.
I agree on the iron buckets for lava.
I would defintely love to see copper become iron alternative for tools and armor. Hoppers and cauldrons too.
As it is now, copper is about as usefull as diorite.
However, about iron... I got to say that earlier MC versions weren't that iron-rich either. Plenty if you wanted iron for tools/armor, or smaller-sized farms that might need 20-30 hoppers. But if you needed really lots or iron, and actually have time left to build something from it, you built an iron farm.
Where are you looking anyway? Best places are cave systems around Y+15, and high in the mountains.
It's a very weird situation, on the one hand we're expected to mine for our resources and not rely on some overpowered automated resource farm
but then we get punished for using strip mining to earn the resources legitimately and as intended by developers with ore generation nerfs. You can't have your cake and eat it too, do Mojang want us to be less dependent on AFK farms or not? because the more of these awkward nerfing decisions they continue to make the more they confuse us gamers, people who purchased copies of said game legally. And with daft decisions like this I could certainly see why other people would be tempted to cheat.
You can already find Iron ingots in Villager chests, which can be used to make buckets and shears early game, which wouldn't have been a problem in your case if your group didn't dislike theft from Villagers, just tell them it's a game, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to empathize with video game characters.
I shaft-mine wherever my base is. I go all the way to the bottom.
Regarding iron farms, my gaming group doesn't like terrorizing villagers, so I don't do it.
I pretty much only use iron for shears, buckets, hoppers, and anvils. I used to use the excess to promote certain villagers, but there usually isn't even enough to build just those listed items for my base. 1.18 has left a very sour taste in my mouth, and it's all because of this one element.
Oh, it's not theft from villagers that's the problem. I figure any chest is the player's chest; they'll never use it anyhow.
it's the use of a villager being accosted by mobs to attract iron golems that's the problem for us. If I DO play 1.18 at all, it will likely only be solo, and then I might make an iron farm (since we're effectively forced to). But, my group won't allow it.
All I can say is playing on older versions of Java is our only option here, I would've loved this to be a feature on bedrock edition
but right now it just can't be done, not officially anyway. But Java edition lets you play older Minecraft and with servers too, which makes it a true sandbox.
That is no longer optimal. There is very little iron to be had at the bottom. Best bet now is going caving around Y15. If there are tall mountains close to your base, try branch mining there, prefferably at Y150+
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I effectively strip mine from just below my base all the way to the bottom of the world. My first shaft checks 86% of all blocks in the shaft, plus any uncovered by resource blobs. From level 64 down to level -59, that's almost 7000 blocks I check. (Then I make the shaft bigger, but that's later in the game.)
I fully expect to see the most iron around level 15, as per the distribution charts.
Of course, if there's a cave on the way down, all of the resources that would have been in the shaft have been removed by world generation. This is helped by the cave being bigger than my shaft, showing a lot of interior (to the cave) surface area, some of which happens to intersect resource blobs. But it doesn't make up for the missing resources unless it's a small cave. (Smaller caves have more surface area per volume, thus potentially exposing some resources.)
Strip-mining (meaning digging out a bit pit, which sounds like what you are doing, as opposed to the common usage of this term when referring to branch-mining) is absolutely the worst possible way to find resources, unless you want stone - you want to branch-mine, which can be orders of magnitude more efficient:
To put this into perspective, if you can mine one block per second, which is achievable with good tools (even stone pickaxes mine stone in less than a second, with better tools allowing for more time spent on walking to/from where you are mining as you clear your inventory or get more food/wood), you can expect to find about one diamond ore per minute, nearly a stack per hour (the time between diamond deposits will be longer due to veins usually having multiple blocks, plus random variation means you can go anywhere from 0-infinity (in practice, up to several hundred) blocks between veins). Obviously, this will be different from 1.18, depending on the changes in ore density.
For comparison, if you simply removed every block from a chunk below sea level, assuming no caves, you'd mine around 15,000 blocks and find an average of 3.7 diamond ore (in 1.17) - that's only 0.025% of blocks, or 68 times worse than the optimal efficiency described above (which could actually be even better if you mined 1x1 tunnels, but the slow movement may not be worth it). A diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III can only mine about 6240 blocks so you'd find only half the diamonds needed to repair/replace it; otherwise, with Mending you'd certainly need an XP farm to repair it. Even just removing everything below layer 15 (layer 15 doesn't need to be removed since any diamonds in it will be visible from below) would still only net about 0.12% of blocks being diamond, 14 times worse.
Also, this is what my mines look like (I branch-mine at the start of a new world because it is far more efficient than caving at finding rarer resources, which will be even more true in 1.18 because of the reduced air exposure); I found 91 diamond out of about 10,000 blocks mined, closely matching the chart in the link above for a spacing of 3 blocks:
Interestingly, according to the Wiki doubling the spacing to 6 blocks roughly doubles the amount of ore extracted from the same area (since now about 1.7% of mined blocks are diamond, up from 0.9%, while you are removing half as many blocks from the area) - it seems that you don't actually miss that much between tunnels, and in the majority of cases there is no point in trying to extract every single ore from the area (I didn't even mine the diamond I found with Fortune because I didn't need that much, I only mined that much because of a rarer mod ore, which is also why I mined below lava level (which is not as bad as often thought), and in vanilla around 30 would be enough for all my gear).
The main change in 1.18 is that you'll want branch-mines at multiple levels, one for each resource, possibly less depending on whether any are most abundant on the same layers (redstone and diamond seem to still have the same peak 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?
It could be called either. I don't actually strip-mine. I dig an oval two blocks tall every third level. I dig the oval 7x8 around a 1x2 shaft in the center. This means I see every block except the ones at floor level that are also between the walls and the shaft (and just under the outside wall). It's the most efficient method of seeing resources in a given volume that's possible. (Well, there is one other way and that's to build 1x1 tunnels, but that's too cheesy for me.)
Branch-mining is very similar to what I do. However, I only make my grid 7x8 rather than dozens or hundreds of blocks.
But, that's not the point. My point is that there is so little iron available by ANY mining method that it's hard to play the game.
I don't need that many resources. Around 10-15 hoppers, a couple of shears, buckets, anvils, and a few other things. I only ever need five diamonds for a game (three for a pick and two more for an enchanting table). I never use iron for armor and only rarely for tools or weapons. My desires aren't high, but iron is so hard to get in the early game that it makes the game no longer fun.
That's nooooot how this place works. Mojang doesn't come here and take ideas from anyone.
Not necessary. Though I partially agree with some of the iron stuff.
Very minimal supporrt.
If you want to get iron more efficiently you should expand horizontally around level 15 more rather than always creating a tower-shaped mine, or alternatively dig sparse tunnels in deepslate layer and investigate tuff blobs, since some of them are actually iron ore veins that have a fraction of the tuff replaced by deepslate iron ore and raw iron blocks. As a bonus, tuff is as easy to mine as stone, despite being in tough deepslate layer.
Also, you can gather modest amounts of iron when engaging in peaceful trade with Piglins, but that's RNG-dependent and nowhere as effective as villager labor camps.
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
Thanks. That works for iron, but I would also need coal, redstone, lapiz, and even gold. That's why I go top-to-bottom.
Cave mining DOES supplement branch-mining, but it requires so much travel. And without a good in-game mapping system for it, I just don't like it much.
Again, top-to-bottom is a serious waste of effort. Even when done at efficient removed to exposed ratio. Pre-1.18, going horizontal below Y15, you had the same exact chance to find iron and coal as your method, but also, 100% of your effort had a chance of finding any other resource. In your case, less than 50% of your effort had chance of finding lapis/gold and less than 25% of your effort could yield redstone or diamond. But that is pre-1.18
Mining (as in digging tunnels to find stuff) is dead. Compared to 1.17, mining is grossly inefficient.
If one to go by the wiki, 1.17 and before, iron was 20 attempts of 0-13 size blobs per chunk, uniformly between 0 and 64, average 112 per chunk.
1.18, iron is 6 attempts 0-13 blobs between -24 and 54, plus 3 attempts of 0-5 size blobs from -64 to 64. Which averages about 3x less iron in 2x as much height, most of it deepslate. Most likely to be found at Y15, but looks like even there, it is a whole lot less likely to be found than anywhere below 64 in 1.17.
Gold, according to wiki, there's 2x more of it, (4 blobs per chunk) but it generates in 3x the thickness. 66% of which is deepslate. So on average, over 2x time spent per ore gained.
There is supposed to be lots of iron in tall mountains, starting at 84 and maxing at 255. But good luck finding any sizable mountains even reaching 150. I mapped a 4000x4000 area of a world, and aside from very amplified-looking savannah cliffs, there was literally nothing above cloud level.
All in all, anytime I tried actual mining in 1.18 worlds, the results were downright abysmal. Yes, going vertical means you run a chance of happening across every kind of resource. Except a typical -60 - 64 shaft will take about 3x longer to dig than a 4-64 shaft in pre-1.18, And in this shaft, you are about 3x less likely to find any iron, 2x more likely to find gold, and so on. In other words, resources gained per time invested has taken a massive nerf.
I would say that new cave generation can be blamed squarely for this. The devs were most likely balancing the availability/distribution of ores based on how much ore got exposed in the caves.
I.e. in my current world, A screenshot of a portion of a cave, shown here in a creative version of the world. And this is just one of many such caves, they are everywhere. Sure it took a fair bit of mob fighting and quite a few torches, but in just this part of cave, the amount of resources exposed for the taking was just incredible. Even with 'reduced air exposure', we are talking tens of thousands blocks exposed with practically zero digging.
So in 1.18, I no longer mine. I locate and cultivate a village until I got access to diamond pickaxes and Fortune III, then I go caving for things I need.
So, you're essentially saying exactly what I said: there are not enough resources.
There are not enough if you DIG for them. Looking for resources by making shafts/tunnels in solid rock has been made in some cases as much as 10x less effective, in terms of resources found per time spent.
The new mega-cave systems - many of which can often be accessed from surface - has made caving for resources several times more effective. More effective, IMHO, than branch mining used to be.
Perhaps, but since no provision has been made for MAPPING these caves, I find it impossible to navigate all but the smallest of them. And the resources in these caves are so sparsely populated and spread out, I stand by my assertion: there are not enough resources.
I carry a map with me so I can see where I've been in general, even if they only show the surface, and caves in 1.6.4 are most likely way more complex than 1.18 since they are mostly narrow tunnels, not larger open spaces (but much denser than since 1.7; I've found cave systems with large semi-open areas up to 100 blocks across due to the sheer number of intersecting tunnels), along with an extremely high frequency of mineshafts which themselves over overlap multiple times (a few areas I've found had so many intersecting mineshafts that there was literally no solid ground left). My main form of navigation is simply the presence of torches and mined-out ores; otherwise, I make "return points", a staircase up to a cobblestone pillar at the surface, when I have to return to empty my inventory/ender chest. Even in my most extreme modded worlds I had little issue in thoroughly exploring a cave system (the average cave system in "triple height terrain" was around 30 times larger than in 1.6.4, around 200 blocks wide and deep with around 500 individual tunnels with 2-3 times the length, merged with other cave systems to form even larger complexes).
That said, they certainly could and should add "cave maps" to vanilla, which I've added myself for an upcoming release, although they do not show depth with caves higher up obscuring those below; cave systems appear as solid masses even when they are still separate tunnels, and this would be more of an issue in 1.18 due to the increased ground depth, but it does show you where caves are and which direction to go in to get somewhere, and surface openings can be identified by the groundcover in them (grass, sand, etc; areas below sea level are always mapped while above sea level they must be below the highest solid block so this works best when the surface is near sea level):
A close-up of an area I explored in one play session while testing TMCWv5:
Note that these maps only show areas lit up to a light level of at least 6 within an 8 block radius of a player-placed torch, which is based on the mapping utility I use to make underground renderings of my worlds (except in 2D), so they will not reveal anything that hasn't been explored yet, and gives the player reason to use torches rather than Night Vision (a light level of 0 is totally pitch black and gamma can't be edited so light sources or Night Vision are mandatory):
Also, cave maps can also be used in the Nether, which currently can't be mapped at all and you can't reliably see which direction you are facing; I even added coordinates when you are holding a map, a feature which was present in old Console editions and which provides a "legit" way to see them (for a time they were seen as a cheat in Bedrock, disabling achievements if enabled, and on Java "reducedDebugInfo" can disable them in the debug screen; if this is added to maps it could still be disabled with a similar gamerule, e.g. "allowCoordinates", which could also specifically hide them in the debug screen (reducedDebugInfo is not redundant as there is other information that can be exploited, such as "looking at" to find diamonds under lava):
An example of maps with coordinates in the XBox 360 edition (coordinates were on the map itself, I placed them in the top-left corner of the screen so they are more out of the way):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-editions/minecraft-xbox-360-edition/mcx360-discussion/2586816-how-to-use-coordinates
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?