Correlation doesn't imply causation means that just because you find things together or at the same time doesn't mean they're linked or caused by the same thing. "I found a dollar when I stubbed my toe at the carwash change machine. If I stub my toe again, I'll find another dollar!"
Observation bias is the bias of only looking in the area you expect positive results to see if you get positive results. "If I stub my toe, I'll find more dollars. I shall test this repeatedly once a week or so at the carwash change machine. There's no point in doing it in the woods as well."
Confirmation bias is the bias of seeing only what you expect to see, and ignoring any contradictory evidence. "I didn't find a dollar when I stubbed my toe this week. But I did last week, and two weeks before that. And 5 months ago. And last year. That's 4 stubbings = 4 dollars, SEE?!"
Fact is, caves just have the advantage of 'pre-mining' a bunch of squares. If you go down to any of the diamond levels, get any of the modding programs and make a 5x5 tunnel in any random direction, you'll find a very similar number of diamonds in the walls. You could do it by hand too, it's just slower.
I'd rather see some math than some psy101, preconception isn't the point. Going from 5 diamonds found total after a day spent derping around the first 15 levels to 15 diamonds (20 total in 2 days) found after an hour and a half mining exclusively on layer 12 is pretty dramatic. I'd have a lot more but I wasn't 100% focused on grinding rocks, and stopped to spend some time to make a water elevator.
There were many more that I didn't screenshot because they just kept popping up one after another.
Diamond nodes aside, the greatest benefit IMO of layer 12 is how effectively you can dispose of lava threats. At this level I didn't encounter any lava above my feet. All it took was a bucket of water to keep mining, and now I have at least 100 obsidian to go back and mine someday. As Adversity said, a "sea of obsidian". The absence of intrusive lava pools will itself increase the speed and efficiency you can mine, which logically means more diamonds per minute.
There are dozens of ways to refute it, but from what I'm standing: I got a tip, I tried it out, I found an armfull of diamond almost immediately. Extremely satisfied with this simple guide, and will recommend it to anyone interested.
E: The texture pack is The Cel-Pak. Thetonestarr did a great job on it. My only gripe is that leaf textures have no transparency, which makes chopping really big trees kind of a pain. It's a quick fix, though, I'm just lazy at the moment.
I started mining on layer 12. I feel more....elite. (don't judge).
I didn't get to far into the tunnel, especially since I broke into a strangely enclosed lake right above me. But I did notice that there was a higher concentration of ores.
"things that have already been said 10 times in this thread."
Fact is, caves just have the advantage of 'pre-mining' a bunch of squares. If you go down to any of the diamond levels, get any of the modding programs and make a 5x5 tunnel in any random direction, you'll find a very similar number of diamonds in the walls. You could do it by hand too, it's just slower.
thx for explaining stuff that has already been explained thoroughly by other people multiple times in this thread...
if youre hacking why dont you just hack in a stack of diamond blocks?? theres an easy 9 stacks of diamonds for you! why, you didnt even have to dig a 5x5 tunnel at all! how about if youre covering 50 chunks?? how long will it take you to dig a 5x5 tunnel 50 chunks in length??
remember that diamond is an INFINITE resource that is generated across the horizontal axis as chunks are generated. by staying on 1 layer you will simply generate more chunks and increase your chances of finding diamond. by building larger multi-layer strip mines youre finding a higher % of the POSSIBLE ore within a chunk but will be covering a much lower volume of total chunks. since it seems diamond generation is limited within a chunk, its obviously in your benefit to generate as many chunks as possible.
the name of the thread is not "lava spawns diamonds", its "the BEST way to mine diamond". to me faster = better... you have fun with your self admittedly slower methods lol.
Quote from Austaph »
but from what I'm standing: I got a tip, I tried it out, I found an armfull of diamond almost immediately. Extremely satisfied with this simple guide, and will recommend it to anyone interested.
thx for trying it out, glad to hear its working great for u too. its really all i ask if anyone wants to have a sensible debate of mining techniques and using a better method(if anyone has a better method, let me know, its more diamonds for me!). im just trying to help people get as many diamonds as quickly as they can, if you dont like diamonds you dont have to use this technique *shrug* lol.
Quote from Ausm »
I started mining on layer 12. I feel more....elite. (don't judge).
rofl =D
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Quote from Swingerzetta »
This forum has made me decide that I now want kids, so that when they get old enough, I can forbid them from coming here. it's a terrible place.
The generator tends to generate one vein of diamond per chunk.
@ adversitys newest post.
I'm not even going to try anymore. All of that (And much more iron, coal, and redstone) would have been found if you were using a branch mine, along with many building resources.
That is my final post in this thread because you can't seem to grasp the fact that this is all chance.
I know you won't respond to this, but BRANCH MINING IS CHANCE TOO. I recently made two mines, each in diffrent locations. Mining in the same layer, I found around 13 diamonds in one mine, and only 4 in the other.
I don't think that there is a correlation between lava and diamond. I think that it is just a coincidence that there seems to be larger concentrations of diamond on layer 12.
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"I don't care where Leonardo DaVinci got his materials, the Mona Lisa is still a legendary piece of art."
The generator tends to generate one vein of diamond per chunk.
@ adversitys newest post.
I'm not even going to try anymore. All of that (And much more iron, coal, and redstone) would have been found if you were using a branch mine, along with many building resources.
That is my final post in this thread because you can't seem to grasp the fact that this is all chance.
I know you won't respond to this, but BRANCH MINING IS CHANCE TOO. I recently made two mines, each in diffrent locations. Mining in the same layer, I found around 13 diamonds in one mine, and only 4 in the other.
you dug a one layer branch mine. of course you won't reveal all of the diamonds because you were only searching in a small area. It wasn't the method was dependent on chance but rather the fact that ores are randomly distributed and they were not distributed where you dug that mine. had you finished that branch mine you would have had more equal numbers.
i personally prefer branch mining, faster for me as i know how to do it well and i like the orderly feel of a branch mine.
I get my diamond in an easier and safer way. I dig down to layer 12, and then proceed to making a long 4x4 shaft horizontally. Then I branch out into a branch mine, and eventually turn those into strip mines. I find this most efficient because I get to see layers 11-16, which is where most diamonds are found. (I'm standing on 11, revealing 12, 13, 14, and 15 by mining the 4x4, and exposing layer 16 as the ceiling) and, after starting a new world to test my efficiency, I found I had around 30 diamonds in a little over 45 minutes. And, I found little to no lava.
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Crafting Mines since the 6th of August, 2010.
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Forums need a tag/bookmark thread for later viewing button. Anyway this will do much for improving my diamond hunting in SSP, which last attempt had two moderate shafts on aprox layers 13 and 15 and had... ug... I still have the save and once I get my sandstone port I'll have to head back there, and mine some more.
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Disclaimer: ... but for all I know running this application will wreck your map or jump out of your screen and rape your dog.
Adversity, I don't know about you, but I know that I'm getting tired of people coming in here thinking that the layer 12 thing involves a theory that diamonds occur more often around lava. We've already agreed that the presence of lava has nothing to do with the occurrence of minerals, but your first post still implies this theory. Could you please go edit it so that it no longer implies a connection between the presence of lava and the presence of minerals? You should definitely still keep in the thing about carrying a bucket of water, and the part about all caves below layer 12 being filled with something other than air, but PLEASE change the parts implying or stating a lava-mineral connection in the first post.
Adversity, I don't know about you, but I know that I'm getting tired of people coming in here thinking that the layer 12 thing involves a theory that diamonds occur more often around lava. We've already agreed that the presence of lava has nothing to do with the occurrence of minerals, but your first post still implies this theory. Could you please go edit it so that it no longer implies a connection between the presence of lava and the presence of minerals? You should definitely still keep in the thing about carrying a bucket of water, and the part about all caves below layer 12 being filled with something other than air, but PLEASE change the parts implying or stating a lava-mineral connection in the first post.
alright, alright.
i already said earlier in this thread that i probably worded the OP a bit poorly, i was just too lazy to go edit it lol.
i hope this clears it up for everyone... im totally not going to rewrite the entire OP =/
THIS IS NOT DUE TO INCREASED MINERAL GENERATION SURROUNDING LAVA POOLS BUT BECAUSE OF THE INCREASED VISIBILITY LAVA POOLS WILL GIVE YOU, WHICH IN TURN INCREASES YOUR EFFICIENCY
ill also start a new mine from scratch soon and update the OP with appropriate screenshots.
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Quote from Swingerzetta »
This forum has made me decide that I now want kids, so that when they get old enough, I can forbid them from coming here. it's a terrible place.
AWESOME VID! thx for posting it, i love the "12mins on level 12" =D ill edit it into the OP.
thx for mentioning me too! i think im the creator of this method of mining?? i have no idea how many people used this previously but ive never seen a post about it so ill take credit =P
youre doing it pretty much by the book. great work checking around mineral veins(you may want to do this a little more, 30-50% of my diamond finds are from adjacent veins but i tend to just mine around redstone since i dont need it anyway) and looking for further exposed rock by digging around off your branch a little bit.
i also loved your "pretty huge minecraft lava cave" video. BEHOLD THE POWER OF LAYER 12!?!?!
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Quote from Swingerzetta »
This forum has made me decide that I now want kids, so that when they get old enough, I can forbid them from coming here. it's a terrible place.
AWESOME VID! thx for posting it, i love the "12mins on level 12" =D ill edit it into the OP.
thx for mentioning me too! i think im the creator of this method of mining?? i have no idea how many people used this previously but ive never seen a post about it so ill take credit =P
youre doing it pretty much by the book. great work checking around mineral veins(you may want to do this a little more, 30-50% of my diamond finds are from adjacent veins but i tend to just mine around redstone since i dont need it anyway) and looking for further exposed rock by digging around off your branch a little bit.
Hey, good theories all around. Branch mining is the logical if 'brute force' approach, and over more time does guarantee you miss less good stuff.
But the intuitive mine-around-lava approach has 2 reasons why it might be more efficient, besides the lessened excavation you need to accomplish:
1. generation of non-background stuff (stone) -- there are random chances for a given block to be part of a vein of non-stone, *but* each check is done using your computer's random number gererator. Background: random numbers are typically generatored using a 'seed' as a starting point, more or less ... the less often this seed is updated, the better the chances you'll get some repetition, or at least clustering, in those 'random' numbers ... and that could skew the chances for rare inclusions in the earth, for where random numbers cluster, so, too, will diamonds/redstone/gold/...and lava.... Key here is how it's coded (if that seed is refreshed often enough -- and different computers might run the same code differently, as far as random number seed, too).
2. As some folks have pointed out elsewhere on these forums, sometimes you get trees floating in the air over or nearly over water. Their suggestion was trees are added to the map first (when a new chunk is created for the first time), then the water is added. And when water is added, some blocks are deleted to make way for the lake/stream/puddle. This is probably how lava (and even caverns) get added to the game -- would explain how sand/gravel can be floating over an open cave, too. The question which applies here is when lava displaces stone in caves, does the code try to avoid displacing diamonds? (Meaning the lava might effectively errode the stone around the diamonds, leaving them behind, just as natural (rl) errosion leaves fossils exposed on the surface or on the cutbank of a river.)
The first is 'if you find something, you might be more likely to find something else nearby' while the second is a weighted errosion algorithm. I don't know much about Minecraft's code, other than the snippet I saw in crop growth rates on minecraft wiki seems to be in some version of 'C,' but these are common considerations in many games.
"This is between me and the chickens, maam, and I'll thank you to stay out of it." Baldur's Gate II: Shadows Over Amn (in Umar Hills)
...in Dungeons and Dragons, flames prevented trolls from returning....
Seems chickens can outrun lava....
Very nice guide. I don't have any experience with diamond mining other than this guide, but it let me get my diamond pick back incredibly quickly after I lost it in a bout of idiocy involving trying to put a lava decoration on top of my house without really knowing how.
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Quote from Zarfot »
*This post intentionally left blank, although the the presence of this sentence means that this isn't true, good fight*
So I don't want to read the last 4 pages and check if this has been posted, but here is a possible improvement to the method. If you do multiple layer mines, you can maximize efficiency with this method.
denotes a space you have dug through
[] denotes unknown material
or denote known material (different materials correspond to being discovered from different branches)
As everyone knoes, using 1x2 branches exposes rock in this pattern:
[] []
[] []
the most common way to branch mine looks like this:
[] [] [] [] [] []
[] [] [] [] [] []
However, you can obtain maximum possible efficiency over large volumes with this method:
as you can see, you can mesh it together forever up, down, left, and right, and never expose the same line twice.
That's not so great a method. Yeah, you're uncovering every possible block, but veins of ores are never in just one block so you don't need to. It's best to leave a gap of three, and stagger each layer.
This way does find every single ore available, because no pattern of ore will go undetected.
By the way, that's if you're using the strip mine method to mine all possible diamond ore. Nothing to do with the layer 12 method.
I don't see how that could possibly be better. I was doing some branch mining today and I encountered several diamond deposits that were vertical only. On that note, your response indicates a method which involves excavating the same number of blocks. It therefore has an identical blocks mined per area covered, and has a greater failure rate. Is there something I'm not seeing that gives it an advantage?
This has quite a large failure band, in fact. It'd be fine for coal (which is always in huge deposits) but I wouldn't use it for diamonds or lapis.
failure band (indicated in red):
edit - while I was doing that, I realized that you do save some mining, but still. You could miss a patch of 6 diamonds doing that.
I'd rather see some math than some psy101, preconception isn't the point. Going from 5 diamonds found total after a day spent derping around the first 15 levels to 15 diamonds (20 total in 2 days) found after an hour and a half mining exclusively on layer 12 is pretty dramatic. I'd have a lot more but I wasn't 100% focused on grinding rocks, and stopped to spend some time to make a water elevator.
There were many more that I didn't screenshot because they just kept popping up one after another.
Diamond nodes aside, the greatest benefit IMO of layer 12 is how effectively you can dispose of lava threats. At this level I didn't encounter any lava above my feet. All it took was a bucket of water to keep mining, and now I have at least 100 obsidian to go back and mine someday. As Adversity said, a "sea of obsidian". The absence of intrusive lava pools will itself increase the speed and efficiency you can mine, which logically means more diamonds per minute.
There are dozens of ways to refute it, but from what I'm standing: I got a tip, I tried it out, I found an armfull of diamond almost immediately. Extremely satisfied with this simple guide, and will recommend it to anyone interested.
E: The texture pack is The Cel-Pak. Thetonestarr did a great job on it. My only gripe is that leaf textures have no transparency, which makes chopping really big trees kind of a pain. It's a quick fix, though, I'm just lazy at the moment.
I didn't get to far into the tunnel, especially since I broke into a strangely enclosed lake right above me. But I did notice that there was a higher concentration of ores.
thx for explaining stuff that has already been explained thoroughly by other people multiple times in this thread...
if youre hacking why dont you just hack in a stack of diamond blocks?? theres an easy 9 stacks of diamonds for you! why, you didnt even have to dig a 5x5 tunnel at all! how about if youre covering 50 chunks?? how long will it take you to dig a 5x5 tunnel 50 chunks in length??
remember that diamond is an INFINITE resource that is generated across the horizontal axis as chunks are generated. by staying on 1 layer you will simply generate more chunks and increase your chances of finding diamond. by building larger multi-layer strip mines youre finding a higher % of the POSSIBLE ore within a chunk but will be covering a much lower volume of total chunks. since it seems diamond generation is limited within a chunk, its obviously in your benefit to generate as many chunks as possible.
the name of the thread is not "lava spawns diamonds", its "the BEST way to mine diamond". to me faster = better... you have fun with your self admittedly slower methods lol.
thx for trying it out, glad to hear its working great for u too. its really all i ask if anyone wants to have a sensible debate of mining techniques and using a better method(if anyone has a better method, let me know, its more diamonds for me!). im just trying to help people get as many diamonds as quickly as they can, if you dont like diamonds you dont have to use this technique *shrug* lol.
rofl =D
The BEST way to mine diamond, layer 12 and you.
I know you won't respond to this, but BRANCH MINING IS CHANCE TOO. I recently made two mines, each in diffrent locations. Mining in the same layer, I found around 13 diamonds in one mine, and only 4 in the other.
RIP 9Kbits2011-2012
you dug a one layer branch mine. of course you won't reveal all of the diamonds because you were only searching in a small area. It wasn't the method was dependent on chance but rather the fact that ores are randomly distributed and they were not distributed where you dug that mine. had you finished that branch mine you would have had more equal numbers.
i personally prefer branch mining, faster for me as i know how to do it well and i like the orderly feel of a branch mine.
alright, alright.
i already said earlier in this thread that i probably worded the OP a bit poorly, i was just too lazy to go edit it lol.
i hope this clears it up for everyone... im totally not going to rewrite the entire OP =/
ill also start a new mine from scratch soon and update the OP with appropriate screenshots.
The BEST way to mine diamond, layer 12 and you.
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AWESOME VID! thx for posting it, i love the "12mins on level 12" =D ill edit it into the OP.
thx for mentioning me too! i think im the creator of this method of mining?? i have no idea how many people used this previously but ive never seen a post about it so ill take credit =P
youre doing it pretty much by the book. great work checking around mineral veins(you may want to do this a little more, 30-50% of my diamond finds are from adjacent veins but i tend to just mine around redstone since i dont need it anyway) and looking for further exposed rock by digging around off your branch a little bit.
i also loved your "pretty huge minecraft lava cave" video. BEHOLD THE POWER OF LAYER 12!?!?!
The BEST way to mine diamond, layer 12 and you.
http://www.youtube.com/user/hellsyes32? ... AaY-uV39oE
Gave a small-time shoutout to you, Adversity :wink.gif:
Everything is on me, the drinks is on me, the b!tches, the hotel, the weed is all free.
i had no idea people were making videos of this lol. does this make me minecraft famous now?? =D
thats what the bucket of water is for...
last time i checked you cant fall into obsidian.
The BEST way to mine diamond, layer 12 and you.
But the intuitive mine-around-lava approach has 2 reasons why it might be more efficient, besides the lessened excavation you need to accomplish:
1. generation of non-background stuff (stone) -- there are random chances for a given block to be part of a vein of non-stone, *but* each check is done using your computer's random number gererator. Background: random numbers are typically generatored using a 'seed' as a starting point, more or less ... the less often this seed is updated, the better the chances you'll get some repetition, or at least clustering, in those 'random' numbers ... and that could skew the chances for rare inclusions in the earth, for where random numbers cluster, so, too, will diamonds/redstone/gold/...and lava.... Key here is how it's coded (if that seed is refreshed often enough -- and different computers might run the same code differently, as far as random number seed, too).
2. As some folks have pointed out elsewhere on these forums, sometimes you get trees floating in the air over or nearly over water. Their suggestion was trees are added to the map first (when a new chunk is created for the first time), then the water is added. And when water is added, some blocks are deleted to make way for the lake/stream/puddle. This is probably how lava (and even caverns) get added to the game -- would explain how sand/gravel can be floating over an open cave, too. The question which applies here is when lava displaces stone in caves, does the code try to avoid displacing diamonds? (Meaning the lava might effectively errode the stone around the diamonds, leaving them behind, just as natural (rl) errosion leaves fossils exposed on the surface or on the cutbank of a river.)
The first is 'if you find something, you might be more likely to find something else nearby' while the second is a weighted errosion algorithm. I don't know much about Minecraft's code, other than the snippet I saw in crop growth rates on minecraft wiki seems to be in some version of 'C,' but these are common considerations in many games.
my 2 Mojang coppers ;')
Posts: 2 Creeper Deaths Today: 0 (so far) Lapis Lazuli mined this week: 0 Squids slaughtered today: 3
...in Dungeons and Dragons, flames prevented trolls from returning....
Seems chickens can outrun lava....
denotes a space you have dug through
[] denotes unknown material
or denote known material (different materials correspond to being discovered from different branches)
As everyone knoes, using 1x2 branches exposes rock in this pattern:
[] []
[] []
the most common way to branch mine looks like this:
[] [] [] [] [] []
[] [] [] [] [] []
However, you can obtain maximum possible efficiency over large volumes with this method:
as you can see, you can mesh it together forever up, down, left, and right, and never expose the same line twice.
[FAQ] Extremely Common Problems
[OFFICIAL] Dragon Cave Thread
I don't see how that could possibly be better. I was doing some branch mining today and I encountered several diamond deposits that were vertical only. On that note, your response indicates a method which involves excavating the same number of blocks. It therefore has an identical blocks mined per area covered, and has a greater failure rate. Is there something I'm not seeing that gives it an advantage?
This has quite a large failure band, in fact. It'd be fine for coal (which is always in huge deposits) but I wouldn't use it for diamonds or lapis.
failure band (indicated in red):
edit - while I was doing that, I realized that you do save some mining, but still. You could miss a patch of 6 diamonds doing that.
[FAQ] Extremely Common Problems
[OFFICIAL] Dragon Cave Thread
Here is an exhaustive analysis of mine patterns, if you are interested. It starts in section 4.
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=28299
"Elites Of Minecraft: The Miner [First Ore loss Calculated]"