Journeyman Mining in Minecraft- Ore Veins

Welcome to another Minecraft article!  In this article, I’m going to be talking about ore veins.

All of the valuable substances underground- from coal all the way up to diamond and redstone- are found in veins.  These veins are sets of blocks- from five up to over twenty- that all hold the same resource and all share at least one edge with at least one other block in the vein.  Because these veins may be connected only by an edge and not by the face of a block, you need to be careful and thorough when you are mining out ore.  If all you do is dig every block of ore or coal you see up, you can easily miss pockets of useful materials.

It also pays to be aware of the order in which the game constructs the world- because ore veins are put into place before chasms, caves, underground water sources, and gravel pockets, these features will often cut across them.  Not only does this make these features useful ways to find ore easily if you have a little luck, it also means that if a vein of mineral runs up to one, it may run out the other side of it as well.  On the other hand, a vein of ore that encounters such a feature is likely to be cut off and therefore smaller than it would have been.

Another useful bit of information is that veins of mineral- from gold to coal- tend to be placed near to each other.  It seems to be most common with diamond and coal- at depths where diamond can be found, the veins of diamond are often attached to the side of the veins of coal- but you will also find coal veins running into iron, redstone veins running into gold, iron, or diamond, and occasionally iron veins that run into gold (though this is less common).

Coal is the most common material you’ll find underground short of stone itself.  Veins of coal tend to be very large and a bit strung out.  It isn’t unusual to find nearly twenty blocks of coal in a vein, stretched out six to ten blocks of length.

Iron is second most common, and while the veins are usually much smaller than coal (usually about ten to twelve blocks), they are equally strung out much of the time, requiring a lot of digging to excavate the whole vein.

Redstone, though it is restricted to being found near lava or at the deepest parts of the underground, is generally the third most common ore, and its veins are usually only a little bit smaller than iron veins.  This doesn’t hurt much, though, as redstone blocks yield up to four ‘units’ of redstone powder.  Redstone veins vary in shape, and can be nearly cubical or stretched out over long distances.

The third rarest mineral underground is lapis.  Lapis blocks will often yield more pieces of lapis than redstone blocks do units of redstone powder, making it very easy to have a surfeit of lapis.  Lapis is usually found in veins of about three to seven blocks, and usually isn’t in contact with other veins of ore.  Lapis veins tend to be compact, if nothing else because of their small size, so they are easy to mine out.

Diamond, surprisingly, is the second rarest material to mine in the underground.  You are more likely to run out of it, because it is more useful than gold, but it is actually a bit less rare- particularly if you are willing to mine regularly in the deepest parts of your map.  Diamond comes in veins of three to six blocks, and is only occasionally strung out- usually each block of diamond ‘ore’ is adjacent to as many of the others in its vein as it can be.

The hardest to obtain mineral underground is gold.  Gold, like diamond, tends to appear in veins of three to six blocks, but these veins are a bit more strung out and will frequently either be along the side of another vein or stretched at a diagonal through the surrounding stone.

When mining a vein, keep in mind that blocks of ore may be touching only on an edge- the surest way to mine out an entire vein is to dig out all of the stone surrounding the ore before you dig up the ore itself.  This ensures you do not miss any ore blocks, though it does take longer and wear out more mining tools.  It generally is worth it though- often you’ll uncover veins of other material in the process of mining this way, and you will find yourself with far greater abundance of the materials you dig up.