Welcome to another minecraft article! It’s time to discuss the most common form of gathering resources- mining!
Mining is pretty much what minecraft is all about, and without mining, you will essentially n ever progress to any sort of advanced activity with the possible exception of farming. In minecraft, mining is the act of digging up blocks, either to take the blocks or to take a resource that was in the blocks, and thereby carving out a little notch into the world.
Now, this may seem simple, but there are a lot of considerations you need to have when you mine, and a number of things you will want to do to make it safer and more reliable as a means of gathering resources, transiting from one location to another, and creating space for living, storage, or other uses.
When you first want to mine, on your first day, you will be after only two resources- coal and cobblestone. These can be gathered virtually anywhere, but will be most accessible where you can find a cliff. You will notice when you see a cliff that the stone there provides a smooth, gray surface- this is the ‘natural’ state of stone, though you are unlikely to have such blocks normally. This is because when you mine stone with a pick, you break it up- so instead of dropping solid cubes of stone, it drops blocks of cobblestone, which is composed of smaller stones stacked together. Because of this, most things built of stone will have a different visual texture than the plain stone- and it’s something you can take advantage of in a number of ways when you are looking at aesthetics.
Of course, this article isn’t about aesthetics (or appearances), so I will move on.
In order to mine seriously, you’ll probably want to dig into the ground. A cliff face can work, but many cliff faces are small enough that you wind up digging down anyways, and besides, there’s a limit to how much space is in a mountain, even if it’s a big one with a nice large cliff face.
If you’re lucky, there’s a chasm or pit from the surface down a ways into the stone beneath- but you may have to dig your own. But wait! Before that, you need to remember the two most important rules for going underground (aside from ‘have torches’)- never dig straight up, and never dig straight down.
This is because you cannot see through blocks.
If you dig out the block above you and it was holding up gravel or sand, you will get a nasty headache from falling material, and start suffocating and taking damage. If you dig out the block above you and it was holding up water, you may have just flooded a big chunk of your tunnel or the cave you were digging in. These, at least, are easily recoverable. If you dig out the block above you and there was lava above that, well, you’re probably about to burn to death in addition to flooding some of your tunnel with lava.
Since dying drops your possessions where you died and any object dropped into lava catches fire and is destroyed almost instantaneously, this can be fairly crippling.
Just as bad is digging straight down. If you dig up the block you were standing on and there was a cave beneath it, you’re about to get introduced to the cave floor at high speed, which is bad for your legs. If you dig up the block you were standing on and there was water beneath it, then you’ve just dropped into water in the dark and may not have an easy way out of the water.
And, of course, if you dig up the block you were standing on and there was lava underneath it, say goodbye to everything you were carrying at the time.
The third rule, of course, is to have torches with you. There are two very good reasons for this.
First of all, underground areas will spawn monsters at any time of day if they are dark enough. Without torches (or another lasting light source), every return to the surface will be fraught with danger. Fraught!
I like that word.
-cough-
Also, it’s really hard to see where the ores you want are when you can barely discern your own pick in the dark.
The other reason is for marking purposes. It can get difficult sometimes to tell which direction you are going underground. If you establish a pattern for your torch placement, you can use them to mark for yourself which way leads back to the surface and which way leads deeper into your dig. A simple decision like putting the torches on the right-hand wall can do wonders for reducing the time you spend wandering around underground trying to find the place you were last time you were in your mine.
Of course, just as any other time that you go out to do work, you will want to have food with you- and you’ll want to bring the materials for a base camp with you as well, though I’ll discuss that in my next article.
As a minimum though, before heading underground to mine, you will always want these five things with you- A pick, a shovel, torches, food, and a sword or an axe with which to defend yourself from the denizens of the subterranean areas.
