Minecraft - The Best Way To Find Diamonds 1. 18. Myth Busting 133
Minecraft 1.18
Minecraft 1.18 has changed the generation of the world forever, and it has also changed where the diamonds are. We know where the diamonds are because Moyang shared this image chart with us upon the release of 1.18. But nonetheless i've decided to conduct my own diamond counting tests to make sure our information is accurate, so with my tediously assembled spreadsheet of numbers and my history of diamond mining strategies.
I will arm you with the knowledge to figure out the best way to spend your time hunting for diamonds.
The other ores in 1.18
Before we get into it, let's make quick mention of the other ores in the game, as the overworld distribution for all of them has changed dramatically, so much so that the rarest ore in the game is now actually deep slate coal, so if you find one of these, be sure to go ahead and silt touch it.
Speaking of coal, the chart tells us the most common place to find it is around y 136. However, you won't always find terrain at this height, and as you go below y96, you will steadily find fewer and fewer of these things. When it comes to iron. Y16 is the best, but you can find tons more at the top of the world, but the catch is that you need terrain to mine it, so if you find a mountain high up, it's a great spot for iron coal and emeralds.
If you're in the correct biome, copper is best found at y48. And there is even more of it to be found if you're inside a drip stone cave, and you can also find lapis at this level if you're branch mining because it's unexposed, meaning it will be hidden behind other blocks. As you can see, it is most common at y0.
The copper ore veins can be found mixed in with granite between 0 and 50, and iron ore veins are mixed in with tough between -8 and minus 60.
Ore generation in 1.17
So anyways, here is how the ore distribution used to look in 1.17. It is quite a change, and we will require multiple mining strategies for different materials, but I am not here to go deep into that. Today we go deep into the diamonds. And while I have your attention.
Counting diamonds
The first thing I wanted to do for this article was confirm the numbers from Mojang were correct, so I used the carpet mod to count the deep slate and diamond ore blocks in the world, and this was the command that I used to count those ores inside one million blocks.
I did this at the relevant y levels from 17 all the way down to minus 64. That is a total of 82 million blocks and a little fun fact, 56. 673 of them were diamond ore blocks, so I created this chart to show diamond distribution, and if we stretch it a bit, it can look like Moyang's chart too, so I think theirs is indeed accurate, but notice there is a big drop off at the bottom of the world where bedrock will replace all the other terrain i also compared these numbers with 1.17, the diamond distribution, and if we match the values to the new bottom of the world, you can see 1.17.
Comparison to 1.17
Had less diamonds on average per layer with around 1 200 at its peak whereas 1.18, has 1 600, that's an increase of around a third more sounds great but deep slate is slower to mine so maybe that's why there are now more diamonds to be found at the bottom of the world so now in order to use these numbers we need to break down the mining technique and where in the world to actually mine , , and we're gonna do that here in my test world so first of all, we have to go over exposure, which is for each block that you break, how many more blocks do you expose.
Branch mining
As you'll see in this example, when I break these two blocks, I expose three on this level and three on that level, one above and one below.
Trapdoor
The better for this number, the better, which is why I also want to mention the trapdoor technique, where you can put yourself into a one-by-one hole, and this is basically the best way to mine, personally. I find this a bit of a pain because you also have to carry a trapdoor around with you and an axe to break it, so if you want to do this, it is technically more efficient, but you will find yourself discovering diamonds and other ores, and then you'll probably end up standing again and have to redeploy the trapdoor.
What height to mine for diamonds
For this article, though, I'm going to focus on the classic two-by-one, We need to think about where in the world we are mining for those diamonds. You already know it's down at the bottom of the world where we're going to find the most, but did you consider that at these two levels here, you will be revealing three times as many blocks, and this is really important when we determine at what level we're actually going to be mining at.
So here we are looking at one of my spreadsheets again and, as you can see, we got some new information added to it. This is pretty easy to understand. This number is copied across to here, and then the next two are copied across but multiplied by three, and then the bottom one is copied across again.
This is because we see three ores at this level above, and below we see just one. So below each of these, I've tallied up the total and the highest number would suggest the best place to mine. And based on the data that I have here, that would be y minus 59. And that can be confusing, because in the game the coordinates are going to say minus 58, but we're talking about the block that is below you, which is -59.
Diamond distribution
That's because we need to think about how the ores are spaced out in the world and how we need to space out our branch mines. So what you're looking at here is a regular Minecraft world, but I've stripped out all the blocks, except the diamond ore ones.
And what you're going to notice is that smaller amounts of diamonds are far more common. You can now find them in groups of two or even just one on their own far more frequently than in the previous version of the game. So if you think of these as the five branch mines that we have in a row, they are spaced too close together.
For example, if we were to find a group of diamonds on the side when we go down our next branch mine, we've already sort of discovered any clusters of diamonds in this space here, so for that reason, it is generally a good idea to space your branch mines further apart so you don't discover the same diamonds twice, and I mine even further apart than free blocks because I like to use a technique called "poke holes," which is where you turn to the side and break four blocks. turn to the other side, and do the same thing again, but there is a debate about how efficient this technique is, so I guess the choice is yours, but before you choose your technique, let's just think of a few other considerations.
Lava lakes
So, apart from the basics like being well prepared, bringing an end chest, food, and torches, the other consideration is lava lakes.
