The Mine Mentor – 3 ways to find A LOT OF IRON in Minecraft 1.20

Iron is an essential material in the game.  I always had difficulties finding a lot of iron. I mean, of course, I always found some. But by the time I finally had enough to make iron armor and tools, I was bored to go look for more iron again.

Mojang made this graph on which you can see on which Y level each or generates and where it generates the most. For an ore like diamond it’s pretty simple: The lower you are, the more chance to find it. But for iron it is way more complicated.

You see, before the 1.18 update iron generated equally between Y 64 and Y 0. You didn’t have to go to a specific Y  level to find enough iron.  But that changed in the 1.18 update. And besides that iron is now also distributed in different batches. The first batch is this thin line, right here.

Here the iron distributes evenly between Y 64 and Y -63. alongside that batch we find the second batch of iron, which generates between Y 54 and Y -24, With the most chance at Y 15. This means if, you would go underground the best place to find iron is at Y 15 for Java edition,

And for bedrock edition  it’s almost the same but why 16. The best ways to mine iron here is by strip mining or by cave mining. Cave mining for iron is especially useful in the beginning of the game.

Because you can quickly spot some iron here and there  and use it for your tools and armor. But later, once you got your first collection of iron, it would be wiser to do strip mining Dig tunnels of 2 by 1, separated with two blocks.

This way you don’t waste your time mining a tunnel where one side was already exposed by the other tunnel   But even though this way you can find quite some iron at this level, it’s not the best way to find iron.

If we take another look to the graph we can see that the third batch is between Y level 320 and Y 120. With Y 232 being the level with the most  concentrated iron. For Bedrock addition it’s Y 255. The thing is you will need to have a mountain in the area you are.

If you have one close to you, you should definitely mine there for iron. Because, as you can see here, there is a lot more iron that you can find in this batch than in the first two batches. Strip mining will be the best method 

But you can even turn it up a notch by  making one by one tunnels. To do this you need a trapdoor. You put the trapdoor just above the  block that you are gonna dig out. Stand next to the trapdoor and then click on it to close it.

Now you are crawling and you can dig tunnels of 1 by 1, which is almost twice as fast as a normal two by one tunnel. But even though there is a lot of iron to find here, it’s by far not the best place to find iron.

There are places where you can find iron in abundance and easy to mine. Looking on the graph one more time we can see down here that there are also iron veins below Y 0. Mostly between Y -8 and Y -59.   It’s the best place to find iron!

In these veins you can find hundreds of iron ores connected to each other, with even some raw iron blocks every  now and then which contain 9 raw iron each.  But of course there is a catch. You cannot just go to this level and immediately find an iron or vein.

These things are rare, but they are down there  and to spot one you need to know something! You see these iron ore veins always spawn together  with a lot of tuff. Together they form these veins underground. So to spot an iron or vein, you should also be on the lookout for tuff blocks,

Especially when you see them next to iron ores, or even raw iron blocks. But even when you know how iron veins generate, they can still take some time to find. Strip mining is not the way to find these veins. That could take you way too much time.

My advice would be to don’t go down there and hunt for iron veins, But rather be alert when you are caving.  Pay attention to these three blocks when you are in a cave,   and when you take iron from the ceiling or from the wall. There could be an iron ore vein close to you.

And when you find one… You won’t be needing to look for iron for quite some time.