Game Theory: Minecraft, Stop Using Diamonds!

And one of the most anticipated things in this update is the addition of netherright now netherright is essentially a level up from diamonds the gear is better than diamond everything like that is better than diamond and obviously all the weapons hello internet welcome to game theory the show that reminds you

To never waste your diamonds on hoes over the last year we’ve talked a lot about minecraft lore on the channel from the history of the endermen to the wither to the drowned to the piglens to the illidars like i said there has been a lot of lore that we’ve been piecing together

For this game but today i wanted to talk about something a bit different something that came as a part of the huge update to the nether that just happened back in june you see we finally finally got ourselves a brand new ore netherrite and that alone would be a

Pretty big deal i mean the last ore actually introduced into the game was nether quartz back in 2013 and the last ore that people actually cared about introduced in the game was emerald back in 2012. sure ores over the years have gotten themselves texture upgrades here and there but nothing new has really

Shaken up minecraft’s mineral hierarchy for the better part of seven years but that’s not all that makes netherrite special not only is netherite new it completely changes the game to quote from the official nether update page discover netherrite a powerful new material that makes diamond look like cobblestone

Oh get dunked on diamond there’s a new stone in town and it is but ugly but it is rare and powerful and can be used to upgrade your diamond based gear so it’s stronger more durable and floating lava so yay after 10 years of diamond domination it being the uncontested champion or in

Minecraft the cyan blue stone that defined this game in its visual style the ore that everyone ran around to show off their mining and crafting skills it’s now fallen off the top of the heap the stone that launched a thousand cosplay and parody videos is as the update says

No better than cobblestone it was a huge huge shock to the minecraft community when it was announced but not to me you see i’ve known for a while that diamond tools aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be and that for years the minecraft community has been overlooking the true

Best material of the game one that has been hiding in plain sight since the very beginning so step aside netherright hand over your crown diamond there’s a new old ore that’s top of the class that all the real miners and crafters are gonna be running around with starting today

Today we are flipping the ore hierarchy on its head to show you what the latest of gamers should really be using as they roam around the minecraft overworld on its face it’s easy to understand why diamond’s been the reigning champion of the minecraft world for a decade

Diamonds have this air of being super rare and super valuable in the game this is absolutely true and while it isn’t quite so true in real life it’s actually all a bunch of marketing hype and artificially limited supply lines by the diamond cartel to boost prices and demands which is a

Story for another day or i guess a different channel but anyway at the very least real life diamonds are marketed to be super rare and super valuable but perhaps most importantly for our discussion today diamonds are the hardest material on earth no joke the word diamond actually

Originates from a greek word which means unconquerable and the scale that’s used to measure hardness the mohs hardness scale invented by mineralogist friedrich mose was set up as a 10-point scale based on diamond being the maximum 10 out of 10 hardness now technically speaking there are some chemical compounds that have

Been found to be harder than diamond in 2009 scientists discovered that when materials like wurtzite boron nitride and lonsdaleite were exposed to certain laboratory conditions they actually ran a higher hardness rating than diamond but you know that was only under specific laboratory conditions meaning the claim that nothing is harder than

Diamond is still one that absolutely holds up besides who would walk around the minecraft overworld wearing something called wurtzite boron nitride armor i probably totally would do that anyway all of this is actually a big part of the reason why diamond jewelry is so sought after these days the jewelry

Industry has done a good job of taking the hardness of diamond and using it as their marketing catchphrase diamonds are forever and so it’s the stone that you should give someone if you truly do love them forever what is this tanzanite get your crappy tanzanite out of here so the tldr

Here is that diamonds are really hard and that hardness makes them incredibly useful for stuff like mining and i’m not just talking about minecraft but in real life where diamond tools are used to cut through hard rock surfaces the drill tips for massive industrial drills or heck

Even some of your basic drill bits at home are covered in diamonds they’re also great because drilling through rock creates a ton of friction and friction creates heat enough heat to melt or deform a hard metal tip but a diamond cover tip can deal with that sort of heat just fine because diamond

Has an extremely high melting point so if diamonds are good enough for real world miners using industrial equipment then why am i making a theory poopooing them surely they must be good enough for an intrepid minecraft adventurer right no diamonds are indeed harder than any other substance

On earth or i suppose in the overworld of minecraft prior to the introduction of netherrite and their ability to withstand high heat is useful for many applications but just because diamonds are harder doesn’t mean that they’re tougher is diamond the hardest absolutely is diamond the toughest no not at all

And you see that’s the real issue here toughness is a real scientific term defined as a material’s ability to resist fracturing when force is applied and the two are actually inversely related for an easy demonstration of this consider two bottles one made of glass and the other made of plastic clearly the

Plastic bottle isn’t as hard as the glass bottle if you squeeze you can probably deform the plastic and it hurts way less to get hit on the head with a plastic bottle than a glass one the glass bottle is therefore tougher right well not so fast think

About what happens if you drop both these bottles on the floor or throw them against a wall the plastic bottle will probably bounce around a bit but mostly be unharmed the glass bottle on the other hand is way more likely to shatter when it’s dropped the glass may

Be harder but the plastic is tougher the harder something is the more stiff it is therefore the easier it is to shatter all this to say diamond is not unbreakable apologies to all your jojo stands out there in fact for as hard as it is it’s actually shockingly easy to break just

Look on youtube and there are dozens of videos of people shattering diamonds with basic hammers hardness comes with a trade-off diamonds can take a bit of force before they deform but when they do deform everything shatters at once what this means is that diamonds are great for some things but a

Terrible option for others for instance in the real world diamonds are great for cutting so that might make you think that they’d be ideal for cutting down a tree and you would be absolutely right if you were using your minecraft diamonds to coat a saw blade but as any minecraft player will tell

You trees aren’t something that you saw down they’re something that you chop down and a lot of the cutting force of a chop comes from the impact something that your purely diamond axe head won’t be taken too kindly to a typical axe swinging person will strike a tree with a blow equal to

About 80 pounds of force and given the fact that a swing of less than 5 pounds of force can be enough to shatter a diamond it’s pretty safe to say that when your diamond axe head hits the tree the tree won’t be the one doing the

Breaking and we know for a fact that diamond is the only thing inside of that axe head cause we see the recipe for crafting it right there displayed for us on screen but okay what about mining we talked earlier about diamonds being used on industrial drill bits helping them cut

Through the earth so at the very least the diamond pickaxe should be a viable tool for that half of the minecraft equation except it’s not because of how easily it shatters diamond is terrible for smashing things which is a big problem in the world of minecraft mining where you break through rock

Surfaces by smacking away at them with a pickaxe made of pure diamond a few poorly placed axe hits and you’ve shattered your blinged out pick to dust the reason it works for real world mining operations is because you’re not smacking the rocks with the diamond you’re rubbing the rocks

Against the diamond it’s like really intense really expensive sandpaper and of course the idea of diamond armor is just right out the window after all an arrow which in the real world would travel at a velocity of around 225 feet per second or 69 meters a second is gonna have enough kinetic

Payload to deal damage to your armor and as i mentioned before the problem with diamond is that if its structure changes just a little bit it’s gonna break and it’s gonna shatter again the problem with diamond is that it can’t deform to dent or scratch anything with enough force to bend it

Will break it including a well-placed skeleton’s arrow so real talk here diamond tools and armor never that good to begin with but at least now we have ourselves netherright the new strongest material in the game the fact that creating netherrite equipment requires you to first have diamond equipment implies

That netherright armor is at least partly diamond maybe it’s some kind of diamond netherite composite that makes both materials stronger when fused together unfortunately that’s probably not the case while metals can be mixed with other metals to form more powerful alloys diamond don’t play nice with others again it’s a problem with its

Hardness the things that make diamonds so hard is also what makes them difficult to mix with other materials diamonds are chemically unreactive which is a great thing if you want a wedding ring that you can take into the shower with you but a terrible thing if you’re

Trying to mix it together with another material to make that diamond less brittle which means that the all-powerful netherrite armor in minecraft is just diamond armor with a coating of netherites that would explain why the color when you upgrade the armor goes from the sparkly diamond to a dull shade of whatever

This is supposed to be seriously if this is supposed to be the prestige armor it should look more blingy but not only is netherrite armor a visual downgrade it’s also just a terrible functional idea if all you’re doing is covering diamond tools with a layer of whatever netherite supposed to be

That means that you’re getting none of the benefits of diamond while keeping all of the disadvantages of diamond even if the netherright coating on your diamond armor is some kind of wonder material that has all the good properties of a strong metal and bends like good effective armor should

The diamond plate on your chest is still gonna crack if the nether right layer gets bent and then the sharp diamond that’s only good for cutting isn’t gonna be facing the enemy it’s gonna be pressed against your body not only is diamond armor a bad idea to

Start with but taking it and then covering it with a layer of netherrite coating is an even worse idea that takes the lame idea of diamond armor and actually makes it potentially more dangerous if that netherite stuff is so good just use that to make your armor and tools stop

Messing around with all the brittle diamond stuff or maybe the real solution is to go back to basics the ideal armor or heck tool for that matter should be made of a material that’s strong and tough by strong i mean the scientific term to describe how much

Stress a material can take before it deforms and tough how much they can resist fracturing after they’ve been cracked how about gold the old butter armor well gold does have itself a high toughness it’s what’s known as a soft metal but it has a low strength due to how easily it bends

Nope as it turns out our old standby iron does great on both of these scales it’s not too soft like gold but it also doesn’t break easily like diamond of all the ores available in the game iron is gonna be the actual best choice if you want it even stronger

Hop back on that crafting table and add a little bit more carbon to that iron and you get yourself steel or at least you would in the real world and honestly you should be able to craft steel in minecraft too considering coal exists in this game and coal is

Just a big old lump of carbon not to mention the fact that steel is already shown to exist in this universe in the form of flint and steel i know a lot of mods make steal an actual ore in the game but the game itself should have it be accessible and

It would be stronger than literally every other ore currently in the game i know what the game mechanics say but my true loyalty has got to be to real science maybe one of these days we’ll get a patch that makes the crafting system more scientifically accurate and

The most exciting part of the crafting will be deciding whether you want a steel alloy with three percent carbon or six percent carbon as for all those diamonds well maybe you should be using them on your hose after all but hey that’s just a theory a game theory thanks for watching

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