Welcome back to another geology episode 1.18 drastically changed or distribution so that certain oras are more common at various levels instead of just finding more as you go deeper if you’re new here my name is nice and in real life I’m a geologist let’s look at Minecraft ores And see how they compare to the real life counterparts the World download is available if you want to follow along or just explore on your own it’s in version 1.20.1 and there will be a popup for some experimental features but everything will work just fine in vanilla I’ve been thinking about this For a while and the real life ores are so different from each other that they really need to have their own episodes this episode’s going to be a bit of a primer for those that are coming we’ll talk about all the ores cover some Basics and in the later episodes we’ll Talk about the specifics and details for each ore and its real life counterpart let’s go out to the or exhibit I’ll also be making a video on the differences between what a mineral Rock Gem and Crystal R before those just because it’s going to come up a lot in These episodes and it’s a common question that I get in real life as well as of 1.20 we have eight ores found in the Overworld and two to four in the nether depending on how you count things ancient debris is not called an ore and the name implies it isn’t natural but I’ll still talk about it there is also gilded Blackstone which you can smelt and it’s not exactly clear if it’s a natural or synthetic Block in the game but for now let’s go out to our excavation site okay let’s start by clearing this out and only leave the ore In real life ore is a naturally occurring rock or sediment that contains the desirable element or material but it also has to contain it in a high enough concentration to make it worth the effort of Mining and processing for example lots of rocks contain a small Amount of gold in them but if it costs more to mine and process than the gold is worth it’s not worth doing and it’s not an ore if the demand for material goes up or a new method of refinement is discovered making it more profitable something that was just a rock or even An old way material may become a viable ore what is and isn’t considered an ore can change over time even if you’re talking about the same Rock to help display something I’m going to add a white background here this hole here is 128 by 128 blocks or 64 chunks in total If we count up each type of ore layer by layer we’ll be able to see their distribution by depth this area isn’t a large enough sample size to get a true distribution of ores and it’s complicated further due to some of the space being caves and the air taking up Locations where you could have orig generate so the numbers don’t exactly reflect perfect ratios but they’re close part of our area is also in the mountains so we will have a few emeralds showing up here and there there are some other biomes where oras generate in higher concentrations like gold in the Bad lands and copper in dripstone caves and we also have veins for iron and copper and I’ll talk about them in their specific or episodes I’ll let this finish up and then we’ll talk about the distribution coal should max out around y96 but since our area is mostly Air at that elevation Uh it was most abundant around y80 Copper maxes out around 48 and then iron is around 16 lapis is around zero gold is you know -16 and then diamonds and Redstone just keep increasing as you go down real ores are not entirely dependent on depth let’s H over to the Big ball in the Horizon I decided that I needed to add this display part of the way through recording and editing so it will come and go in some shots earth started out as an homogenous ball with all the elements equally distributed throughout the planet over time heavier elements like Iron and nickel were pulled more by gravity and sank to form the core the lighter elements floated to the surface to form the crust that we live on present day the earth looks something like this we have a solid iron inner core a liquid outer core and then a Thick mantle it’s always shown as this orange color and diagram and that’s right and wrong like we discussed in the how hotest Lava episode the mantle is hot enough to Glow so it is emitting an orange light but if you cooled it down its color would actually be green we Know this because certain volcanoes bring up parts of the mantle I have a piece here from Antarctica the black part is basalt but the green crystals are actually what the mantle looks like and it makes up 84% of the earth so this is actually what most of the earth looks Like the crust in our layer is uh not to scale by the way but the rest is pretty close the actual continental crust would be about 1/3 of a block and the oceanic crust would only be about 05 of a block the deepest drilling project in history Only ever got about onethird of the way through the crust so when we’re talking about ores we’re still only really dealing with the very thin layer that we’re mining to further concentrate specific elements and materials into ores the crust is acted upon by things like hydrothermal magmatic weathering And sedimentary processes these take a geologically long time to form and we use them much faster than new or or is created some ores were only made at a specific time in Earth’s history and can no longer be made even if we waited forever let’s go look at the blocks we Call these blocks ore blocks but really The Ore is the stuff we want the material we don’t want that’s mixed around with the ore is called Gang uh g n gu e we mine the block and we get the ore and I guess just the rest disappears In real life you separate the ore from the gang and that unwanted material is called the tailing so technically we should get back some Cobble or gravel or something like that along with the ore and I know we are limited to 1 M blocks in Minecraft but another little nitpick or just something To think about is that we can take ore and make a raw block out of it and then we can refine that same ore and make a block from it that is the exact same volume in real life you lose volume during the refining process that’s the point you’re removing things that you Don’t want from the material so maybe that means that these blocks aren’t necessarily solid for the Minecraft ores I thought it would be interesting to see how the amount found in our hole here compares to what the entire Earth produced last year I’ll be getting most of my data from the 2023 mineral Commodity summary published by the United States Geological Survey on the Minecraft side I’m going to calculate everything as if the ore was mined with fortune 3 I’m assuming that fortune isn’t magically multiplying the amount of material in the ore but it’s just making us better at extracting it and That kind of breaks down with lapis where even without Fortune you can get nine lapis liy then you can make a block that’s the same size as the ore with fortune 3 you can get a Max of 36 and make four blocks so just another reason maybe to think that the resource blocks Aren’t actually you know completely solid in order to convert real life volumes into Minecraft volumes I have to make the assumption that the blocks are of solid material though there are a few other entities with lapis in the game as well for the rest of the ores we are Wanting to get a specific mineral or element but lapis Lai is actually a rock it gets its blue color from the mineral lazerit but lapis lazery usually has calite and pyite in it as well I have a sample here that doesn’t have any pyite in it but you can still see the blue Lazarit and the white calite I also have this lapis elephant that normally sits on my desk in the game it only seems like we’re mining lazerit our hole here had 1,390 ore which produces almost 2,29 lapis blocks I’m just going to be rounding to the nearest block when I say Most of these and Lapis is the only or that I don’t have Good Earth numbers for how much we mined last year I imagine that it’s not much since besides being pretty there isn’t an economic use for it anymore historically it was ground up as a die but I’ll talk more about that In its own episode it’s still a good source of die in the game since you get so much of it from the ore and the enchanting table has lost some of its use with villager trading just being so easy there isn’t a real life magical Rock Like Redstone but I wanted to include it here just for completeness there are some real life minerals that look very similar to it and most of them contain some pretty nasty elements vanadinite here is a lead mineral with vadium in it and the red and orange minerals in this samples are Realgar and oint both of them are Arsenic sulfides and the next one might be my favorite especially with it being in this darker mineral which makes it look like deep slate Redstone oree the red is cinear a Mercury sulfide and the dark mineral is site an antimony sulfide all Of them are toxic I’ll go wash my hands I’ll probably do a speculation episode at some point in the future on Redstone for here our excavation produced 1,139 blocks all right let’s talk about some real life ore most people think about an Old Prospector painting for Gold in a stream but those types of deposits called Placer deposits are usually just gold being washed down stream by erosion the real gold ore is some rock Upstream on an industrial level we mine ores that have very little gold in them they usually contain other important elements as well which make it Worth it even high-grade gold or only contains about 8 to 10 grams of gold per ton of rock this piece here is a core taken from a gold mine in the Upper Peninsula Michigan it only has about 0.15 grams per ton of gold but it also contains a few perent of nickel copper And then small amounts of silver Cobalt platinum and platium as well the combination of all those Metals makes it worth processing we got 1,367 ore from our excavation which would produce 334 cubic met of gold and by comparison last year the Earth mined 3,100 metric tons of gold solid gold Weighs 19.3 tons per cubic meter so that’s about 161 cubic M of gold total for the whole earth it’s wild to think that this hole almost produced twice that I just had a video idea it would be cool to have an episode looking at the elemental composition of Earth’s crust Compared to Minecraft I think that would be fascinating uh I guess I’ll have to add it on to my list one of the elements that’s commonly found with gold is copper you can find it as a Placer deposit like gold like you find nuggets of it and it was common in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I have a few pieces from there copper is one of the few metals that you can find in this raw form like this and even this bigger one is small for some of the pieces that have been found up there copper was the second most abundant ore in our Excavation and since it produces 7.7 ingots per ore on average it produced 6,000 and 46 blocks more than double any other resource block this display is about the maximum number of gravity blocks I can summon without it just becoming a slideshow so if you are exploring this world on a stora system You might have some issues it would be nice to have more uses for copper in the game but its abundance is there because copper and quartz are really the only two ores that you’re meant to be using their resource blocks as building blocks you know I guess anything can be used as A building block in Minecraft but nobody’s expecting survival players to build houses with diamond blocks in real life it’s commonly mined with gold copper concentrations can make up a few percent of the bulk Rock last year we produced 22 million metric tons of copper from mining which is almost 2. 5 Million blocks of copper a cube would almost be 136 blocks on a side and that’s far too big to summon gravity blocks so instead I’m going to use my old standby the display entity I can make this 136 blocks on a side and we Can kind of start to see a bit of the scale that we are talking about I still feel like some of the scale is lost when doing this so let’s do it another way too I’ll bring this one back down and and our excavation over here is 128 by 128 Blocks last year Earth’s copper production would basically fill this entire hole down from – 58 up to y00 remember that this is the actual metal amount not the volume of ore mind either that volume would be at least 100 times larger than this continuing on with diamonds they are the hardest known Mineral they are pretty little pie pieces of carbon that are not that rare but are very useful for many applications who wants a dumb clear mineral when there are so many more interesting colors and natural stones I have a bunch of dumb clear minerals in my freezer the gem quality mineral is what Jewelry companies try to push on you but the much more common and more useful industrial grade diamonds are used for abrasives and a lot of other things I have an old engraver at work that I use that has a natural diamond in it it’s cheaper to make diamonds now but natural Ones are found in composits called kimberlite pipes these are old magma conduits that brought up a lot of odd minerals from Earth’s mantle I have some kimberlite here but this sample doesn’t have any diamonds in it as a byproduct of gem quality mining we recovered 46 million carats of industrial diamonds Last year this might seem like a lot but a carrot equals .2 G which converts to about 2.6 blocks our excavation on the other hand had 834 four blocks which when mined would be about 204 diamond blocks or about 75 years worth of Earth’s production I just Thought of something else we could do we could figure out how many carrots a single Minecraft diamond is since a diamond block weighs 3,510 kg and a diamond is 1 nth of that block and one carat is .02 kg divide the weight of the block by the number of diamonds it takes divided By not divid divid by 0 divided by 002 and we get 1,9 50,000 carats for one Minecraft diamond and for comparison the Hope Diamond is 45.5 2 karats and the world’s largest raw diamond ever found was only 3,16 Kat just like in Minecraft real life emeralds are one of the rarest gems And this is one of the cases where the mineral and the gem have different names and there are several gem quality versions with different names depending on the color emeralds are the green gem quality version of the mineral Barrel the blue Gem of barrel is called Aquamarine I have some here and you can see the natural hexagonal shape that the crystal grows in while the gems are rare the mineral Barrel is not some of the world’s largest crystals are barrels this one is pretty big and not a gem but you can still see the hexagonal shape on The one end and while maybe not the prettiest it’s one of my favorite samples and I don’t have have information on how much Barrel or emeralds we mined on Earth last year but I do know that we mined about 280 tons of brillium and Barrel is a primary Source for that metal which has many applications in science Alloys and the nuclear field since we know the mineral formula for Barrel we know each element’s abundance and we can look up their atomic weight we can calculate the percentage that Brillion makes up of Barrel’s total weight and then use that To calculate how much Barrel you would need to mine to get 280 tons of pilum to get 5,56 67 tons and then we can use the average density of 2.76 tons per cubic meter to get about 2017 cubic met of barrel mined last year our Minecraft hole on the other hand had About 32 blocks of ore which makes about eight blocks total not really the fairest comparison because the excavation site wasn’t all mountain and in Minecraft We’re mining emeralds not Barrel but I thought it was a fun comparison all right so this is where things really get interesting let’s talk about iron Our Minecraft excavation yielded 1,167 blocks of iron and for Earth even though most of the iron has sunk into the core there is still a substantial amount left in the Earth’s crust the ore deposits that we mine are incredibly Rich usually between 30 and 60% iron we mine what are called Banded iron formations they are commonly alternating layers of hematite and iron mineral and then silicate minerals they can look extraordinarily beautiful and they are my favorite formation for multiple reasons this sample here is specular hematite and it Glitters in the Sun as if it was pure metal I took it From a waste Pile in an old mine last year we mined 2.6 billion tons of ore which contained 1.6 billion tons of usable iron and 1 cubic meter weighs 7.9 tons and that converts to over 200 million blocks or a cube that is 288 meters on a side that’s a little bit More than build height so even using display entities it’s very difficult to get a sense of scale so I made a custom Dimension with a bigger build limit if you’re using the World download this is the experimental part that it warned you about when you open the world if you Have a slower system this might struggle for me it works okay if you allocate six gigs of memory to Minecraft this blew my mind uh I thought for sure that I was doing something wrong but I can’t can’t find an error let’s fly up to the top So at the top we can’t even see the ground just a little bit of a mountain toop sitting there it just seems so ridiculous that we produce this much each year they’re the clouds down there while we’re on the topic of ridiculousness let’s talk about coal cuz if you thought iron was Crazy it gets a lot worse last year we mined 8.3 billion tons of coal there are several types of coal and they all have their different densities bituminous coal is in the middle and it’s also the most common type of coal its average density is 1.3 Tons per cubic meter this yields a cube of coal that is 1,800 and 61 blocks on a side as we stand on the top of the iron Cube here we are not even onethird of the way to the top of the coal Cube let’s fly up I will have to speed this Up almost there great can’t even see the top of the iron from here so every year this volume is being dug up and burnt and converted into CO2 there is no such thing as Clean Coal by the way we’ll talk more about coal in its own episode and while we Don’t have oil in the game we produced about 84 million barrels of oil per day last year which would convert to a cube that is about 1,759 blocks on a side so just about the same size as this coal Cube there goes the iron Cube let’s get away from reality and Head to the nether I actually came back and added something else this is us here and then the excavation hole and then then there is the size of the iron Cube compared to the size of the coal Cube just something else to help a bit with visualization all right let’s go Back okay and for completeness our Minecraft excavation yielded uh 2757 blocks of coal we have four materials that we can smell in the nether we can find three almost anywhere can’t really see very well here but this is a similar 64 chunk area let’s start with gold and quartz These blocks are evenly distributed in every elevation and any variation is mostly due to ores not generating where there is air I’m not going to say much about the gold ore here it drops nuggets but even with fortune 3 you produce less than nine nuggets on average if you Smelt it it produces one Ingot per ore so silk touch and smelting is the way to go I’ll probably include more about it in the gold episode our nether excavation produced 238 blocks still more than all of Earth but less than the Overworld nether quartz is an odd one I Originally thought that it might be a different type of quartz since it had the nether in front of it like it’s not Overworld quartz not normal quartz it’s nether quartz something different but then they added nether gold and that’s just gold found in the nether so it Seems like it’s just quartz quartz is a mineral with the formula silicon dioxide one silicon and two oxygen the two most common elements in Earth’s crust so it’s everywhere in real life any rock you pick up almost always has some Quartz in it it’s a major component of all the ous Rocks we have in Minecraft but if we think of the definition of ore though maybe we don’t have the means to extract it from rocks in the Overworld and this nether quartz is the easiest way to acquire it in real life we mine quartz for a variety of reasons all the silica Chips and whatever device you’re using to watch this came from quartz any silicate glass we make in the world comes from some form of quartz our nether hole produced 3,57 blocks of quartz I think it’s the only four block or to Resource Block in the game so that leaves us with ancient Debris a strange lore Edition it can generate at any y level but it’s focused down at the bottom between levels 8 and 24 I don’t have much to say about it in this episode because there isn’t a comparison to real life the name debris implies that it isn’t naturally formed And smelting it yields scraps not ingots so it’s like you’re burning away something and just left with little bits of what was there I have a lot of thoughts on this but it’s all speculation in Game Theory our excavation here had 96 debris in total 72 were down in the normal range and if you were wondering would take a hole about 1,200 blocks in each Direction down in that abundant region uh to make a full netherite begin okay for the last material we have to travel Le reset this hole you can only find gilded Blackstone In basan remnants and I would like to write it off just as an artificial block made by piglins or whatever civilization made these structures but we seemingly have naturally generated Blackstone in other parts of the Nether and Blackstone isn’t a real life Stone by the way at Least Nothing by that name it appears closest to basal but we already have two messed up forms of that in the game you can smelt gilded Blackstone in a furnace or a smelter so I wanted to include it here for completionist sake let’s finish this up and head back to the Overworld before we go I have a history story that I like and is relevant to ore in refining aluminum is the third most abundant element in Earth’s crust but it wasn’t always a cheap abundant metal that it is today behind me is a one:1 scale model of the Washington Monument In Washington DC when it was finished being built in 1884 it was the world’s tallest structure at 169 M tall the Eiffel Tower ended up replacing it as tallest structure just 5 years later but the monument is still the tallest mostly Stone structure you see when they Finished it they wanted a showpiece item to cap the top of it something to show off to the world aluminum was an exotic metal that was difficult to refine and get in any large quantity a solid piece of aluminum was commissioned and while it only weighed 100 ounces it was the Largest piece ever cast two years later a more efficient method was discovered and within a decade the price fell from $16 a pound to 50 cents a pound it’s so common that I have a chunk more than double the size of the Capstone just sitting in the corner of my garage G Okay so I’m going to go around and reset everything and get this world ready for download I’m actually going to put written things in these Le turns this time I completely redid how this uh hole works by the way codewise it all works with a data pack now instead of chain Command blocks so it shouldn’t crash even on slow systems the plan for the next geology videos are to focus on the specific ores and go into more depth about what they are how they form when they formed and how the Minecraft or World compares to them I hope that you Enjoyed this episode it took me a lot longer than I expected but I had a real good time putting it all together I probably said that I’ll talk about it in another episode way too much but there was a lot that I decided not to include in this episode something that I added Was that homogeneous ball my wife suggested it after watching the rough edit and I’m glad I went back and put that in there if you have any specific questions about ores leave it in the comments and I’ll probably answer or maybe I’ll put it in that specific or Episode I hope you have a nice day and I’ll see you next time Video Information
This video, titled ‘How does Minecraft ore compare to Earth’, was uploaded by Gneiss Name on 2024-01-01 20:24:01. It has garnered 43747 views and 5220 likes. The duration of the video is 00:26:01 or 1561 seconds.
An introduction to ores. We talk about the minecraft ores and look at how they compare to real life ores and how much we mine each year.
World Download: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bc7JUf2bHXDawOV6ep8SSjkb4eiRm8Pa?usp=drive_link
