Huge Iron Ore & Copper Ore Veins! ▫ Minecraft Survival Guide S3 ▫ Tutorial Let’s Play [Ep.24]

Hello everyone my name is pixarius and welcome back to the Minecraft Survival Guide I hope you’re all having a good day in today’s episode we are heading back down into the caves we’re getting so familiar with this cave but there is a very good reason for that because down

Here a while ago we located something that I think it’s high time we talked about we are once again returning to the Deep slate levels of the cave and it’s not the amethyst geode but we’ve got something very close by that that we need to be paying special attention to

Right here in this little dip we have a creeper so we need to take care of him first but next to that we have found a pretty huge deposit of deep slate iron ore surrounded by tough this is a sign that we have run into a huge iron vein

Iron all veins like this can generate anywhere below y zero where the Deep slate levels of the world begin and these are exceptionally Rich veins of iron normally you’ll find iron in patches of one or two nearer the surface and then further down you can find it in

Larger patches of eight or nine or even 10 iron ore sometimes veins will generate a little bit closer to each other and you’ll get a little bit more but it tends to happen more in a lump of ore than it does in streaks like this so streaks like this surrounded by tough

Are usually a good sign that you may have stumbled across a huge vein of iron the dead giveaway is a block we removed from here the first time we encountered this which was a full block of raw iron the kind of thing that you get by crafting nine raw iron together that

You’ve just dug out of the ground yourself but these are not the only example of these large veins of ore generating in the world there is one other material that you can find huge veins of and on one of my twitch live streams a little while ago I was

Fortunate enough to run into the tail end of one of those veins although unfortunately that was right when my computer started crashing and I lost a little bit of progress in this world but I did keep the coordinates and so today we should be able to find that again I

Remember it was in this area because there’s a geode hanging from the ceiling right here but if I look around around at the walls we should be approaching the coordinates yes here it is this looks like the early stages of a huge vein of copper you’ll notice Granite

Generating around this and these occur in the stone layers of the world so anywhere above Y is zero and upwards up to about sea level at y 64. if I dig around the outside of some of this copper you will typically find that the granite starts to disappear further into

The Rock and as we mine out some of these blocks we’re uncovering more copper ore and there’s a cave underneath that so I should be a little careful here but today we’re going to spend a bit of time Excavating these veins to see how much material we can get because

These can be a huge Boon to iron and copper Reserves at this stage in the game before we have set up any Automatic Farms for either type of material now we’re going to be mining these out with fortunes so we can maximize the amount

Of material we get but I do want to keep a record of how many of the ore blocks we actually mine during this process and luckily for me Java editions statistics option has a really good way of checking this if you click on items and click on

Times mind you can see how many times you’ve mined each individual block which even comes down to stuff like plants and resources as of right now the most precious resources I’ve got have been coal or with 482 blocks mined but as I scroll down here you’ll see 282 blocks

Of stone iron ore appears whereas copper oh copper is right here below deep slate Redstone we have mined 197 blocks of copper ore I’ve taken a screenshot of that actually so I don’t forget it we are going to see that number Skyrocket once we have taken out this huge vein

We’ll also probably have mined a lot of granite and granite doesn’t appear quite high on this list we’ve only mined 58 blocks of granite total in this world so far that is less than a stack I have broken beds more frequently than I have broken Granite that is about to change

But the other one we’re looking for is right here deep slate iron ore is the variant of iron ore that appears in those huge veins along with tough block box so we’re going to be seeing a lot of iron ore in this episode as well and just like the copper we’re going to

Fortune that so we can acquire as much of the raw iron as possible I’ve already mined out quite a lot of tough because it generates frequently in the Deep slate layers and that’s where we’ll be looking for diamond ore of which I have only mined 40 so far but before we start

Mining the first thing I really want to do is make sure the area is somewhat secure so I’m going to go around and light up a few of these darker areas just to make sure that no mobs are going to sneak up on me I don’t really want a

Creeper blowing up some of this copper ore that I’m excited about Mining and with that done together we can take a look at the structure of these veins so as you can see lots of granite blocks generating around copper ore is a bit of a giveaway that we’re onto a huge vein

Here but you’ll notice there are other pieces of granite around here that generate in these kind of blobs and there’s no copper ore around this one and likewise there is copper ore over here in this wall but it doesn’t seem to have generated as part of a vein along

With the granite the granite here is kind of inside accidental the way you can keep track of it being a huge vein is that the materials will occur in these kind of streaky sections instead of clumping together into larger blobs like the granite does here and the

Blocks of ore will be very frequent in Granite and copper veins it’s kind of like a one to three or one to four ratio and as you start clearing away the blocks of granite you’ll expose a lot of copper ore blocks in the process just clearing away the granite from this

Section here we are uncovering more copper ore and as we dig through that copper ore we’re likely to uncover more granite and so it continues with all the granite removed we are left with a whole bunch of copper which we can now come in and mine and it goes without saying that

I’m going to need my Ender Chest for this because especially with Fortune we’re going to be getting a lot of copper I’ve already got two in a bit Stacks just from mining out this little area and wherever we see Granite from this point onwards we’re going to be

Continuing to mine through that in search of more blocks of copper ore so we’ll crack open the end of chest we’ll stuff the raw copper inside of there for now I’ll grab that with the silk touch pick and also go and grab a crafting table so that once we end up with enough

Copper we’re going to start condensing it down into full blocks of raw copper and that will save a bit of space in our ender chest once we’re done with the copper vein we’ll do exactly the same thing with the iron vein here and I think I’m probably going to set a time

Limit for each one since I don’t know for certain how long each one will go on for some of them can get massive so I’m thinking 90 minutes on each one makes sense because I normally stream on Twitch for about three hours and I will

Be doing this on a twitch live stream in fact by the time you’re seeing this video that live stream will already have happened so I’ve gone back home cleared out my inventory I’ve got a stack of logs with me we’ll grab some more coal for torches whilst we’re on our way down

Into the caves let’s do this and I’ll see you folks on the other side where we can look at the results hey folks welcome back so we have finished mining out both of those all veins or at least I finished a 19 minute session mining out each of those all

Veins the second of them the iron vein is still a work in progress because we spent 80 minutes over here mining out this area and pretty much every area here you can see that has been cleared that isn’t just natural cave generation like this if we come around the corner

Here you’ll see a little bit more where we had to continue tracking down that copper going through the granite here and any granite that you see left over is just naturally generated Blobs of granite that didn’t have any copper ore in them whatsoever but around here the

Twists and turns that this vein took we have ended up mining out all of the copper I could find but then after 80 minutes it was really kind of a struggle to see where this vein went if anywhere or if it was just done with and it had

All disappeared I really think of the two of them this vein was potentially the smaller one or maybe it just suffered from the amount of caves that generated around here if you take a look at the cave generation in these surroundings there are areas like this where the vein could have generated but

The cave generation has kind of taken over and going further up and around here where we could have encountered some more of the copper vein it seemed like the area was giving over into drip Stone cave generation and I sort of decided that that point that we should

Stop pursuing the copper or vein at least in this direction because drip Stone caves frequently generate copper in them so I wasn’t entirely certain which one was going to be the vein generating it and what was going to be natural generation from the cave so after 80 minutes of digging I felt like

I had tracked down all of the copper ore that I was going to find I mean there’s still some generating in the walls around here but I don’t think that’s part of the copper or vein itself and in the process of this I’ve dug up a lot of

Granite we now have a great deal of granite just kind of sat here in this chest that’s all from this vein all the granite that I feel like I was forced to dig up just to get hold of some more copper but copper we now have have in

Such large quantities and that’s really down to the fact that the copper ore will give you a bunch of raw copper if you mine it with Fortune 3. normally a single block of copper ore will drop between two and five raw copper but when mined with fortune 3 it can drop as many

As 20. on average according to people on the Minecraft Wiki who’ve done the maths it comes out to about seven or eight raw copper per block but now if I go to my statistics page we take a look at the Times mind we now have 1284 copper or mind which if we deduct

The 197 copper ore I’d already mind comes out to 1086 copper ore from basically every block we could find in that vein and like I said with the persistent mining effort that took about 80 minutes to find all of that and remember each one of these blocks of raw copper being made

Of nine of these raw copper items will smell down into nine copper ingots and so that constitutes a full block of copper once it’s been smelted which means we basically have 14 X of copper blocks at this point that’s quite a lot in fact the statistics panel here will

Also tell you how many items you have picked up if you click on this button at the top here and we have picked up by far the most raw copper that includes the amount of raw copper that we picked up in this world previously but I reckon

If you subtract a few hundred from that you’re still looking about 8 000 copper that we have mined just today alone and so if you imagine that took 80 minutes that’s about a hundred copper per minute that’s really not bad and now that my under chest is empty again we’re going

To take all of that raw copper back with us we’re going to take all of it in the end of chest and hopefully we will have room for all of the iron that I collected in the process of doing this I did take a note of how much durability

My diamond pickaxe had last week used the fortune pickaxe for basically every block we mined in there and after all that activity is left with 645 durability so he’d maybe knock two-thirds off of the durability of our diamond pickaxe although I did have to stop and get some coal at one point so

It might have gained some durability back from that now let’s go and compare the results from the huge iron vein that we found so I know for a fact that we have mined a lot more blocks of the huge iron vein and they weren’t all around

Here and yes I’ve really torn up the floor in order to make sure we got as many of these iron blocks as we can there’s still a little bit of tough around here so they could still be the occasional block of raw iron hanging out in here but I’m fairly certain we’ve got

Most of it from around here and we had to follow the iron vein back through the cave because sooner or later this area got fully depleted we ended up digging into my skeleton spawner at one point because the iron vein generated around there so I sort of intuited from some of

The iron ore that I’d seen growing on the pillars here in this cave that we ended up with an iron vein that went through the cave in this direction and eventually I Came Upon This patch over here where as you can see there’s a bit of tough next to that redstone ore I’ve

Been digging out a whole bunch there’s probably a little bit more buried in here although some of this could be just a natural blob of tough that generated as part of the cave but around here we really went to town digging some stuff out and in the process we found

Ourselves some goodies but if we come on down here this whole area everything that you see here was me digging it out in favor of finding all of that iron ore and down here at the end we are still going I mined this out for 90 minutes

And we were not done we were still finding other precious resources but we were definitely still finding more iron ore as well now going back to my statistics for a second if we go back to the times mind you will see that deep slate iron ore is now creeping up on

Copper ore there’s only 60 blocks between them but we started with a lot less deep slate iron ore mind originally because we’ve been mining regular iron ore we haven’t been going down here for iron ore as much so in total I figured out we have now mined

1133 iron ore from this huge vein which is about 50 more than the copper ore we were able to collect from the copper or vein so we’ve actually mined out more iron ore than we have copper we’ve also mined a lot more tough and deep slate

Now I’m pretty sure we had a decent amount of those before since we’d be getting those whilst we’re strip mining for diamonds and looking for other precious resources down in this level of the world so I’m not sure if we’ve actually mined more tough and deep slate

Than we did granite and natural stone when we were digging out these areas but we definitely got a lot more blocks out of it and I’m pretty sure that we pulled more blocks of deep slate and tough out of this vein than we did of granite out

Of the copper vein because this double chest is almost full of the tough and deep slate and we have a significant amount of it stored in this chest along with the iron this little chest above just has any stuff that was in my inventory that I wanted to stash away in

There that wasn’t part of the vein mining operation but take a look at the amount of iron we have it’s a little bit different than the amount of copper isn’t it and that’s really because a block of iron ore is only going to drop between one and four iron when you mine

It with Fortune so it’s nowhere near the amount of yield that you get from copper blocks considering you can get up to 20 Raw and you’re getting about eight on average from iron on average you’re getting two so cover is gonna get you four times as many it just stands to

Reason we definitely mind more raw iron so it does make sense that we’re going to be getting slightly more but the most telling thing I think is the pickaxe durability we’re at 232 from a fully repaired pickaxe I did go to my XP farm in between mining out the two veins and

Fully repair this pickaxe and I’m actually kind of surprised that we ended up mining more blocks of this considering that we are mining through deep slate and tough and while tough doesn’t break any slower than the granite does deep slate is a harder block to mine for the average pickaxe we

Do have a very efficient pickaxe we’re running efficiency fives the most efficient pickaxe we have at this stage in the game but deep slate still has a slightly longer time to break and the amount of deep slate we’ve collected here really does mean that we’ve ended

Up with a lot of those blocks slowing us down it’s probably only a minuscule amount but it does add up and I think where the discrepancy lies is the fact that the copper vein kind of led us on a bit of a run around I wasn’t sure where

The copper vein went a couple of times it disappeared into abandoned mine shafts and through caves and I lost track of it a couple of times whereas this iron vein just kept on giving us more iron and in the end I did spend 90 minutes on this vein and still didn’t

Finish whereas in 80 minutes of that copper vein it was pretty much gone so of course the other important stuff and the stuff that I’ve been neglecting to mine because I was more interested in the iron output from this vein we have a handful of diamonds and Redstone that

Are down here as well because of course if you’re digging around in deep slate levels you are bound to find this stuff sooner or later and there are some areas of this vein that go all the way down as far as Bedrock so I’m going to take

Advantage of this for a start it’s going to repair some of my diamond pickaxe which could extend your mining session down here even longer if you’re somebody who wanted to keep going whilst you were mining down here but look at this we’re getting a whole bunch of diamonds this

Is probably doubling what I’ve got left over in storage and once again this is right by a section that we haven’t mined out from the hue iron vein yet there’s a little more Redstone over here which I’ll grab seeing as it’s here A bunch more Redstone here in the wall so I’ve

Been effectively using these like landmarks so I might get a little bit more turned around now that I’ve removed them down here we have a bunch more gold ore that generated in a double vein and that’s really nice for bolstering our gold supplies and there’s even more iron

Behind it down here we have yet more diamonds there’s a patch of gravel here that seems to have erased any other chances of getting diamonds from there and down here this is a full vein of diamond that we found at Bedrock so that takes us to 28 diamonds that we found

Just by mining out this area and I think I might have left a couple over by the door yep there’s a couple up here as well let’s grab those while we’re at it 30 diamonds total so naturally in the process of digging out one of these veins you are going to uncover large

Areas of the terrain that were not previously exposed to the open air and as you might expect that is going to increase your chances of finding diamonds since they typically generate with less air exposure and this hasn’t been my first first time digging out these huge veins of all since they were

Introduced in Minecraft 1.18 but one thing I was reminded of this time is quite how Meandering and windy and maze-like these tunnels can get if you just focus on mining the tough and the ore and you leave the rest of the blocks around them so honestly one approach I

Might recommend even if it does take a little bit longer is to be more organized about the way in which you dig as you come down through here you’re gonna get all twisted and turned around and leaving torches on a wall while it’s obviously a pretty useful tactic in a

Cave might just end up getting a little too confusing I left some diamonds up here 33. another piece of advice I will have is that if you encounter one of these large Blobs of tough it’s often fairly clear whether or not the iron vein continues through them just dig

Through the center of it following the line that the trail of iron seem to be making and if you find some more iron ore blocks then it’s possible that it even goes through and out the other side but if like this you’re discovering that you just hit more tough it seems fairly

Likely that the Trail Ends there something I learned from the huge copper vein is that if the area around you seems to dry up and you’re not finding anything new check any nearby caves as I was progressing through the copper vein I wasn’t really finding a great deal of

Adjacent material but then I went into a cave and discovered a whole offshoot of the copper vein that had generated seemingly somewhere else and that led through to areas like this where this copper generation clearly isn’t part of the huge vein but is still a massive deposit of copper because we’re entering

A drip Stone cave where copper is more likely to generate and much like the diamonds and Redstone generating in the iron Vein The Copper vein is still going to be a pretty decent source of iron and gold and even lapis since each of those will generate around the same height

Range that copper does I even ended up finding one area down here past this little patch of gravel and I was starting to use landmarks like that to navigate by this time but I found an area down here where the copper vein crossed paths with an abandoned mine

Shaft and I did some digging around here and I found even more copper plus access to the abandoned mine shaft that I could explore and loot at my leisure oh there’s a little bit more of it here there we go I knew there was going to be

A touch more around here somewhere and if we continue to follow it around here we could be following this copper vein for a little while so I gave up the chase potentially a little early but it really does feel like these veins can go on for quite a while once you’re mining

Them out you just have to remember that every time you see Granite you mine it if you see copper behind that you mind that and just like when you’re searching for other veins of Aura it’s always worth checking your diagonals just in case there’s a block hidden behind the

Wall there’s a lot of doubling back involved and there’s also a lot of vertical jumping for areas like this where the copper vein takes a very sharp turn upwards so for those I recommend bringing a material that is not native to the area like Cobblestone for example

Since you’re only going to find Natural Stone in caves you’ll know that that is a marker for where you left off or where you had to go upwards and that’s going to be a good alternative to using something like your granites to pillar up and then tricking yourself into

Thinking that you’ve not mined there already there are still these full blocks of ore to be found which usually indicates that this is a pretty hefty part of the veins so I’m pretty happy that we found that one that’s another statistic we should go over actually if

We take a look at the Times mind and scroll down towards the end because we haven’t mined a huge amount of them you’ll notice I got 28 blocks of raw iron from that huge iron vein which probably includes the one that I mined the first time we found this but in

Terms of blocks of raw copper we’re only at 11 so I found many fewer of them in the copper veins so far than I found in the iron vein I don’t know if that’s necessarily part of the way they generate and I have just found two in

Very short succession here so it may be that I just didn’t find the right part of the copper vein but even so it seems like we got a lot of full blocks of raw iron out of the iron vein but with this vein continuing upwards I think we’re

Probably going to call it quits anyway because my inventory is getting full despite the fact that I’ve tossed a bunch of stuff into the Ender Chest already and I’m a little way away from home so I should probably head back there take stock of all of the materials

We’ve come back with and wrap up for today oh it feels really good to see home again it feels like we’ve been down in the mines for a good long while today but the results really speak for themselves we’ve got so many resources in the end of Chess now we’ve got a

Bunch of lapis that doesn’t even fit in the end of chest because we’ve got so much stuff there so let’s open it up and take a look look at all this raw copper we’re gonna need a bigger resource chest for this I think it’s probably gonna

Have to stay somewhere else for a while maybe we’ll tuck it away in here where I actually stashed a bunch of my equipment and whatnot from the end of chest so we could clear it out and have a totally free space to gather all of this I’m

Going to take about half a stack of copper break that down into raw copper and we’re gonna throw that in the blast furnace because I want to do something with all of this copper now we have it we can take the Redstone and the Diamonds and put those in this chest and

As I expected we are basically tripling the amount of diamonds we had just from the incidental diamonds we found digging out that huge vein of iron ore and you might be wondering sure the iron I can imagine that’s pretty useful you’re gonna get Hoppers Minecarts all of the

Stuff that we use used in the setup for the sugarcane farm the other day there’s loads of stuff that you can use iron for it’s good for armor it’s good for tools what’s copper good for exactly well one of the things we can do with copper is

Create a lightning rod by crafting three copper ingots in a line into a lightning rod like so and we should probably have one of these outside because we’ve been working with villagers for a little while and the villagers here have this rudimentary shelter but they aren’t protected from lightning strikes and

Some weird stuff happens to Minecraft’s mobs when lightning strikes happen trust me the roof over the heads right there is not quite enough to protect them from what’s potentially gonna happen if they get struck by lightning so we’re just gonna put a lightning rod around here

And a single lightning rod will have a pretty wide radius it protects from lightning so any lightning strikes in this area should strike this rod and we should have no problems with our villagers getting hit by it we’ve already seen a couple of the other uses for copper which include the brush and

The Spyglass but really where copper comes into its own is as a building block copper has some really interesting properties that are worth exploring in a full video of their own but if we place copper a few blocks apart like this after a little while these copper blocks

Are going to start aging they will go through different stages of oxidation they start as this shiny orangey pink colored copper they end up getting exposed which takes some of the Shine off and then they will start to weather and finally oxidize at which point they take on that Verdigris patina that you

See in Old copper statues the most famous example probably being the Statue of Liberty and if you are going to build a life-size Statue of Liberty in your Minecraft world you are going to need a lot of copper blocks so that is really the reason that huge veins of copper

Exist it’s also worth noting that if we throw copper into a stone cutter we’ll get cut copper and a single block of copper will get you four cut Copper from that point you can’t craft it down into copper ingots anymore because you’ve started splitting it up at that stage

But it is much better to do that in the stone cutter than in the crafting table because you can make cut copper in a crafting interface in a two by two like so but then you’re putting four blocks of copper in and only getting four blocks of cut copper out where you could

Be getting 16 out of them if you use the stone cutter back out here looks like a couple of our copper blocks have now started to age so you see what I mean they start to take on a different color this is now exposed copper which is a

Completely separate block to the regular copper that can be turned into cut exposed copper the weathered copper can be turned into cut weathered copper and you can make slabs and stairs out of those blocks as well so really when you get hold of copper you are not just

Getting one block you’re getting four blocks and those four blocks can be turned into slabs and stairs in different variants there’s a whole copper family for us to explore but we’re gonna have to save that for another day for now folks thank you so much for coming on this journey with me

And taking a look at huge veins of copper and iron ore hopefully you have some luck tracking those down in your worlds because they are a lot of fun to dig out and you’ll never have more resources from a single caving Expedition that’s where we’re gonna

Leave it for today thank you so much for watching this episode of the Minecraft Survival Guide my name has been pixariffs don’t forget to leave a like on this video If you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and I’ll see you folks soon take care bye for now Foreign