20 Minecraft Mining Tips and Tricks You Should Know!

– Hi, I’m Marc, and welcome to this video of 20 mining tips. Now in this video, I’m going to show you 20 different ways that you can improve the quality and efficiency of your mining. So let’s get started. Now, if we walk up on our pretty little mine entrance here,

You can see a bunch of signs. And the signs are the things you want to do before you go down into the mine. Now the first one (1A) is to make a pretty little mine entrance. Do you have to do that? No, but it makes me happy, sooo…

1B is to bring a stack of raw wood. Now, why raw wood? Because you can get four times as much wood in one slot of your inventory than you can if you bring planks. So I recommend the raw wood for making torches and towering up and making crafting tables,

And all sorts of stuff. Also bring a stack of food. Now, you may not have steaks like I have, but any food, bring a snack so you have lots of food. ‘Cause there is nothing worse than you really getting into your mining and suddenly you have to stop and get food

And go all the way back to the top, and it’s a pain. Now, I should have labeled it 1D, but it’s bring water. Not because you’re thirsty, but because you want to be able to take care of that lava before you die in it, and also get some obsidian if you can.

Now the final tip before we go down into the mine is to bring lots of torches. This is a no-brainer. I usually bring a stack and that’s plenty, because I can typically make more torches using coal that I find along the way.

And I’ve got the wood with me, so let’s head on down. Now if you take a look, I’ve got number two being one method is to create full block stairs. And that’s a quick and easy way to get down to where you want to be. And in this case, it’s full blocks.

Now what I did is I put a gap of four blocks in between each one. Now is that necessary? No, you can do three blocks. But three blocks will force you to bonk your head on the way down, which is just really ugly, you don’t want to be bonking your head.

So I do four blocks and one block step. Now, this is the fast way to get down if you’re building steps. But there is a faster way to get down and I’ll show you that in a moment. Now, number three here is to cave later and mine now.

Now if you came down here to just mine, then mine. You don’t want to be mining and then come across a cave, or a ravine in this case, and suddenly you go off and you start caving, which is a lot more dangerous than mining. And you die, you lose any diamonds you had,

You lose this, you lose that. Mine now, cave later. Or vice versa, go caving and mine later. Now we could do that right now, we can say, ah, screw mining, I want to caving or ravining in this case and go do it, because I don’t have anything in my inventory

Really yet and it’s a safe time to do it. Alright, number four is our second method, and that’s stair blocks. Now, going down the rest of the way we’ve got these stairs and not a lot changes going down. But going up you can make a lot more headway

Because you don’t have to jump up to get there. So you can do this next, do the one block stairs and later on do the stone stairs. Alright, now we’re at the bottom of our mine. And we’ve got these chests. Put some chests down at the bottom of your mine right away,

So you can store your stuff as you get it. This will allow you to get a lot more stuff without having to go back up to the top to get rid of what you’re carrying. So I highly recommend a couple of large chests, if not even more. They’re not very expensive.

You just bring ’em down, make ’em out of the wood that you brought. Another thing is an Ender chest, if it’s possible, it depends on where you are in the game. But if you’ve got an Ender chest, put it down here. Because then you can stuff your diamonds and gold

And other things that you find in here. And if something happens, you get blown up by a Creeper, or you get lost or you die, all your diamonds and gold and all the other valuables are safe in here. All you have to do is create another Ender chest

And ta-da, there they are, so great piece of advice. Another one is to keep furnaces handy. Number seven tells you that you can turn ore into blocks. And the reason you want to do that is less inventory space. If you can take your ingots, or take your ore,

Turn them into ingots and then turn your ingots into blocks, you have a lot more space in your inventory. In addition to that, you can get things like cobblestone cooking and other things that you want to cook down right away while you’re mining. So it’s a good piece of advice to have that.

And that’s number seven. Number eight is to use water to bridge lava and make obsidian. So you’re mining and you come across some lava, now what do you do with it? I want to get over to that nice little chest over there. Well all I have to do is take my water

And dump it unto the lava. Now notice how the water was kind enough to push me across here as well. And you know what’s in my chest? More water! And that’s all you got to do. And now underneath there is a lot of obsidian

That we can mine up and make, oh I don’t know, Nether portals and more Ender chests. Alright, so that is tip number eight. Now tip number nine is to torch around light level zero. Now this is going to go against some people’s strategies for lighting,

But what I do is I go down here, when it starts to get dark, I torch. When it starts to get dark, I torch. Now notice there’s a definite pattern to it. Now if we go down here, watch what happens in our lighting levels. Take a look at light.

And what we want to do is take a look at the block level. 11, 10, nine, eight, 11, 10, nine, eight. Alright, see how that’s happening? Now we’re saving ourselves the trouble of using too many torches, but we’re also keeping safe by not having that light level go down to seven.

So just torch where it’s needed, torch right around the zero light level. And what you’ll do is you’ll carry on to that next torch, the last torch carries forward, and you’ll end up at about that eight light level. Alright, number 10 is use ladders or dig up two blocks wide to dig down.

So here I dug up, and I can put another ladder, and I could put another ladder, and I could keep putting up ladders until I get to the top. Now I want to dig down, this is one thing that in my past video, people really got on me about,

But that is not to dig straight down. If you dig straight down, you’re in danger of falling into a cave, falling into lava, things like that. And they said, but what you can do is this technique. Alright, well let’s get over the center here. And now we can dig straight down.

Notice how we’re always able to see ahead of where we’re going? That’s a great way to dig straight down. And this is a method you may want to use to get to the bottom of your mine, and then put ladders back up. There are a lot of different ways of doing this,

And this is just one, but it’s a pretty efficient and effective way of doing it. Now notice what I just did? I used the raw wood that I had with me, ta-da! Alright, moving on, we have tip number 11, clean out your mined areas. Now let’s do a little mining here

And I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s just get some stuff, oh that’s right I’m in Creative mode so I can get a lot of stuff, we’ll just do this. Alright, we’ve got our cobblestone. And here’s where we had been mining out. Now what I would recommend is closing this up.

Throw a torch in there so mobs don’t spawn, and then just close it up. Now you’re thinking, why do you want to do that? Well, two reasons. One is it looks a lot nicer. And that appeals to my sense of prettiness. And then the other reason is as you’re going down,

You don’t have to stop and go, was that a cave or, oh let me look. Oh, no, that was where I was mining before. Alright, it’s just a way of keeping things a little cleaner and neater. Do you have to do it? No. Alright, number 12 is listen.

So many people, they put on music when they’re playing Minecraft, or you know they’re not paying attention to the sounds. When you’re mining, pay attention to the sounds. It’ll tell you where lava is, it’ll tell you where water is, it’ll tell you where mobs are. Or, if you don’t want to do that,

What you can do is turn on your subtitles. So you get into Music and Sounds and you show subtitles. Now watch. Oh, there’s water flowing over here. Oh, there’s lava over on this side. And water over on that side. So there’s a great way of telling where stuff is.

And it’s a great little cheat, actually. And I feel almost guilty using it but it does work pretty effectively. So, let’s turn that off. Ooh, footsteps, so what does that mean, hmm? Hmm? Honestly, I find it annoying in the corner of my vision,

Unless I really need it, so I’m going to turn that off. Alright, moving forward. We got 13 and 14. 13 is to use enchantments wisely. Now what I mean by this is everybody has what they think would be the ultimate tools to have while mining.

And it really comes down to using your enchantments wisely. If you’re going down and just collecting cobblestone, it makes no sense to have say a Fortune III pickaxe, because all you’re going to get is cobblestone and you’re going to wear out your enchanted pickaxe. By the same token, if you’re going down

Looking for diamonds and you don’t feel like dealing with ore blocks that you have to get rid of later, then you don’t really need a Silk Touch. Then again, if you’re looking to get stone, Silk Touch really saves you some time and effort. So use those enchantments wisely.

And a lot of times what I’ll do is just bring down the tools I need for that little expedition, and then switch out tools so that the other tools stay safe, alright? Hopefully that makes sense. Now number 14 is to skip three rows between mine tunnels.

Now if we look, I’ve got some mine tunnels here and I’ve skipped three rows, one, two, three, one, two, three. And each mine tunnel is three rows apart. Now the reason for that is, is that it allows you to find every piece of diamond or ore or anything else that is in here.

Well, statistically almost every piece. And the reason being is if you think about it, this row here you’re going to always see the side of it. This row here you’re always going to see the side of it. The center row is the one you won’t necessarily see,

However, blocks do not spawn, or ore blocks and the like do not spawn typically in one block wide patterns. So almost always you’re going to see it on one side or the other. You’ll see a vein of diamond or a vein of gold or whatever. So, the most efficient, most people agree,

Is three blocks apart. There are some that don’t agree but ignore them. Alright, (laughing) I’m sorry. Alright, number 15 is don’t mine right over your head. And what I mean by that is here we go, oh we’ve got some great diamonds up here, and we’re going to mine those. Oh, oh!

Suddenly we’re attacked by all of that gravel. And if we’re not careful, we suffocate. Let’s get rid of that and let’s get this one instead. Oh no, sand, aah! And that’s why you don’t want to mine straight over your head, because you can have that stuff fall on you

And you can now suffocate, or it could be lava or it could be other things. Always mine off to the side a little bit. Okay? Number 16 is mark your tunnels with redstone or signs. And kind of I’ve done this with the signs, and you could say I’ve numbered my tunnels.

But another great way is to use redstone. Now I know that when they start to skip like this that is my main tunnel, and then these are all my offshoot tunnels. But I can always find my main tunnel again because it makes this T pattern.

Another way you can do that is to put signs on the side, or you can do what I did here which is to make your tunnel too wide, and then your little offshoot tunnel’s only one wide. And that allows you to come back here and say,

Oh this is my main tunnel and this is how I get out. Trust me, you can get confused with a really big tunnel system. Alright, number 17 is turn your items into blocks. Now say for example we have this right here, and we take advantage of having our raw wood, which is three.

And we say, okay, we’re going to go into our inventory here, and this is tough to do when you’re in Creative, and I’m so used to being in Survival. I’m going to cheat here quick. So let’s get our crafting table, let’s just find that quick,

I should know where that is from memory, but. Crafting, there it is, come on, come here buddy. Alright, let’s lay down a crafting table. Now we’ve got our raw lapis lazuli, we’ll do that one instead. We take and we throw her on here, and we turn that into lapiz lazuli blocks.

Now we can start adding these up and save a lot of inventory space in the process. So turn your items into blocks. So that includes redstone, that includes diamonds if you have enough of those, includes lapis. Got coal, a lot of those can save space by just simply turning them into blocks, okay?

Hopefully I didn’t get you confused on that one. I had me confused on that one. Let’s get these out of the way, and let’s move on. Now this next one here is to look at where your feet are when you’re mining down. Now if you look at my feet,

They are at 11, which makes my head at 12. Those, theoretically, are the best spots for mining for diamonds. So pay attention to where your feet and your face are, and that will almost guarantee that you’re going to find some diamonds along the way.

Now are people going to argue with me about this? (laughs) Dang straight they will. Everybody’s got a feeling of where the best place is. But statistically, the best place is 11 and 12. In addition, you’re going to be one block above the lava. And the lava line is something

You don’t want to necessarily run into on a regular basis. So, alright, so we’ve got that. And we’ll move on to number 19 is to dig around diamonds, that I misspelled, nice job Mark. Diamonds near lava. So let’s say we’ve got these diamonds here and we start digging them out,

And I’m going to dig out this one. Alright, and what I want to do is dig around it like this, so that if that lava gets away, our diamonds don’t get destroyed in the process. So, make sure that you’re digging around ’em. And see how that works? We’ve got a nice safe area,

Now we know there’s no lava like down here. We know that we can safely start mining the, (gasps) look at what happened, uh oh! Our diamonds fell in the lava. And that’s going to happen sometimes. You want to really try to avoid doing that.

And that’s where the mining around your diamonds can help, it can help prevent that. Okay, anyhow. So dig around those diamonds to expose as much as you can before you move forward. And now we’ve got 20, that was 19. 20 is dig using an up-and-down-forward technique.

And if you want to be fast and efficient, this is a good way to do it. If you mine like this, you’re always moving your hand. But watch what happens if I do this. Look at how much faster that is. And what I am doing is I am just walking forward,

And I am pointing down at that lower block so it breaks the upper block. Of course it does that, Murphy’s Law. Alright. See how I move forward? Break a block and continue to move forward. Very efficient way of mining. Now, the problem is how fast you’re going,

Which means you can drop into lava, you can run into a cave or ravine. So be careful doing that and listen or turn on those subtitles. Also, if you’re doing that, make sure you come back again because you can easily miss ores. Finally, a bonus one. Put torches in your offhand.

Now, this is something I am still learning how to use efficiently. But let’s say I put that in my offhand and I’m going down here and mining. And I can put up a torch, I can mine. I can put up a torch, I can mine. And I’m using two other fingers,

I’m not having to switch my inventory at all. Isn’t that nice? Sweet! And that’s something that came in in 1.9, which I still need to get accustomed to doing. So anyhow, that is 20 tips for better mining. You’re going to be more efficient,

And the quality of your mining is going to be that much better. So, if you like this video, great. Subscribe, leave a comment, leave a like. If you didn’t like this video, meh, keep that to yourself. Thanks for watching.