What is the Best Way to Mine in Minecraft?

What is the best way to mine in Minecraft? With the new changes to terrain generation in Minecraft 1.18, the caves and cliffs update, what is the best way to find diamonds in game. Is it basic strip mining, diagonal mining, caving or something completely different?

How do you get the most diamonds for your pickaxe, the most bang for your buck, the most moula, for your joulah, rie. And that is the question I will be answering in today’s video. Let’s get right into it.

But real quickly before we do begin, if you do end up enjoying the video or learning something new I would greatly appreciate it if you could subscribe. We’re nearly at 800,000 subscribers and every bit of support helps a lot.

Out of the 10 million people that watched my channel in the last month, less than 2% of them actually subscribed. So if you wanna help me out it’s completely free and means a lot, not to mention you can undo it whenever you feel like it.

So please consider it, and with that said let’s get right into the video. So I made this video back in January but that video sucks and now for some reason it’s the google suggested result that comes up when you search the best way to mine in Minecraft.

Although it does not deserve that honor at all. Not to mention that there have been some SLIGHT alterations to the way caves generate in Minecraft. So with the new 1.18 terrain generation, what’s the best way to mine in Minecraft? The first question we have to answer is where do we mine?

Previously the optimal level for mining was around y 11 since that’s where diamonds generated the most and you could pick up every ore in the game. Except now instead of the ore distribution looking like this, it looks like this. Where the wider the shape is, the more ores spawn at that y level.

For example you can see that the diamond triangle is the widest around y: -64, however the gold one is around y level -15. So while before you could just mine on y 11 and hit a good amount of every single ore, now there’s a bit of complication.

If we mine at y -59 to get the most possible diamonds, we’ll be getting pretty much no gold, iron, coal, or copper. Yes we can technically mine around y 0 and hit every single ore at once however that would also be making us get significantly less diamonds than we would be lower down.

Wait what’s that. A secret message, let’s flip it and read it and heighten the contra- oh. Yes the first message is here but upside down. Thanks mojang. But back on topic, where do we mine? For the purposes of this video I’ll be mining at y -59.

After all, we wanna get the most diamonds, and this is the best way to do it. But of course I’ll be keeping track of everything I collect, including other ores so we can see what methods really work, but with that said, let’s get into the methods. Method 1 is basic strip mining.

Strip mining is probably every new player’s first instinct. You mine down to y -59, and just dig in a straight line. For each of these trials I’ll be digging out either 320 or 160 blocks so I can measure it in chunks.

I’ll also be doing each method twice and average the results in case one run was particularly lucky or unlucky. Across two 320 block strip mines, results were disappointing but expected. I gathered an average of 2.5 diamonds per strip, with each mine resulting in 630 and 701 blocks mined.

The average duration of a 320 block strip mine was almost 10 minutes leading to a pitiful 0.25 diamonds per minute and 0.37% of all blocks mined being diamond ore. Would I recommend this method, absolutely not. Method 2 is adjacent strip mining.

Why strip mine once when I can do it twice or three times. The thought process behind adjacent strip mining is that you cover more area within a chunk and don’t miss any blocks in between. My personal preference is to space my mines three blocks apart, because while yes, I might

Miss something, chances are an ore vein won’t be one block in width. For this trial I decided to do 4 adjacent strips so I could cover the whole chunk. To make it consistent, each strip would only be 80 blocks long, totalling to 320 blocks in all. Results here were surprisingly very bad.

Across my 2 trails of 4 strips each I averaged 1 diamond per trial. ONE. In conjunction with an average of 694 blocks mined and an average time of 10 and a half minutes per trial. That gives us 0.144 % of all blocks being diamond ore and 0.09 diamonds per minute.

That’s less than half of regular strip mining. Maybe I just got very unlucky but wow those results are bad. Method 3 was branch mining. Branch mining is similar to strip mining but instead of just going out, every 4 blocks

You dig 5 blocks out on either end, producing a branch design, hence the name. The logic here is similar to adjacent strip mining but instead you now strip along a different axis. Each branch mine* was 160 blocks long, or 10 chunks and here are the results. They were even worse.

Across both trails, I didn’t find a single diamond. With 752 blocks mined per trial and an average time of 12.2 minutes, I collected 0 diamonds per minute and 0% of all blocks I mined were diamond ore. Again maybe I just got very unlucky but something has definitely changed. Method 4 was diagonal mining.

In my last video I concluded that this method was the best with an average diamond count significantly higher than anything else. Let’s see if it still holds up. If we want to mine 320 blocks diagonally, we can use the pythagorean theorem to figure out where to mine.

Just set the hypotenuse to 320 and use the 45 45 90 identity to determine how many blocks we have to mine along each axis, which happens to be 226 blocks in each direction. Stay in school. After mining out two trials, I averaged 4 diamonds per trail. Which is so far the highest.

Additionally, while each mine had 957 blocks broken, this still resulted in a total of 0.41 % of all blocks mined being diamond ore which is the highest by a landslide. One of the problems with diagonal mining though is that it takes awhile to get back to hq

Leading to an average time of 16.4 minutes per mine, or 0.244 diamonds per minute. That actually is lower than just regular strip mining so while you may end up finding more diamonds it will definitely hurt your soul walking back. Method 5 was crawl mining.

Crawl mining involves using a trap door or water or some sort of mechanic to get into crawl mode and just mine normally from there. The logic is you break one block to expose 5 faces and don’t have to spend as much time as in a normal strip mine.

That being said it also takes a lot longer to get back out after you’re done. So is this method really worth it? Kind of. For a regular crawl strip mine of 160 blocks, I averaged 1 diamond per trial.

Which granted may not seem like much however in the context of how much I mined, It’s actually not bad. The average blocks mined were only 184, and each mine only took around 5.4 minutes. As a result, crawl mining comes in at 0.54% of all blocks mined being diamond ore, and

0.18 diamonds per minute. The diamonds per minute is actually also lower than just regular strip mining, but considering how big of an improvement the blocks saved is, I would give this method a thumbs up. Method 6 was caving. I was curious if just looting caves was more effective than plain old mining.

If anything it should save blocks mined. Since I can’t measure 320 blocks in a random shaped cave, I’ll just be teleporting a random set of coordinates, finding the nearest cave and exploring it for 10 minutes. The results blew me away.

I found an average of 11 diamonds per caving session for only 8.6 minutes of mining. Coupled with a total of 231 blocks mined per session, most of which are other ores by the way, I ended up with 4.75% of all blocks I mined being diamond ore and 1.269 diamonds per minute.

That’s incredible and blows all the other methods out of the water. With the new expansive caves you can just see so many blocks at once it’s completely more worth your time to go caving. Additionally through each trial I was counting how many other resources I found and again caving just blows them away.

The second most resourceful method was actually adjacent srip mining. On average I found 6 lapis, 6.5 iron, 154 redstone and no other ores. But while caving, not only did I find 11 times as many diamonds on average, I also found 116 lapis, 45 gold, 21 copper, 43 iron, and 180 redstone.

And that’s not even mentioning the ores I skipped because I didn’t wanna waste that much time. Overall, caving just seems like the far better choice than any other method. But is it actually the best way to Mine in Minecraft?

Not necessarily . To truly identify the best mining method we have to figure out how to cover as many blocks as possible with as little effort possible. Since diamond generation changed since 1.16, what is the optimal way to mine to maximize our diamond output.

To answer this question we first have to figure out how diamonds generate. I took the time to scout out 100 individual chunks across 2 minecraft worlds to figure out how diamonds were generated. The results are as follows, each chunk has an average of 4.8 diamonds.

That doesn’t sound bad, but actually sucks when you realize the average number of veins were 2, and that’s across 80 y levels. Because of the new addition of negative y levels, diamonds can generate anywhere between y 16 and y-64, that’s 80 levels and somewhere in between are two veins of about 2.5 diamonds.

We pretty much have to search the whole chunk if we want to have a good chance at claiming those rewards. So how do we do that? Well here are a few ways One method that comes to mind is moss mining.

In the update, while we are cursed with the terrain generation, we are also blessed with moss. Moss when bonemealed can spread to practically every naturally generating stone, and can then be instamined with a hoe. So what if we set up a containment chamber and began mining the moss to cover the whole chunk.

This way we don’t miss anything. And we don’t, but this method is awful. After moss mining for nearly 20 minutes I noticed a fatal flaw in this method. It is a snail’s pace, it is very very slow.

In 20 minutes I was only able to mine 13 layers of rock, and given that I started at y 66 and I had to mine all the way down another 110 blocks to reach the final layer of diamonds, that’s just not happening.

At best, the chunk has, what, 15 diamonds, and at the rate I was going that would equal 0.075 diamonds per minute, the slowest method out of all the previous. Not to mention in the 20 minutes I did mine I broke two netherite hoes, so this method

While being insanely slow is also very taxing. Another idea I had to cover the whole chunk was to use tnt duplicators and bomb my way to the bottom. This seemed good in my head but after trying it out I also ran into some complications.

Number 1 the tnt duper has very little range, it only digs a single hole in the ground and if we wanna dig the whole chunk, it’s gonna take a lot of dupers. But the second and more crucial flaw in this method is the fact that the tnt itself is too slow.

Because the world is so deep, by the time we get into the negative y values, the tnt doesn’t actually make it to the end. It explodes before it reaches the bottom. Not to mention deep slate has pretty high blast resistance, making this method also very displeasurable. So, what can we conclude?

At the end of the day, the undoubtedly best method of mining is to mine the least and go caving. With the new way that ores generate, to have the largest chance of getting a variety of ores, as well as to be able to spot diamonds, caving is the way to go.

Not only is it scenic, but those views expose you to so many blocks you’re bound to find diamonds as well as a ton of other resources. So by the time 1.18 rolls around, you’ll know how I’ll be mining.

But with that said, let me know in the comments what method you’ll be most likely to use. And as always, thank you so much for watching, please consider subscribing. It does help out a ton and peace out, have a good one, I’ll see you next time.