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No chance of that. Infact, gold would be routed out by iron! But because iron exists everywhere gold exists with reletivly the same occurrence, this is of no matter. All this would change is the avg ore amount per deposit, which can be calculated.

Quote from soul4hdwn »

the boatelevator can be done better with this: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=95282

An amazing invention of Availn's, thanks for the link! It combines the speed of a boatavator with the safety and reliability of a water-ladder.

You might have noticed the lack of work being done here on the Elites of Minecraft: The Miner.


That's because I was making this. Still under construction, just like this one, but it's good to have something released.

Alright, I really dig this thread ( )!

Two initial thing that will really help, and then I'll note the methods I typically use.

X-Ray
- This tool is immeasurable in value, giving a very clean look at mines and cave systems by making unexposed rock invisible. I'll post a pic below in my explanation of my technique.

New Boat Elevator
- This is the fastest vertical transport I've ever seen (it's based on the SW water glitch, and if Notch patches that without including an actual elevator I probably won't update). It's maybe all of 3 seconds from bedrock to sea level, extremely stable, requires 1 water block, and 1 boat; when set up properly, it simply requires a single right-click to activate (getting in the boat), both up and down.

Now, here is the technique I use. It's based around reach (4 blocks) and the way trunks and branches stack.

= seen = assumed = missed = bedrock = ladder = torch (go figure)
From above (Entrance top middle):
[]

[]
[] [] [] [] [] [] []

I repeat this going 5 branches deep, giving the trunk a length of 20. I then extend the trunk at the end by 2 more meters, turn 180°, dig up 3, place a ladder, and repeat on the next level, alternating branches as such -
From the side (Entrance lower left):

[] [] [] [] [] [] []
[] [] [] [] [] [] []

[] [] [] [] [] [] [] []
[] [] [] [] [] [] [] []



I take this up 5 times, which places the ceiling in the 16th layer, and guarantees I see as much as possible at a very low density (excluding the ladder shafts). When I Reach the 5th level, I walk back to the start of the trunk, and dig down (note that every other block will have already been mined and will have a ladder between layers due to the back and forth zigt-zag this pattern makes between levels). After completing a trunk, I mine 11 blocks in one of the two directions perpendicular to the trunk (away from my vertical surface connector), and start another parallel trunk, whose branches are 2 blocks away from touching the last trunk's branches, like this (from above):


[] []



I realize this may be confusing to some degree, so here are some x-ray pics to give a better sense of what's happening:

A general view of my newest trunk-cluster (from the side). So efficient...


Let's look at how much diamond I missed! From this angle (from above) it would appear that I missed the clusters circled in red. The ones circled in blue are clusters that appear to overlap the trunk-cluster, but are in fact outside of it (for now >=D ).


However! Upon close inspection of the 3 ore veins (from the side), we see that two of them are sunk in the bedrock -


and one of them is in a very dangerous place indeed! (from the side)


All of the ore veins are actually outside of the trunk-cluster. Incidentally I discovered 9 diamonds during the creation of this cluster.

Anyway, repetition of this pattern creates very low travel times, as the stacked trunks all lead to one major trunk, and can all be stellated around your primary vertical connector.
Next, I'm going to try and find the best arrangement of trunk clusters in a 3d space, with a focus on shortened travel times created by single pass trips during trunk creation (no doubling back), and emphasis on an axial hub.
I hope this is useful!

Wait, what the ... ???

I like the entire concept of the vertical mine but what do you do when you have reached the bedrock?
Fill it with gravel?
Cover just the top of it?

On another note is strip mining vertically more or less effective than strip mining horizontally?

@tungsten

An interesting way to solve the transport problem. I normally arrange ladders in a complex manner in front of every branch going up, but I can see your method would cut down on ladders tremendously. It is expandable too, as once you reach the end of the last trunks you can just demolish the ladder, block up the floor/roof and then remake the ladder as far foreward as you want.

And yeah, I saw that vertical transport thread. Ingenious.


Also, I thought the X-Ray viewer would become vital to data collection, however the data Dos-boots provided is more than enough. The viewer is still a better alternative to layering cartograph images, so I'll keep that in mind.



@DFogify

No, backfilling is a waste of time (even if it gets rid of gravel).

I STILL have said it in the main thread, but you can create a branch mine directly under your vertical mines with the same vertical pathing, then you can use a set tranport system to get out of the branch mine.

I would not reccomend vertical mining. It has far less diamond and gold return than a branch mine, even though it boosts an increase in raw coal and iron gains. Also, ore loss and cross have not been calculated for any vertical mine due to more probabilities that need to be found out.


And vertical strip mines are worse than horizontal, both because deposits have more area to be found horizontally, AND because a horizontal strip mine can be made inside the diamond layer.


~~~

On a unrelated note, I've realised my raw probabilities for finding ores are wrong. When you mine straight forward, you can see unveiled ores: So, the chance of ore discovery is the avg surface area of the whole deposit. I'm expecting that to double the chance of striking ore, which will make diamond tools far greater in theoretical use than what they were made out to be.

@Tungsten, Do you think you might be able to draw a diagram showing the path you take when mining? I think transport-wise, the most efficient way of doing things would be to have your mine be one un-interrupted path which folds back upon itself.

From what I can see, it seems that you do a lot of back-tracking after mining out each branch, and it would seem to me that it would be more efficient to do a zig-zag pattern (where you dig branch1 going away from the trunk and then turn right, go over 4 squares, turn right again and dig branch2 headed back towards the trunk). However I'm not certain how much time this would save, and might be more difficult to keep track of. The human element must always be taken into account. Even when operating in a perfectly efficient system, Humans can get disoriented and confused.

@Featherblade:
Doesn't the clustering of ore sort of "cancel-out" in terms of the probability of finding it? Sure when you spot some ore you now know basicly where all the rest is, but doesn't the fact that it's all concentrated mean that your chances of spotting ANY ore are then correspondingly reduced?

For an extreme example, if all the diamond ore within a 16 chunk area were consolidated into one solid 4x4x4 block, then as you dug through that volume wouldn't your ore-spotting chances be quite small? Sure once you FOUND it you'd be fine, but you could dig out thousands upon thousands of blocks without finding a darned thing before you spot the motherlode.

My intuition tells me that the probability of spotting ore has to do not with its surface-area, but it's "Cross-sectional Area" (also known as its "profile"). However, regardless of which of these factors is significant, in both cases, the clustering of ore DECREASES the probability of spotting deposits.

The only reason we can get good efficiency when ore is clustered is because our knowledge of the minimal probable size of deposits allows us the ability to make dispersed tunnel-patterns that will still be able to capture the great majority of the ore.

That is why I predict only a double in the rate of finding. This is mainly because both the ores themselves and the blocks around them are being counted as discovering ore, rather than just the ore alone.

As an example, if a 2x2x2 cube occurs, there are another 16 blocks (the surface area) as well as the original 8, leading to 24 chance of finding the ore. Cubes have the lowest surface area possible, and that is the largest cube able to be formed.

Smaller ore deposits (like a 1x1x1) would have 6 extra blocks on all sides that add to the chance of being discovered, plus the ore itself.



This means a range of 3-7 times the chance of finding all ore using rough probability. I would say this is fair, considering that in practicality diamond picks were in fact just viable with 256 hits, let alone 1024.

Unfortunately, I don't think it means that at all. Adding a "zone of finding" around ore deposits is functionally equivalent to the "visible blocks" that surround a dug tunnel. You can't use them together, since you have no way of knowing whether "visible block" is in the "zone of finding" of an ore deposit or not.

As for the viability of a diamond-pick with 256 uses...by my calculations it would require digging a minimum of 320 blocks in order to reveal 95%+ of all the ore in one map-chunk from bedrock to diamond-ceiling using the honeycomb tunnel-spacing. Sustainable diamond-mining with a 256-use pick does not seem like a reasonable proposition. I suggest you re-examine your conclusions on the ease of spotting clustered ore.

I will attempt to clarify the point I tried to make earlier: If you have 40 deposits of ore in a given volume, it will be easier to find 10 deposits of 4 ore than to find 5 deposits of 8 ore. If you assume that you are hunting for ore by digging an infinite tunnel in one direction, then the chance of finding a deposit is based on its horizontal profile. If a deposit is oriented in such a way that it has a minimal profile (like a 2x2x1 viewed from the side) then its ore will be more difficult to find. (I apologize if I have still failed to be clear, it's a complicated issue that I'm better at visualizing than verbalizing.)

That said, I do think the "surface area" method of analyzing deposit visibility has some merit since different shapes will have different surface-area/volume ratios, but to look at things from that perspective, you have to assume you are digging blind: able only to "see" the block you dug. Using both the methods of seeing surrounding blocks and counting ore-adjacent blocks runs the risk of counting double and inflating the visibility of deposits.

I have not explored a fresh world with this newest update yet. Do you have any information on how lakes and lava-pools appear? Where do they appear, how big are they, etc.

Do these new lava lakes create a danger for a miner unintentionally wandering into them?

Have there been any changes to the "All caverns are filled with lava up to height 10" system that currently exists?

Good, the "Lava Level" information is still correct, just now incomplete.

The fact that you're reporting that lava is appearing as a "deposit" though and independent of other features (like randomly filling in depressions) does have disturbing implications for mining safety.