I agree with the points made about how Netherite should not be able to be found in chests, However, when i kept reading you said that it should take more than one ingot and this is where i disagree. If you had to find enough Ancient Debris to craft tools and armor it would take hours and even days because you need to find 4 and combine it with 4 gold just to make 1 ingot. I would like to see a change in maybe not being able to find it in chests but I will have to disagree that it should take more than 1 to upgrade.
Ancient debris is nowhere near as rare as you may think, especially with the distribution it has:
Then factor in the fact that when branch-mining you expose multiple blocks per block removed, then the fact that when you expose a vein several additional blocks will be exposed - put those together and diamond ore is suddenly not very rare anymore, hence all the discussion over it being too easy to get (if you know how to efficiently find it; if you simply mine out all blocks below layer 15, as some players do, you'll only find one diamond per 833 blocks):
A maximum efficiency is reached at a spacing of around 6 blocks (that is, 6 solid blocks left in-between the tunnels). At this spacing, efficiency is about 0.017, corresponding to 1.7% of blocks removed being a diamond.
That's effectively 14 times more common than its per-block abundance would suggest! I don't even consider Fortune to be worth using on diamond when you can find all you need within an hour (one block mined per second, which is doable even without enchanted tools, especially in the Nether, is 3600 blocks per hour, times 0.017 and you get nearly a stack of diamond ore per hour), and the fact that you need to spend time and resources to get Fortune itself. In fact, in my own mod I added an ore which is far rarer than diamond in part because I wanted something that was actually rare for my playstyle, even then I don't need Fortune to find enough while caving, where it is around 8 times rarer than diamond, comparable to the spawn rate of Netherite outside of its peak range:
This is from an analysis of layers 4-8, the range above lava level which contains diamond and amethyst ore (equivalent to 11-15 in vanilla):
Amethyst is obsidian with a data value of 1 (49:1), which also means you need a diamond pickaxe to mine it, while ID 181 is ruby ore, which only generates in a single biome - despite this, this and emerald are over half as common as amethyst, and have a much wider range, as indicated by an analysis of layers 4-62:
Amethyst is now over twice as rare as emerald, the rarest ore in vanilla - again, despite emerald only generating in a few biomes which are together only about half as common as Extreme Hills in vanilla, and more than a thousand times rarer than coal! It is a bit more common than indicated here when caving due to ores that extend below lava level; I found about 8 times more diamond than amethyst in Survival, but that still makes it far rarer than anything in vanilla (I found only 223 amethyst over 466 hours of caving, a rate of just 0.478 per hour; for comparison, I averaged 3.43 diamond, 201.26 iron, and 551.15 coal. Notably, these rates are actually slightly lower than what I average in vanilla).
Note that it is intentional that it isn't so rare that I need to use Fortune so I don't need to carry an extra pickaxe, or just use Fortune on my main pickaxe as I used to (which meant my inventory filled up at about double the rate), and it is more common below lava level so branch-mining isn't too difficult, so this is the cutoff where I consider something to be too rare (caving is something that I solely do for fun and I don't want to interrupt it just to get more resources, although I do trade for diamond gear in my first world so I can save all the diamonds I collect, but this is much easier than having to branch-mine since I just have to spend a few minutes per day harvesting crops and trading).
A natural issue about this kind of thing is durability. You can break around 1300 blocks with a diamond pick, and ancient debris appears about every 1/650 blocks (in peak areas, according to your data). With you needing 4 scrap to get a new pick, it takes about 2 diamond picks durability to upgrade a tool. With netherite being only (approximately) 11% better, this doesn't seem like a worthwhile thing.
A natural issue about this kind of thing is durability. You can break around 1300 blocks with a diamond pick, and ancient debris appears about every 1/650 blocks (in peak areas, according to your data). With you needing 4 scrap to get a new pick, it takes about 2 diamond picks durability to upgrade a tool. With netherite being only (approximately) 11% better, this doesn't seem like a worthwhile thing.
Nether blocks can be broken at extremely high speeds using any pickaxe, and they can be collected using any pickaxe too. The only reason you'd be using diamond pickaxes to mine in the nether is if you had literally no access to anything else. Otherwise, even a wood pickaxe would do fine while mining (though I prefer iron for durability), and you only have to mine the actual ore with your diamond pickaxe. That's only 1-3 durability for each time you find netherrite.
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Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Minecraft 2.0
Minecraft 1.VR-Pre1
Snapshot 15w14a
Minecraft 3D
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
Turns out that we're both wrong. According to the wiki, netherrack takes .35 seconds with a wood pickaxe, .2 with a stone, and .1 with higher tiers. It's likely that the wiki may have rounded these numbers and that diamond does mine faster than iron, but it's objectively slower to mine using stone or wood. Iron's still not a free material, and you'd likely go through about an anvil's worth of iron to find a single debris (not vein, debris. you need 4 debris to upgrade a tool or armor piece.)
What about what I keep saying about Mending? You only need 30-40 diamonds to make all the gear you'll ever need and making diamond ore rarer will only make it take longer to find enough
Then, like I said, use iron gear.
The fact that nobody ever really even bothers to enchant iron gear illustrates that diamonds are way, way, way overly abundant. You and I both agree that the grind of mining should deter players from amassing enough diamonds, for example, to build a diamond castle, I happen to believe that that same principle should be extended to gear. You don't want to work to obtain a precious resource? Fine, use iron gear. Iron should be the standard anyway, diamond should be the flex. You can do literally everything in the game with a set of iron gear and 9 diamonds for instamine tools. But you refuse to accept that because you simply feel entitled to the top precious resource in the game.
Btw, your point about only needing 30-40 diamonds to make all the gear you'll ever need actually supports my argument better than yours.
Many players even feel that iron isn't common enough to justify mining it and were so outraged when Mojang decided to nerf iron golem drops that they "had" to revert the changes. This says it all; yes, somebody actually made a petition on change.org to protest the nerf, and I've seen others say they would quit playing if such changes were made, or even have quit due to the threat:
Iron holds a completely different role in the game than diamond because of the fact that it is used to create a large variety of technical materials that are required in mass quantities for large scale projects, so it makes perfect sense for them to be renewable. Diamonds on the other hand are used only for tiny niche items that are ultimately only necessary in a quantity of one, and their main function is just stronger yet redundant overlap with the role iron already serves: defense against mobs, and faster mining.
Also, I doubt Mojang wants the game to be that hard, considering the main demographic it is targeted to, and being easy is a major selling point of the game (see the third item listed; for me the the main attraction is the second one):
Considering the fact that the game has both a "Hard" mode as well as a "Hardcore" mode illustrates that it was indeed intended to provide sincere challenge. The fact that the survival aspects of the game are well known to be strongly based on the absolutely brutal and unforgivable ADOM RPG illustrates this further. I'm all in favor of the game facilitating easier play for some people, but it's not unreasonable for other players to have diamond abundance balanced such that they are only viable as a flex rather than an easily obtainable standard material for gear. I'd say that the measure by which I'd judge this balance is, unless players are regularly enchanting their iron gear, then diamonds are overly abundant. In my view that seems to be a perfectly reasonable standard option for many players.
For comparison, it took me about 58.6 hours to "complete" the game in my last world, which would most closely fall under "Main Story" since I don't bother with things like the Wither, only the Ender Dragon, and don't try to find structures or biomes other than a stronghold and Nether fortress; everything after this point is caving for fun, which took another 466 hours to find at least one of every underground feature, plus 14.5 additional hours to build secondary bases, railways, and wall in villages. This is also longer than I'd take in vanilla 1.6.4, and probably current versions since in vanilla 1.6.4 you only need to rename your items to keep the cost down, while I added my own version of Mending to the same effect, which meant I had to breed and trade with villagers, just as I would in 1.9+, and it is easier to get a specific enchanted book trade, including Mending, in 1.8+. I also wouldn't need to mine as much quartz, which takes around 12 hours, to get XP for enchanting, especially with 1.8's enchanting and 1.14's grindstone
Like I said, you only need about 9 diamonds to do literally every activity in the game, with full mining speed.
You just feel entitled to easily obtaining the top flex item in the game. In which case, why even call it diamond?
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There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
Turns out that we're both wrong. According to the wiki, netherrack takes .35 seconds with a wood pickaxe, .2 with a stone, and .1 with higher tiers. It's likely that the wiki may have rounded these numbers and that diamond does mine faster than iron, but it's objectively slower to mine using stone or wood. Iron's still not a free material, and you'd likely go through about an anvil's worth of iron to find a single debris (not vein, debris. you need 4 debris to upgrade a tool or armor piece.)
All mining times are rounded up to the next tick (0.05 seconds), plus you need to add another 0.25 seconds for a delay between consecutive blocks unless you can "instantly" mine the block (the calculated mining time is less than 0.05 seconds), as well as another 0.05 seconds before you can start mining the next block (even when you can "instantly" mine it) for a total of 0.3 seconds - I compared the speed of gold and diamond before and with Efficiency V both could mine 150 stone or 133 ore per minute (0.4 and 0.45 seconds per block respectively. If I use the formulas given by the Wiki i get 0.1 and 0.15 seconds respectively, to which you must add 0.3 seconds for consecutive blocks).
This also means that Netherite will be the same since its mining speed is between gold and diamond; only blocks that happen to be just hard enough to prevent diamond from mining it within the next tick or much harder blocks like obsidian will see much of a benefit, and mainly with unenchanted tools (you surely will put Efficiency V on your tools, especially Netherite). Efficiency adds a constant factor, 26 for Efficiency V, so the differences become less - for example, wood (base 2) will have a speed of 28 while gold (base 12) will have a speed of 38. Plug these into the formula for stone (1.5 * 30 = 45; 45 / speed, rounded up = time in ticks) and you get 2 ticks or 0.1 seconds for both - yes, wood and gold are exactly the same! Conversely, for obsidian I get 2.25 seconds for diamond and 2.15 seconds for Netherite, making the latter 4.6% faster; adding another 0.3 seconds for the delay between blocks reduces the advantage to 4.1%.
Other blocks may be slightly faster with Netherite since their hardness is just enough to push the mining time up to the next tick for diamond, but as far as I'm concerned they are the same since the vast majority of the blocks I mine are ores, followed by stone, then mineshaft rails, the last of which are instantly mined with diamond so no further benefit is possible. The only other significant advantage, durability, is completely irrelevant due to Mending; it only helps to provide a larger buffer for cases where you don't get any XP from using the items; I did play a bit in 1.9 before to see how different it actually was from 1.6.4, including the effectiveness of Mending, and I had no trouble keeping all my gear topped up though normal gameplay.
Also, you only need to mine 650 blocks per ancient debris if you mine every single block - when mining for diamonds, do you clear out everything below layer 15? That will yield around one diamond ore per 833 blocks - but then how does the Wiki get a figure as low as one per 59 blocks (1.7% of all blocks mined and about 14 times higher than the overall per-block abundance)? Because you can expose multiple blocks per block mined when digging tunnels, and when you do expose an ore it likely exposes several more blocks; this is why the analysis I made in this thread found significantly more exposed coal than indicated by its natural abundance (ancient debris has smaller veins than other ores based on what the Wiki says but you'll still get more than expected; only a single block ore like emerald will be solely dependent on blocks exposed). A diamond pickaxe can also mine over 6240 blocks if you put Unbreaking III on it, which you definitely should - I do when I mine quartz for XP (about 5% of which goes to repairing it).
This is also further confirmation of why some players struggle to find resources, yet others think they are far too abundant - since they know the exact techniques needed to obtain them; do new players even know the exact layers you can find diamond at, without looking it up?
This is also further confirmation of why some players struggle to find resources, yet others think they are far too abundant - since they know the exact techniques needed to obtain them; do new players even know the exact layers you can find diamond at, without looking it up?
New players don't know anything. The game is not friendly to new players and most learning is done on wikis and websites rather than in-game, which is unfortunate.
By the way, I just started a new world and timed myself to get diamond.
On my first try it took me 48 minutes to get a full set of diamond armor, weapons and tools, including a hoe. That's 35 diamonds in 48 minutes, including the time it took to collect wood, find a cave, dig down to level 12, fight off several skeletons, creepers, zombies, craft furnaces and smelt and craft a full set of iron armor, four iron pickaxes, and craft all of the diamond items.
That's 1 diamond every 1.4 minutes, (without Fortune III and Efficiency V).
I'm sorry, but diamonds are preposterously over-abundant.
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There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
Like I said, you only need about 9 diamonds to do literally every activity in the game, with full mining speed.
You just feel entitled to easily obtaining the top flex item in the game. In which case, why even call it diamond?
Indeed, that's a major reason why I added amethyst to TMCW, and earlier, used a mod that added amethyst gear plus my own basic MCreator mod to add an ore for it, which is basically a way to show off how many resources I can collect - even after 466 hours of extreme caving, mining 380,000 ores in total from nearly every cave in most of a level 4 map, I had less than a stack of surplus amethyst, with the majority of what I found going to repairing my gear (keep in mind that I still play in 1.6.4, where you need to use resources to repair your gear, which also applies to TMCW, which does have "Mending" but all it does is keep the prior work penalty down, just as renaming does in vanilla):
This is all I have after spending over 19 real-time days doing nothing but caving; I didn't even make a spot in my resource storage room for amethyst since I knew that I'd never accumulate enough to warrant even a single chest:
This is the gear I use while caving (as well as all the time during the "end-game")
An amethyst pickaxe is basically just a diamond pickaxe which costs far more to repair, in addition to the resource being much harder to obtain; 43 levels for one unit restores 1171 durability for a cost of 2177 XP while you can fully repair the same diamond pickaxe with a sacrifice which restores 1561 durability for only 1032 XP, and as little as 887 XP if you damage the sacrifice by 149-187 durability (the anvil adds a 12% durability bonus so this will achieve a full repair). I had to increase the anvil cost limit to 49 levels in order for amethyst items to be able to get reasonably good enchantments (other items still have the original cap of 39, this still makes amethyst unable to get some enchantment combinations that diamond can get):
This is also why I enabled the statistics for mob spawners, and in TMCW, added a block which drops when you mine them with Silk Touch - otherwise, there isn't any easy way to show how many I've found:
Also, if you played in older versions you might have different opinions on the value of diamond and whether it is overpowered; for example, due to how repair costs were calculated it cost far more to repair diamond gear - iron tools only cost 2 levels to fully repair but diamond costs a whopping 17 levels (this is also why my amethyst items are so expensive; you can't even repair unenchanted items using a sacrifice unless it is damaged enough):
Likewise, there was no such thing as "god gear", at least not as something you'd regularly use, because it was impossible to repair - a diamond sword with Sharpness V, Knockback II, Unbreaking III, as I use, is already too expensive to repair with a sacrifice unless you damage it (which I do my killing a couple hundred chickens, then I trade the meat for emeralds to buy another sword).
Conversely, the higher durability of diamond made it much more valuable, especially when you regularly mine as many blocks and kill as many mobs as I do every day, and I certainly don't want to rely on unenchanted tools or XP farms to make new ones all the time:
If you do the math that's 13,479 iron pickaxes and 2,006 iron swords! The same goes for armor; 3 pieces of diamond armor is much cheaper to maintain than 4 pieces of iron, especially when enchanted. You make it sound like you just run around in unenchanted iron but I sure do not like dying and have a risker playstyle than the average player, and in any case, it doesn't really matter how easy it is to obtain diamond when you only need a certain amount - so what if it takes 1 or 1,000 hours to make a full set of gear? Mojang needs to remove Mending, or make it work the way it does in my own version of the game (several other features in TMCW are based on my own ideas of how they should have been done) - then you have to continuously work to maintain your gear; even if it doesn't feel like it to me because of my playstyle I am "working" to sustain my use of my gear and I've been "reminded" countless times of how unique my playstyle is and that others do not want to spend all their time mining to get resources, hence why nearly everybody has farms.
By the way, I just started a new world and timed myself to get diamond.
On my first try it took me 48 minutes to get a full set of diamond armor, weapons and tools, including a hoe. That's 35 diamonds in 48 minutes, including the time it took to collect wood, find a cave, dig down to level 12, fight off several skeletons, creepers, zombies, craft furnaces and smelt and craft a full set of iron armor, four iron pickaxes, and craft all of the diamond items.
That's 1 diamond every 1.4 minutes, (without Fortune III and Efficiency V).
I'm sorry, but diamonds are preposterously over-abundant.
Buddy, in short, I find diamonds a lot harder to find than you do, to the point where I *do* enchant my iron armour. You want to make diamonds not show up in trading or structures, sure. But it's not that common underground. You're a god of mining but you don't speak for everyone. You sound like a rich person telling the masses that they're not entitled to paying off their mortgages or student loans and that it's easy to get money.
Nepho, it's great that you were able to do that in such a short time, but I don't exactly want to be holding down the mouse button and moving forward for half an hour. Strip mining isn't what makes minecraft fun.
Nepho, it's great that you were able to do that in such a short time, but I don't exactly want to be holding down the mouse button and moving forward for half an hour. Strip mining isn't what makes minecraft fun.
How many hours do you spend in your worlds?
World1 145.46 days 3491.04 hours 1000 sessions (3.49 hours/session)
TMCWv1 (replayed) 42.56 days 1021.44 hours 284 sessions (3.59 hours/session)
TMCWv4 22.46 days 539.04 hours 140 sessions (3.85 hours/session)
TMCWv3 15.83 days 379.92 hours 104 sessions (3.65 hours/session)
InfiniteCaves (recreation) 15.62 days 374.96 hours 122 sessions (3.07 hours/session)
World1v2 8.57 days 205.68 hours 73 sessions (2.82 hours/session)
TripleHeightTerrain 8.25 days 198.00 hours 53 sessions (3.74 hours/session)
World1v3 7.27 days 174.48 hours 59 sessions (3.08 hours/session)
TMCWv2 5.62 days 134.88 hours 52 sessions (2.59 hours/session)
Total 271.64 days 6519.36 hours 1887 sessions (3.45 hours/session)
Half an hour, or even the 3 hours or so I spent mining in most of my modded worlds (all except for the first one), or the upwards of 12 hours I spend mining quartz for XP, is nothing by comparison, and I never need to go out just to collect more resources past the early game, nor do you have to in 1.9 and later thanks to Mending (I still need resources but my playstyle guarantees a steady income).
Either way, you do need to put the rarity of diamonds into perspective:
This was mined over 13 play sessions and 45 hours in vanilla 1.6.4; diamond was only 0.474% of all ores mined at the rate of 4.3 per hour, with no bias towards any particular ore or elevation (I just explore everything underground that is interconnected in some way) - at this rate it would take 8 hours to accumulate enough for a full set of gear, which again shows how important the way you collect resources is - some players are actually concerned about the availability of resources like stone and dirt, which may be used far more than diamond but they are also vastly more abundant, effectively only limited by how much you can mine:
Depletion of local resources is also another issue, especially for players who don't know about things like Mending or trading, or just don't use them; I can't just go down in a cave to collect resources if I needed them because they have all been mined out for thousands of blocks around my main base. In particular, I consider mineral blocks to be uncraftable so I only have about a stack of individual diamonds/iron/gold/etc and coal in furnaces on hand; when I plan to make a new secondary base I make sure I have enough gold and redstone dust to craft enough powered rails. I do use blocks directly though for things like anvils and redstone blocks under powered rails.
Nepho, it's great that you were able to do that in such a short time, but I don't exactly want to be holding down the mouse button and moving forward for half an hour. Strip mining isn't what makes minecraft fun.
Then use iron gear.
Why do you feel entitled to surplus of the top precious resource in the game?
Should it be easy to build a castle made of diamond blocks in Survival mode? No. So what exactly should deter players from being able to build a castle made of diamond blocks in Survival mode? Scarcity. The same principle applies to diamond armor and gear. You simply feel entitled to having buku diamonds, I think it should be a perk / flex rather than the standard gear. Because, you know, they're d-i-a-m-o-n-d-s.
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There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
Buddy, in short, I find diamonds a lot harder to find than you do, to the point where I *do* enchant my iron armour. You want to make diamonds not show up in trading or structures, sure. But it's not that common underground. You're a god of mining but you don't speak for everyone. You sound like a rich person telling the masses that they're not entitled to paying off their mortgages or student loans and that it's easy to get money.
You can cut 16 wood, craft a wood pickaxe, axe and shovel, dig straight down to level 12 and start mining for diamonds in less than 2 minutes.
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There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
I'm now convinced that netherite might be a bit too common as well. Technically it's far more rare than diamond, however, obtaining ancient debris is exceedingly easy once you have TNT. Not to mention extremely fun.
Digging down to level 14 or so in the Nether, digging a 1 wide tunnel, and then laying down a line of TNT with maybe 1 or 2 space gap between each, and igniting them, unearths a wide tunnel exposing quite a lot of ancient debris. With one stack of TNT it seems you should be able to expose more than enough ancient debris to convert a full set of diamond armor or tools.
Once you've obtained supplies of gunpowder and sand to make TNT, netherite actually seems to be quite a lot easier to obtain than diamond. Of course, mining it with TNT is extremely fun. It reminds me that, back in the day, I always wanted diamond to be immune from TNT, so that you could use detonations to create efficient diamond mines, which seemed to be the obvious end goal of utilizing TNT. I never understood why they allowed diamonds to be destroyed by explosions.
I would actually love for diamond to be given explosion immunity. Mining for diamond would then become infinitely more fun with TNT, the way it always should have been.
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There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
You can cut 16 wood, craft a wood pickaxe, axe and shovel, dig straight down to level 12 and start mining for diamonds in less than 2 minutes.
The time it takes to find a diamond ore given their rarity is much greater than that even if you have a top tier strategy. If I do as you say, it takes me at least half an hour to get a diamond ore from world spawn and this is assuming I just nosedive down a 1x1 hole crafting my tools from wood to iron on the way.
I don't really think most players play like that and I don't see the point or the fun to playing like that, you're just robbing yourself of the game if you try to speedrun it like that, and you can basically just get unlucky and not find anything for a long time anyway.
I'm now convinced that netherite might be a bit too common as well. Technically it's far more rare than diamond, however, obtaining ancient debris is exceedingly easy once you have TNT. Not to mention extremely fun.
Digging down to level 14 or so in the Nether, digging a 1 wide tunnel, and then laying down a line of TNT with maybe 1 or 2 space gap between each, and igniting them, unearths a wide tunnel exposing quite a lot of ancient debris. With one stack of TNT it seems you should be able to expose more than enough ancient debris to convert a full set of diamond armor or tools.
Once you've obtained supplies of gunpowder and sand to make TNT, netherite actually seems to be quite a lot easier to obtain than diamond. Of course, mining it with TNT is extremely fun. It reminds me that, back in the day, I always wanted diamond to be immune from TNT, so that you could use detonations to create efficient diamond mines, which seemed to be the obvious end goal of utilizing TNT. I never understood why they allowed diamonds to be destroyed by explosions.
I would actually love for diamond to be given explosion immunity. Mining for diamond would then become infinitely more fun with TNT, the way it always should have been.
Based on the design of abandoned mineshafts I'm led to believe you are expected to use TNT in conjunction with a button or lever, by digging out the centre of a 3x3 cube, putting TNT and a block to cover, and then triggering it, so you very slowly dig out a tunnel one TNT at a time, but in doing so you don't lose much ore (anything you can see on the way you can just mine out and replace with stone, and corner blocks you can't see won't get totally blasted -they'll either stay or they'll drop their ore and experience.
Also, again, you have this 'anti-entitlement' with your ability to amass a full stack of TNT that fast - we're talking about 64 times 5 = 320 gunpowder. I don't usually have more than two stacks after playing a world for a while even if I do bother fighting creepers and ghasts - it's often easier to just ignore them or to force them to explode or shoot their fireballs back at them, and dungeons are fairly rare now. Unless you have looting III mending swords early on somehow, or you cave mine very quickly, I don't see how you can amass so much gunpowder.
Why do you feel entitled to surplus of the top precious resource in the game?
Should it be easy to build a castle made of diamond blocks in Survival mode? No. So what exactly should deter players from being able to build a castle made of diamond blocks in Survival mode? Scarcity. The same principle applies to diamond armor and gear. You simply feel entitled to having buku diamonds, I think it should be a perk / flex rather than the standard gear. Because, you know, they're d-i-a-m-o-n-d-s.
That's really not true. You don't get a full set of armor that fast without fortune.
You want the game to be harder for you as a high level player and in doing so are making it hard for everyone, including too hard for some people to bother with diamonds at all. Get rid of Mending instead, as an idea.
You say the game is too easy, but for some it's just easy enough. Better too easy than too hard. Not everyone has all day to play games and time saved is time earned.
You can cut 16 wood, craft a wood pickaxe, axe and shovel, dig straight down to level 12 and start mining for diamonds in less than 2 minutes.
Assuming that you find iron first, you don't fall in lava or a cave when you're digging straight down, and you are able to fight off the mobs you encounter if you come across a cave...
I'm now convinced that netherite might be a bit too common as well. Technically it's far more rare than diamond, however, obtaining ancient debris is exceedingly easy once you have TNT. Not to mention extremely fun.
Digging down to level 14 or so in the Nether, digging a 1 wide tunnel, and then laying down a line of TNT with maybe 1 or 2 space gap between each, and igniting them, unearths a wide tunnel exposing quite a lot of ancient debris. With one stack of TNT it seems you should be able to expose more than enough ancient debris to convert a full set of diamond armor or tools.
Once you've obtained supplies of gunpowder and sand to make TNT, netherite actually seems to be quite a lot easier to obtain than diamond. Of course, mining it with TNT is extremely fun. It reminds me that, back in the day, I always wanted diamond to be immune from TNT, so that you could use detonations to create efficient diamond mines, which seemed to be the obvious end goal of utilizing TNT. I never understood why they allowed diamonds to be destroyed by explosions.
I would actually love for diamond to be given explosion immunity. Mining for diamond would then become infinitely more fun with TNT, the way it always should have been.
Ancient debris isn't nearly that common, some can ignite 10 explosions and not find it at all, while some can strip mine and find it faster (depending on their mining speed). Utilizing TNT is also a fairly dangerous way to mine, and gunpowder could be really hard to come across since it is only dropped by mobs, and not actually found anywhere. Further, creepers must be killed from a range or they'll blow up, dropping nothing. In the nether, you could kill ghasts, but that isn't a guaranteed drop and ghasts are extremely hostile and annoying to deal with. The TNT method may be viable for 1 or 2 mining sessions but will end up getting expensive if you plan on doing it every time.
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Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Minecraft 2.0
Minecraft 1.VR-Pre1
Snapshot 15w14a
Minecraft 3D
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
As it turns out, diamonds in the Earth are much more common than we thought. About 1,000 times more common, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers used seismic technology (the same kind used to measure earthquakes) to estimate that a quadrillion tons of diamonds lie deep below the Earth's surface. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000 --- or one thousand times more than one trillion.
MYTH #1: Diamonds are expensive because they’re so rare.
Diamonds are not particularly rare. In fact, compared to other gemstones, they’re the most common precious stone found. Generally, the cost per carat (or weight of a gemstone) is based upon a stone’s rarity; the rarer the stone, the more expensive. Therefore, rubies, emeralds and sapphires are much rarer and, in turn, far more expensive than diamonds.
MYTH BUSTER: So, what makes diamonds so valuable? It’s simple: market demand.
For centuries, diamonds have been a sign of power, wealth and status. The stone was a rare find and therefore was worth more. However, in the 1800s, a veritable diamond trove was unearthed in Kimberly, South Africa. This newfound mine had the potential to flood the market with diamonds and bring down the cost for the precious stone. To prevent too many diamonds from hitting the market, De Beers quickly intervened, bought up the mine and maintained tight control over the global diamond supply. De Beers released only enough diamonds to meet annual demand. This gave the illusion that diamonds were exceedingly rare. In turn, the seemingly-limited supply inflated the cost of diamonds.
For comparison, a Minecraft world has around 52 trillion diamond ore which can make 5.8-13 trillion diamond blocks, with a total weight of 20-45 trillion metric tons (without Fortune to Fortune III).
Also, I think it is bad game design to add something that can only be practically used by a small subset of players (like myself, who spends literally all their time caving). Have you ever used chiseled/cracked/mossy stone bricks or moss stone in your builds? I only have 30 chiseled stone bricks, which can only be obtained 3 at a time from jungle temples, and took over 145 days of playtime to find - what's the point of them even existing if the only thing you can do with them is to show off how many jungle temples you've found? Cracked and mossy variants can be found in large amounts in strongholds, which are easy to locate thanks to eyes of ender, but once they are gone that's it. Moss stone can be found in jungle temples and dungeons, and while I have over 75,000 accumulated so far (from dungeons only) it took more than 3,000 hours of caving to collect that much (this still exceeds the amount of diamond ore that I've found by a factor of more than 5, despite diamond ore being much more common overall since most of it is hidden). Thankfully, Mojang made them craftable in 1.8 so they can now be obtained in unlimited quantities (I did not make them craftable in TMCW since I don't use them, though you can find them in more structures).
Diamonds do have uses, it's a matter of skill and taste if you use them. I die often so I don't, to avoid risking losing them. Thus, combined with my poor strategy for mining (a rough circular design, or a very clustered strip mine), I don't wear diamond or fight/mine with it. I only use them for appliances as already said.
And fancy types of moss stone and stone bricks were useful for patching up and marking important areas in strongholds before 1.8, I used them for this often. For example, the path to portal rooms marked by chisels on the top wall or ceilings of larger rooms, and areas where silverfish are cleared or creepers blew up or fire burned wood floors marked by cracked brick, surfaced or cave areas by moss stone, lava and water areas by moss brick.
Ancient debris is nowhere near as rare as you may think, especially with the distribution it has:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/File:Ancient_Debris_Spawn_Rate_Per_Layer.png
The peak concentration is about 0.15%, which seems rare but diamond actually has a lower peak concentration, about 0.12%:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/File:PercentOfOreByHeight.png
Then factor in the fact that when branch-mining you expose multiple blocks per block removed, then the fact that when you expose a vein several additional blocks will be exposed - put those together and diamond ore is suddenly not very rare anymore, hence all the discussion over it being too easy to get (if you know how to efficiently find it; if you simply mine out all blocks below layer 15, as some players do, you'll only find one diamond per 833 blocks):
That's effectively 14 times more common than its per-block abundance would suggest! I don't even consider Fortune to be worth using on diamond when you can find all you need within an hour (one block mined per second, which is doable even without enchanted tools, especially in the Nether, is 3600 blocks per hour, times 0.017 and you get nearly a stack of diamond ore per hour), and the fact that you need to spend time and resources to get Fortune itself. In fact, in my own mod I added an ore which is far rarer than diamond in part because I wanted something that was actually rare for my playstyle, even then I don't need Fortune to find enough while caving, where it is around 8 times rarer than diamond, comparable to the spawn rate of Netherite outside of its peak range:
This is from an analysis of layers 4-8, the range above lava level which contains diamond and amethyst ore (equivalent to 11-15 in vanilla):
Amethyst is obsidian with a data value of 1 (49:1), which also means you need a diamond pickaxe to mine it, while ID 181 is ruby ore, which only generates in a single biome - despite this, this and emerald are over half as common as amethyst, and have a much wider range, as indicated by an analysis of layers 4-62:
Amethyst is now over twice as rare as emerald, the rarest ore in vanilla - again, despite emerald only generating in a few biomes which are together only about half as common as Extreme Hills in vanilla, and more than a thousand times rarer than coal! It is a bit more common than indicated here when caving due to ores that extend below lava level; I found about 8 times more diamond than amethyst in Survival, but that still makes it far rarer than anything in vanilla (I found only 223 amethyst over 466 hours of caving, a rate of just 0.478 per hour; for comparison, I averaged 3.43 diamond, 201.26 iron, and 551.15 coal. Notably, these rates are actually slightly lower than what I average in vanilla).
Note that it is intentional that it isn't so rare that I need to use Fortune so I don't need to carry an extra pickaxe, or just use Fortune on my main pickaxe as I used to (which meant my inventory filled up at about double the rate), and it is more common below lava level so branch-mining isn't too difficult, so this is the cutoff where I consider something to be too rare (caving is something that I solely do for fun and I don't want to interrupt it just to get more resources, although I do trade for diamond gear in my first world so I can save all the diamonds I collect, but this is much easier than having to branch-mine since I just have to spend a few minutes per day harvesting crops and trading).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
A natural issue about this kind of thing is durability. You can break around 1300 blocks with a diamond pick, and ancient debris appears about every 1/650 blocks (in peak areas, according to your data). With you needing 4 scrap to get a new pick, it takes about 2 diamond picks durability to upgrade a tool. With netherite being only (approximately) 11% better, this doesn't seem like a worthwhile thing.
Nether blocks can be broken at extremely high speeds using any pickaxe, and they can be collected using any pickaxe too. The only reason you'd be using diamond pickaxes to mine in the nether is if you had literally no access to anything else. Otherwise, even a wood pickaxe would do fine while mining (though I prefer iron for durability), and you only have to mine the actual ore with your diamond pickaxe. That's only 1-3 durability for each time you find netherrite.
Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQdu9LKAdIU
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
15w14a is on this link:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/15w14a
1.RV-Pre1 is here:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/1.RV-Pre1
Minecraft 3D is here:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_3D_Shareware_v1.34
Turns out that we're both wrong. According to the wiki, netherrack takes .35 seconds with a wood pickaxe, .2 with a stone, and .1 with higher tiers. It's likely that the wiki may have rounded these numbers and that diamond does mine faster than iron, but it's objectively slower to mine using stone or wood. Iron's still not a free material, and you'd likely go through about an anvil's worth of iron to find a single debris (not vein, debris. you need 4 debris to upgrade a tool or armor piece.)
Then, like I said, use iron gear.
The fact that nobody ever really even bothers to enchant iron gear illustrates that diamonds are way, way, way overly abundant. You and I both agree that the grind of mining should deter players from amassing enough diamonds, for example, to build a diamond castle, I happen to believe that that same principle should be extended to gear. You don't want to work to obtain a precious resource? Fine, use iron gear. Iron should be the standard anyway, diamond should be the flex. You can do literally everything in the game with a set of iron gear and 9 diamonds for instamine tools. But you refuse to accept that because you simply feel entitled to the top precious resource in the game.
Btw, your point about only needing 30-40 diamonds to make all the gear you'll ever need actually supports my argument better than yours.
Iron holds a completely different role in the game than diamond because of the fact that it is used to create a large variety of technical materials that are required in mass quantities for large scale projects, so it makes perfect sense for them to be renewable. Diamonds on the other hand are used only for tiny niche items that are ultimately only necessary in a quantity of one, and their main function is just stronger yet redundant overlap with the role iron already serves: defense against mobs, and faster mining.
Considering the fact that the game has both a "Hard" mode as well as a "Hardcore" mode illustrates that it was indeed intended to provide sincere challenge. The fact that the survival aspects of the game are well known to be strongly based on the absolutely brutal and unforgivable ADOM RPG illustrates this further. I'm all in favor of the game facilitating easier play for some people, but it's not unreasonable for other players to have diamond abundance balanced such that they are only viable as a flex rather than an easily obtainable standard material for gear. I'd say that the measure by which I'd judge this balance is, unless players are regularly enchanting their iron gear, then diamonds are overly abundant. In my view that seems to be a perfectly reasonable standard option for many players.
Like I said, you only need about 9 diamonds to do literally every activity in the game, with full mining speed.
You just feel entitled to easily obtaining the top flex item in the game. In which case, why even call it diamond?
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
All mining times are rounded up to the next tick (0.05 seconds), plus you need to add another 0.25 seconds for a delay between consecutive blocks unless you can "instantly" mine the block (the calculated mining time is less than 0.05 seconds), as well as another 0.05 seconds before you can start mining the next block (even when you can "instantly" mine it) for a total of 0.3 seconds - I compared the speed of gold and diamond before and with Efficiency V both could mine 150 stone or 133 ore per minute (0.4 and 0.45 seconds per block respectively. If I use the formulas given by the Wiki i get 0.1 and 0.15 seconds respectively, to which you must add 0.3 seconds for consecutive blocks).
This also means that Netherite will be the same since its mining speed is between gold and diamond; only blocks that happen to be just hard enough to prevent diamond from mining it within the next tick or much harder blocks like obsidian will see much of a benefit, and mainly with unenchanted tools (you surely will put Efficiency V on your tools, especially Netherite). Efficiency adds a constant factor, 26 for Efficiency V, so the differences become less - for example, wood (base 2) will have a speed of 28 while gold (base 12) will have a speed of 38. Plug these into the formula for stone (1.5 * 30 = 45; 45 / speed, rounded up = time in ticks) and you get 2 ticks or 0.1 seconds for both - yes, wood and gold are exactly the same! Conversely, for obsidian I get 2.25 seconds for diamond and 2.15 seconds for Netherite, making the latter 4.6% faster; adding another 0.3 seconds for the delay between blocks reduces the advantage to 4.1%.
Other blocks may be slightly faster with Netherite since their hardness is just enough to push the mining time up to the next tick for diamond, but as far as I'm concerned they are the same since the vast majority of the blocks I mine are ores, followed by stone, then mineshaft rails, the last of which are instantly mined with diamond so no further benefit is possible. The only other significant advantage, durability, is completely irrelevant due to Mending; it only helps to provide a larger buffer for cases where you don't get any XP from using the items; I did play a bit in 1.9 before to see how different it actually was from 1.6.4, including the effectiveness of Mending, and I had no trouble keeping all my gear topped up though normal gameplay.
Also, you only need to mine 650 blocks per ancient debris if you mine every single block - when mining for diamonds, do you clear out everything below layer 15? That will yield around one diamond ore per 833 blocks - but then how does the Wiki get a figure as low as one per 59 blocks (1.7% of all blocks mined and about 14 times higher than the overall per-block abundance)? Because you can expose multiple blocks per block mined when digging tunnels, and when you do expose an ore it likely exposes several more blocks; this is why the analysis I made in this thread found significantly more exposed coal than indicated by its natural abundance (ancient debris has smaller veins than other ores based on what the Wiki says but you'll still get more than expected; only a single block ore like emerald will be solely dependent on blocks exposed). A diamond pickaxe can also mine over 6240 blocks if you put Unbreaking III on it, which you definitely should - I do when I mine quartz for XP (about 5% of which goes to repairing it).
This is also further confirmation of why some players struggle to find resources, yet others think they are far too abundant - since they know the exact techniques needed to obtain them; do new players even know the exact layers you can find diamond at, without looking it up?
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
New players don't know anything. The game is not friendly to new players and most learning is done on wikis and websites rather than in-game, which is unfortunate.
By the way, I just started a new world and timed myself to get diamond.
On my first try it took me 48 minutes to get a full set of diamond armor, weapons and tools, including a hoe. That's 35 diamonds in 48 minutes, including the time it took to collect wood, find a cave, dig down to level 12, fight off several skeletons, creepers, zombies, craft furnaces and smelt and craft a full set of iron armor, four iron pickaxes, and craft all of the diamond items.
That's 1 diamond every 1.4 minutes, (without Fortune III and Efficiency V).
I'm sorry, but diamonds are preposterously over-abundant.
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
Indeed, that's a major reason why I added amethyst to TMCW, and earlier, used a mod that added amethyst gear plus my own basic MCreator mod to add an ore for it, which is basically a way to show off how many resources I can collect - even after 466 hours of extreme caving, mining 380,000 ores in total from nearly every cave in most of a level 4 map, I had less than a stack of surplus amethyst, with the majority of what I found going to repairing my gear (keep in mind that I still play in 1.6.4, where you need to use resources to repair your gear, which also applies to TMCW, which does have "Mending" but all it does is keep the prior work penalty down, just as renaming does in vanilla):
This is the gear I use while caving (as well as all the time during the "end-game")
An amethyst pickaxe is basically just a diamond pickaxe which costs far more to repair, in addition to the resource being much harder to obtain; 43 levels for one unit restores 1171 durability for a cost of 2177 XP while you can fully repair the same diamond pickaxe with a sacrifice which restores 1561 durability for only 1032 XP, and as little as 887 XP if you damage the sacrifice by 149-187 durability (the anvil adds a 12% durability bonus so this will achieve a full repair). I had to increase the anvil cost limit to 49 levels in order for amethyst items to be able to get reasonably good enchantments (other items still have the original cap of 39, this still makes amethyst unable to get some enchantment combinations that diamond can get):
This is also why I enabled the statistics for mob spawners, and in TMCW, added a block which drops when you mine them with Silk Touch - otherwise, there isn't any easy way to show how many I've found:
Also, if you played in older versions you might have different opinions on the value of diamond and whether it is overpowered; for example, due to how repair costs were calculated it cost far more to repair diamond gear - iron tools only cost 2 levels to fully repair but diamond costs a whopping 17 levels (this is also why my amethyst items are so expensive; you can't even repair unenchanted items using a sacrifice unless it is damaged enough):
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Anvil/Mechanics/Before_1.8#Costs_For_Sacrifice_Repair
Likewise, there was no such thing as "god gear", at least not as something you'd regularly use, because it was impossible to repair - a diamond sword with Sharpness V, Knockback II, Unbreaking III, as I use, is already too expensive to repair with a sacrifice unless you damage it (which I do my killing a couple hundred chickens, then I trade the meat for emeralds to buy another sword).
Conversely, the higher durability of diamond made it much more valuable, especially when you regularly mine as many blocks and kill as many mobs as I do every day, and I certainly don't want to rely on unenchanted tools or XP farms to make new ones all the time:
If you do the math that's 13,479 iron pickaxes and 2,006 iron swords! The same goes for armor; 3 pieces of diamond armor is much cheaper to maintain than 4 pieces of iron, especially when enchanted. You make it sound like you just run around in unenchanted iron but I sure do not like dying and have a risker playstyle than the average player, and in any case, it doesn't really matter how easy it is to obtain diamond when you only need a certain amount - so what if it takes 1 or 1,000 hours to make a full set of gear? Mojang needs to remove Mending, or make it work the way it does in my own version of the game (several other features in TMCW are based on my own ideas of how they should have been done) - then you have to continuously work to maintain your gear; even if it doesn't feel like it to me because of my playstyle I am "working" to sustain my use of my gear and I've been "reminded" countless times of how unique my playstyle is and that others do not want to spend all their time mining to get resources, hence why nearly everybody has farms.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
You underestimate your power.
Buddy, in short, I find diamonds a lot harder to find than you do, to the point where I *do* enchant my iron armour. You want to make diamonds not show up in trading or structures, sure. But it's not that common underground. You're a god of mining but you don't speak for everyone. You sound like a rich person telling the masses that they're not entitled to paying off their mortgages or student loans and that it's easy to get money.
Nepho, it's great that you were able to do that in such a short time, but I don't exactly want to be holding down the mouse button and moving forward for half an hour. Strip mining isn't what makes minecraft fun.
How many hours do you spend in your worlds?
Half an hour, or even the 3 hours or so I spent mining in most of my modded worlds (all except for the first one), or the upwards of 12 hours I spend mining quartz for XP, is nothing by comparison, and I never need to go out just to collect more resources past the early game, nor do you have to in 1.9 and later thanks to Mending (I still need resources but my playstyle guarantees a steady income).
Either way, you do need to put the rarity of diamonds into perspective:
This was mined over 13 play sessions and 45 hours in vanilla 1.6.4; diamond was only 0.474% of all ores mined at the rate of 4.3 per hour, with no bias towards any particular ore or elevation (I just explore everything underground that is interconnected in some way) - at this rate it would take 8 hours to accumulate enough for a full set of gear, which again shows how important the way you collect resources is - some players are actually concerned about the availability of resources like stone and dirt, which may be used far more than diamond but they are also vastly more abundant, effectively only limited by how much you can mine:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/3014807-minecraft-cobblestone-generator-how-many-of-you?comment=8
Depletion of local resources is also another issue, especially for players who don't know about things like Mending or trading, or just don't use them; I can't just go down in a cave to collect resources if I needed them because they have all been mined out for thousands of blocks around my main base. In particular, I consider mineral blocks to be uncraftable so I only have about a stack of individual diamonds/iron/gold/etc and coal in furnaces on hand; when I plan to make a new secondary base I make sure I have enough gold and redstone dust to craft enough powered rails. I do use blocks directly though for things like anvils and redstone blocks under powered rails.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Then use iron gear.
Why do you feel entitled to surplus of the top precious resource in the game?
Should it be easy to build a castle made of diamond blocks in Survival mode? No. So what exactly should deter players from being able to build a castle made of diamond blocks in Survival mode? Scarcity. The same principle applies to diamond armor and gear. You simply feel entitled to having buku diamonds, I think it should be a perk / flex rather than the standard gear. Because, you know, they're d-i-a-m-o-n-d-s.
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
You can cut 16 wood, craft a wood pickaxe, axe and shovel, dig straight down to level 12 and start mining for diamonds in less than 2 minutes.
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
I'm now convinced that netherite might be a bit too common as well. Technically it's far more rare than diamond, however, obtaining ancient debris is exceedingly easy once you have TNT. Not to mention extremely fun.
Digging down to level 14 or so in the Nether, digging a 1 wide tunnel, and then laying down a line of TNT with maybe 1 or 2 space gap between each, and igniting them, unearths a wide tunnel exposing quite a lot of ancient debris. With one stack of TNT it seems you should be able to expose more than enough ancient debris to convert a full set of diamond armor or tools.
Once you've obtained supplies of gunpowder and sand to make TNT, netherite actually seems to be quite a lot easier to obtain than diamond. Of course, mining it with TNT is extremely fun. It reminds me that, back in the day, I always wanted diamond to be immune from TNT, so that you could use detonations to create efficient diamond mines, which seemed to be the obvious end goal of utilizing TNT. I never understood why they allowed diamonds to be destroyed by explosions.
I would actually love for diamond to be given explosion immunity. Mining for diamond would then become infinitely more fun with TNT, the way it always should have been.
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
The time it takes to find a diamond ore given their rarity is much greater than that even if you have a top tier strategy. If I do as you say, it takes me at least half an hour to get a diamond ore from world spawn and this is assuming I just nosedive down a 1x1 hole crafting my tools from wood to iron on the way.
I don't really think most players play like that and I don't see the point or the fun to playing like that, you're just robbing yourself of the game if you try to speedrun it like that, and you can basically just get unlucky and not find anything for a long time anyway.
Based on the design of abandoned mineshafts I'm led to believe you are expected to use TNT in conjunction with a button or lever, by digging out the centre of a 3x3 cube, putting TNT and a block to cover, and then triggering it, so you very slowly dig out a tunnel one TNT at a time, but in doing so you don't lose much ore (anything you can see on the way you can just mine out and replace with stone, and corner blocks you can't see won't get totally blasted -they'll either stay or they'll drop their ore and experience.
Also, again, you have this 'anti-entitlement' with your ability to amass a full stack of TNT that fast - we're talking about 64 times 5 = 320 gunpowder. I don't usually have more than two stacks after playing a world for a while even if I do bother fighting creepers and ghasts - it's often easier to just ignore them or to force them to explode or shoot their fireballs back at them, and dungeons are fairly rare now. Unless you have looting III mending swords early on somehow, or you cave mine very quickly, I don't see how you can amass so much gunpowder.
That's really not true. You don't get a full set of armor that fast without fortune.
You want the game to be harder for you as a high level player and in doing so are making it hard for everyone, including too hard for some people to bother with diamonds at all. Get rid of Mending instead, as an idea.
You say the game is too easy, but for some it's just easy enough. Better too easy than too hard. Not everyone has all day to play games and time saved is time earned.
Assuming that you find iron first, you don't fall in lava or a cave when you're digging straight down, and you are able to fight off the mobs you encounter if you come across a cave...
Ancient debris isn't nearly that common, some can ignite 10 explosions and not find it at all, while some can strip mine and find it faster (depending on their mining speed). Utilizing TNT is also a fairly dangerous way to mine, and gunpowder could be really hard to come across since it is only dropped by mobs, and not actually found anywhere. Further, creepers must be killed from a range or they'll blow up, dropping nothing. In the nether, you could kill ghasts, but that isn't a guaranteed drop and ghasts are extremely hostile and annoying to deal with. The TNT method may be viable for 1 or 2 mining sessions but will end up getting expensive if you plan on doing it every time.
Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQdu9LKAdIU
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
15w14a is on this link:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/15w14a
1.RV-Pre1 is here:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/1.RV-Pre1
Minecraft 3D is here:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_3D_Shareware_v1.34
For comparison, a Minecraft world has around 52 trillion diamond ore which can make 5.8-13 trillion diamond blocks, with a total weight of 20-45 trillion metric tons (without Fortune to Fortune III).
Also, I think it is bad game design to add something that can only be practically used by a small subset of players (like myself, who spends literally all their time caving). Have you ever used chiseled/cracked/mossy stone bricks or moss stone in your builds? I only have 30 chiseled stone bricks, which can only be obtained 3 at a time from jungle temples, and took over 145 days of playtime to find - what's the point of them even existing if the only thing you can do with them is to show off how many jungle temples you've found? Cracked and mossy variants can be found in large amounts in strongholds, which are easy to locate thanks to eyes of ender, but once they are gone that's it. Moss stone can be found in jungle temples and dungeons, and while I have over 75,000 accumulated so far (from dungeons only) it took more than 3,000 hours of caving to collect that much (this still exceeds the amount of diamond ore that I've found by a factor of more than 5, despite diamond ore being much more common overall since most of it is hidden). Thankfully, Mojang made them craftable in 1.8 so they can now be obtained in unlimited quantities (I did not make them craftable in TMCW since I don't use them, though you can find them in more structures).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Diamonds do have uses, it's a matter of skill and taste if you use them. I die often so I don't, to avoid risking losing them. Thus, combined with my poor strategy for mining (a rough circular design, or a very clustered strip mine), I don't wear diamond or fight/mine with it. I only use them for appliances as already said.
And fancy types of moss stone and stone bricks were useful for patching up and marking important areas in strongholds before 1.8, I used them for this often. For example, the path to portal rooms marked by chisels on the top wall or ceilings of larger rooms, and areas where silverfish are cleared or creepers blew up or fire burned wood floors marked by cracked brick, surfaced or cave areas by moss stone, lava and water areas by moss brick.