Hello everyone! So I just got my enchanting table and 15 bookshelves. I seen on Youtube this guy had a silk touch pickaxe to pick ores and then fortune to get more from them. I don't have enough diamonds to make another pickaxe so I am using iron. What's the best level to enchant a iron pickaxe to get silk touch? Fortune 3? Sorry if this is confusing. I tried looking on the wiki but I got confused. So if you could just tell me the level that would be very helpful! Thanks in advance.
Hello everyone! So I just got my enchanting table and 15 bookshelves. I seen on Youtube this guy had a silk touch pickaxe to pick ores and then fortune to get more from them. I don't have enough diamonds to make another pickaxe so I am using iron. What's the best level to enchant a iron pickaxe to get silk touch? Fortune 3? Sorry if this is confusing. I tried looking on the wiki but I got confused. So if you could just tell me the level that would be very helpful! Thanks in advance.
You can't get both on the same tool. Your best chances, on average, for either one in the least number of tries is at level 30. For the least total XP expenditure, you still want level 30 for fortune III, but you can do level 14 for an iron tool or 15 for diamond for silk touch.
You can't put them both in an Iron Pickaxe or any other pickaxes.The effect will cause the Fortune enchantment.The silk touch enables a original placement of the block when mined.
However,Fortune is different.It enables more amount of coal,lapis lazuli,redstone and diamond with the silk touch enchantment,it will ruin the whole thing.
And the higher level may be your best chance of getting a good enchantment.
I know this is an old thread, but it's relevant. Through various methods, you CAN get "multitool" enchantments, where you place enchantments on an item that shouldn't be there. Does anybody know, if you put both looting and fortune on the same one, what would truly happen? Would it actually give you multiple ores, one ore and several products of it, just the several products, or just one ore flat out?
I know this is an old thread, but it's relevant. Through various methods, you CAN get "multitool" enchantments, where you place enchantments on an item that shouldn't be there. Does anybody know, if you put both looting and fortune on the same one, what would truly happen? Would it actually give you multiple ores, one ore and several products of it, just the several products, or just one ore flat out?
Fortune gives you more items from mining.
Looting gives you more items from slaying monsters.
What would happen, is that you'd get a pickaxe that gives more loot when you slay monsters with it, and more ore from mining.
I assume, though, you meant Silk Touch and Fortune.
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Fortune gives you more items from mining.
Looting gives you more items from slaying monsters.
What would happen, is that you'd get a pickaxe that gives more loot when you slay monsters with it, and more ore from mining.
I assume, though, you meant Silk Touch and Fortune.
In which case silk touch takes priority - I tested it a while ago.
I find Silk Touch more easy to obtain than Fortune III, but depending on what you need, sometimes Silk Touch is essential (to take ores, grass, beehivees, and so on)
You can't get both on the same item, you have to choose, you click on the one you want.
Fortune is more generally useful, it doubles (on average) your drops of diamonds, redstone, lapis, potatoes, carrots, saplings, etc and harvesting potatoes and carrots won't even wear out your pick.
Silk Touch has more specialized uses, allowing you to obtain grass blocks, sea lanterns, iron ore, gold ore, (oops! Brain fart! Thanks allyourbasesaregone!) diamond ore, redstone ore, lapis ore, nether quartz ore, podzol, mycelium, mushroom blocks and pick up glass blocks and pick up melons without having to get slices and put them back together.
So I'd go for Fortune III first and try to get Silk Touch later (unless you have a specific use in mind for the Silk Touch)
Early game, Fortune III is somewhat more useful, as you are short on resources. Also, if you can score a Mending book and add it to a Fortune 3 pick, it will practically keep itself repaired while mining.
While F3 direct is lvl 30 and can be hard to get, do not forget to check the second row of the table. F2 can definitely be had from there, and you can make F3 by combining An F2 item with an F2 book. My nearby village has a librarian selling F2 books for like 20 emeralds, so putting F3 on anything is trivial.
Further game, I find Silk Touch immensely more useful, using it 100% of the time. F3 only comes out for specific tasks. Strip-mining, I get everything and store it in ore form (redstone, lapis, coal, diamonds), and break it up with F3 later when I have need. Working with ice and glass. Glowstone/sea lanterns. Getting stone instead of cobble. And when you get in the habit of carrying an ender chest with shulkers, you definitely want ST pick to be your default tool. Oh, and mining in strongholds and mountains, ST will not release silverfish.
ST shovel: terraforming is generally an easier task when you can grab grass instead of dirt. And digging gravel, you almost never want flint.
ST axe lets you harvest leaves in large quantity, and it is a much better tool for getting melons for trading.
My enchanting table showed fortune lll for experience 30 and silktouch l for experience 15.can I get fortune lll for my diamond pickaxe withou silk touch.which one do I have more preference?
You must be playing w/ mods or an older version or something because
A) I don't think you would see more than one enchant per enchant option on a table at a time
A book with both silk touch and fortune might give you both but probably not, and in either case they conflict with each other
C) Enchantment tables shouldn't allow this combo because of the conflict (silk touch overrides fortune)
D) There is no 'Silk Touch I' because there is no 'Silk Touch II' +, when there is only one level it is just called 'Silk Touch'.
You can't get both on the same item, you have to choose, you click on the one you want.
Fortune is more generally useful, it doubles (on average) your drops of diamonds, redstone, lapis, potatoes, carrots, saplings, etc and harvesting potatoes and carrots won't even wear out your pick.
Silk Touch has more specialized uses, allowing you to obtain grass blocks, sea lanterns, iron ore, gold ore, nether quartz ore, podzol, mycelium, mushroom blocks and pick up glass blocks and pick up melons without having to get slices and put them back together.
So I'd go for Fortune III first and try to get Silk Touch later (unless you have a specific use in mind for the Silk Touch)
You mean literally any ore besides those two, right? Ice is also silk touch affected.
Early game, Fortune III is somewhat more useful, as you are short on resources. Also, if you can score a Mending book and add it to a Fortune 3 pick, it will practically keep itself repaired while mining.
While F3 direct is lvl 30 and can be hard to get, do not forget to check the second row of the table. F2 can definitely be had from there, and you can make F3 by combining An F2 item with an F2 book. My nearby village has a librarian selling F2 books for like 20 emeralds, so putting F3 on anything is trivial.
Further game, I find Silk Touch immensely more useful, using it 100% of the time. F3 only comes out for specific tasks. Strip-mining, I get everything and store it in ore form (redstone, lapis, coal, diamonds), and break it up with F3 later when I have need. Working with ice and glass. Glowstone/sea lanterns. Getting stone instead of cobble. And when you get in the habit of carrying an ender chest with shulkers, you definitely want ST pick to be your default tool. Oh, and mining in strongholds and mountains, ST will not release silverfish.
ST shovel: terraforming is generally an easier task when you can grab grass instead of dirt. And digging gravel, you almost never want flint.
ST axe lets you harvest leaves in large quantity, and it is a much better tool for getting melons for trading.
Wiser words have never been spoken, fortune is all fun and instant-gratification but a smart player like you knows silk touch is where it's at.
My enchanting table showed fortune lll for experience 30 and silktouch l for experience 15.can I get fortune lll for my diamond pickaxe withou silk touch.which one do I have more preference?
I assume you mean the 3 Lapis piece enchantment (top) offered is Fortune III and the 1 Lapis piece enchantment (bottom) is Silk Touch?
As others have said, F3 is more useful for mining things that have drops as you can get better yield, whereas ST is useful for picking up blocks that would normally break or drop something else. I have an adjustable Enchanting table and i've often picked up Silk Touch for a lower exp value, although it usually in the top slot so still costs me 3 lapis. Getting it for 1 lapis sounds a good deal!
Further game, I find Silk Touch immensely more useful, using it 100% of the time. F3 only comes out for specific tasks. Strip-mining, I get everything and store it in ore form (redstone, lapis, coal, diamonds), and break it up with F3 later when I have need. Working with ice and glass. Glowstone/sea lanterns. Getting stone instead of cobble. And when you get in the habit of carrying an ender chest with shulkers, you definitely want ST pick to be your default tool. Oh, and mining in strongholds and mountains, ST will not release silverfish.
I don't understand why so many people like using Silk Touch to collect ores since it is far better to directly harvest them instead of using Silk Touch - not only can you carry more by crafting the resources into blocks (aside from lapis, which averages 13.2 drops with Fortune III, but it is rare enough to have an insignificant impact), you save on tool wear; a stack of coal ore drops an average of about 141 coal with Fortune III but a stack of blocks can store 576 resources, or about 4 stacks of ore - this is how I can afford to mine more than 3,000 ores per play session without even filling up an ender chest (27 stacks * 576 = 15,552 resources), and why I added blocks to an otherwise vanilla world that let me do the same with rails and cobwebs (I've collected over a thousand rails in one day before; the abundance of mineshafts in 1.6.4 is unbelievable). I also don't have to worry about keeping my items in repair even without any XP farms; I gain over 5,000 XP per play session, all of which goes to repairing my items as needed (using the anvil as I play in 1.6.4 but this applies even more if you use Mending since you can't use your stored XP to repair items):
This is an example of how much I can mine in a single play session - on average, I mine more than 3,000 ores:
Yet, despite collecting nearly 6,000 resources and other items (after factoring in drops and the coal I consumed for torches and fuel) I still had several empty slots left in my ender chest, plus additional space in partial stacks:
I've also seen the claim that they like to keep their "valuable" Fortune pickaxe safe but Fortune III is just as easy to get as Silk Touch, if not even slightly easier (this tool says 21% for Fortune III and 20% for Silk Touch, both for a diamond pickaxe at level 30. Interestingly, the chances used to be much lower, 12% and 10% in 1.8, no idea about 1.6.4 or earlier as it doesn't go back that far (this thread was originally made in 2012) but it appears that Fortune was always slightly easier to get). Likewise, there's no point to any of the gear you see me using above outside of caving (I call it my "caving gear", though I use it all the time during the "end-game", which is nearly all spent caving) so it wouldn't make any sense at all to just use unenchanted/minimally enchanted iron gear, and it vastly reduces my risk of dying and losing my items (less so for just an enchanted pickaxe, but if you are simply branch-mining there is little risk).
The main use I see for Silk Touch is the ability to pick up ender chests; the need to carry around a second pickaxe is more than made up for the extra space it gives you (of course, shulker boxes make Silk Touch unnecessary but they don't exist in 1.6.4, including my modded version); otherwise, it is useful to obtain glowstone without loss or the need to craft it into blocks (basically like having ores drop blocks instead of resources). I also use it on emerald ore since its rarity and the abundance of emeralds themselves makes it more valuable as an ore.
I've also seen the claim that they like to keep their "valuable" Fortune pickaxe safe but Fortune III is just as easy to get as Silk Touch, if not even slightly easier (this tool says 21% for Fortune III and 20% for Silk Touch, both for a diamond pickaxe at level 30. Interestingly, the chances used to be much lower, 12% and 10% in 1.8, no idea about 1.6.4 or earlier as it doesn't go back that far (this thread was originally made in 2012) but it appears that Fortune was always slightly easier to get).
I would assume Silk Touch is more common that Fortune III (as opposed to Fortune I, II or III cumulatively) in reality as it can be obtained at lower levels than 30, hence the post by Saisuneeth about geting it for a lev 15 enchantment, I would guess F3 isnt available for that low a level, maybe F2 or F1 ... IME F3 is much harder to get on an encthanting table than ST because of this.
I don't understand why so many people like using Silk Touch to collect ores since it is far better to directly harvest them instead of using Silk Touch - not only can you carry more by crafting the resources into blocks .... you save on tool wear
Convenience and play style.
You like your caving, so you do it your way. Not to mention you are not even playing the same game as the rest of us here.
I like to plop down a beacon and strip mine. And I primarily want stone, not cobble. As I am ripping out whole layers of rock, I can't be bothered to swap my tool for every vein I come across. Or plop down a crafting table needed to craft blocks now and then. My inventory fills up with various stone way faster than with anything else, so keeping resources as ore is never a factor. And once I unload it off into shulkers, it is even less of a factor. Storage is cheap, time is precious. Since I generally end up actually using only a tiny portion of what I mine and store, the later need to place and break the ores is again a non-issue. XP is trivial. A couple minutes at XP farm, everything is recharged to 100%.
So for myself, I have determined that ST+E5+Haste2 and just letting it rip while stashing it wholesale into shulkers, not bothering with tool switches or block crafting, is by far the fastest and most convenient option that gets me what I require.
Not to mention you are not even playing the same game as the rest of us here.
I often get this remark about how I play and it highly irritates me, as if the fact that I use some minor mods means I'm playing a totally different game (here is another example, "This is a useless statistic because you play on such a heavily modded version of the game that basically nothing is the same as the actual game" - yeah, right, they clearly have absolutely no clue as to what the mods I use are, or the fact that I play exactly as I did in vanilla regardless of the mods I'm using, which are more like minor tweaks (the addition of coal blocks in vanilla 1.6 had a vastly greater impact on my playstyle than any of my mods, from perhaps 1,000 ores per play session to over 3,000 as it was now practical to mine all coal), with many of the features I've added in TMCW based on features in newer versions (so I'm actually playing the game a bit more like one would in a newer version, such as having to get Mending for my gear instead of simply renaming them, of course, my version of Mending behaves the same as renaming did so it is really only different in how you obtain it); vanilla data packs can do far more, never mind that things like "rail blocks" are completely obsolete when shulker boxes let you carry vastly more individual items (27 * 27 * 64 = 46656 for an ender chest full of shulker boxes) than an ender chest full of resource blocks (27 * 64 * 9 = 15552).
You'd never even know that I've used mods on my first world if I didn't say that I did; the seed is also known and I often show coordinates so you can verify that things I've found actually exist in vanilla. Even if I do call the version I play my first world on "World1" (it even says "Minecraft World1" in the title bar and F3 screen) it is a lot more like Optifine than an actual mod (the vast majority of its 248 classes are for bugfixes and optimizations, and I've even added settings added by Optifine and newer versions).
Here's a challenge: I've never played multiplayer before but I would if that is what it takes to prove myself; find a survival server where I am given the gear I use while caving and a good cave system and have spectators observe me while caving, including counting how many ores I mine within a time limit; I'd prefer 1.6.4 but the version doesn't matter as long as the cave system is large enough so I don't run out of caves to explore within the time limit (or end it when I do run out; having a cave system of known size is also useful for comparing other players, as long as none know its layout beforehand). That said, my average ore collection rate is actually relatively low compared to what players find in ABBA caving competitions (a game where a group of players try to collect as many ores as possible within a time limit, with the winner taking all), especially for rarer ores (they often don't even count iron, much less coal), except my rate is sustained over the long-term, and interestingly, when only counting time spent caving it is slightly higher in my first world than many of my modded worlds (refuting claims that more/bigger caves increases my rate, or it is offset by more/harder mobs and difficulty in navigating through more complex caves).
Maybe you are referring to the fact that many things have been added to the game since 1.6.4 but those hardly matter to me; I'd still only go to the Nether to mine quartz for XP (a lot less thanks to the enchanting changes since 1.6.4) and collect just enough ancient debris (in 1.16) and never return again; likewise, the End is just for fighting the dragon; I might collect some shulker boxes and an elytra (for a trophy, not for use) but otherwise I'd never return, and my playstyle would otherwise be exactly the same as it currently is (of course, with the underground modded to be at least like 1.6.4 but all that means is larger and more varied cave systems and more underground structures, which have astoundingly not changed much since Beta 1.8. Similarly, if I modded biome generation to be random it would have little impact on my playstyle, just make the world more interesting than the vast expanses of the same few biomes that vanilla 1.7+ has, the same is also true of TMCW itself; the only biome-specific feature I've really used is 2x2 spruce trees as a source of wood for torches and those can just be grown from ordinary spruce saplings, otherwise I use 2x2 jungle trees in vanilla).
I often get this remark about how I play and it highly irritates me, as if the fact that I use some minor mods means I'm playing a totally different game
It's mostly that you're playing a different era of the game. 1.5-1.6ish is the finalized versions of the post-Notch pre-Jeb era, while 1.6ish to 1.12 is sort of the transition era, and 1.13+ is the new era. 1.5 and 1.12 feel like final versions of the game to me (hence why I spent so much time on them in the past).
The truth is that your stats are interesting but they don't entirely apply because the gameplay has changed so much that literal similarities like number of spawning rates or ore gen doesn't compare to the practicals of how easy (or hard, rarely) it is to get materials now.
The truth is that your stats are interesting but they don't entirely apply because the gameplay has changed so much that literal similarities like number of spawning rates or ore gen doesn't compare to the practicals of how easy (or hard, rarely) it is to get materials now.
I highly disagree; how has the simple act of caving changed in newer versions? You just run though caves, placing torches, and fighting off any mobs, which have hardly changed (most of the mobs added since don't even spawn underground), and mine any ores you see - indeed, many people want a cave update because this part of the game has hardly changed for nearly 9 years now (Beta 1.8 is the last update that actually added any new underground structures). Ore generation hasn't changed much either; if anything, ores became more common in 1.8 with no indications of changes since then, and I've even spent a bit of time in a newer version (I believe as recent as 1.12) just to compare the experience of caving to 1.6.4; I mined ores at a far faster rate than in 1.6.4, up to 1,600 per hour in one case, likely exceeding even my most extreme single-hour rates in 1.6.4, and that was with vanilla cave generation (which only matters more for long-term rates, as the highly interconnected underground in 1.6.4 makes it very easy to find new areas to explore):
Here are the stats for one such session, from 1.8; the time includes the time spent on getting the gear I use from Creative - even if I'd spent all of those 0.75 hours caving I still mined 1,237 ores per hour, including 392 iron, the latter also quite high compared to my average ratio in 1.6.4 (about 1/4 of total ores):
Note that even in 1.9+ I did not take advantage of any newer features that can help, such as shulker boxes, I just used the exact same gear aside from better armor (to offset armor penetration) and Mending (to test its sustainability; I had no issues keeping my gear repaired). I didn't even use the off-hand slot or the sprint key, still double-tap W.
Otherwise, the most notable difference was the relative lack of mobs, and I did make sure the render distance was at least 10 (the biggest changes to mob AI since 1.6.4 include the pathfinding range of zombies being severely nerfed in 1.8, from a difficulty-independent 40-100 blocks to a difficulty-dependent 35-55 blocks, most likely due to the lag they caused (even with my fixes the server tick time rises by a factor of 3-4 with a large horde of zombies trying to reach me, though still well below the maximum before lag occurs, while vanilla rises to 100+ ms) and mobs being less attentive - in 1.6.4 they will aggro the instant you come into line of sight while in newer versions I was able to literally run up to some mobs and kill them before they showed any signs of reacting).
Mind also that the sources I've referenced to back up my claims of how easy it is to gather resources are from people playing in newer versions; for yet another example, the Wiki has this to say about finding diamonds by branch-mining:
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.
For perspective, this means that if you can mine an average of one block every two seconds, which is quite slow as even a stone pickaxe can mine stone in less than a second (including an additional delay between blocks which is not included in any of the times the Wiki shows) you'll find an average of 30.6 diamond ore per hour. Then consider the relative abundance of diamond to other ores:
Also, this this is an older chart made using data from 1.2.3, which would be the same as versions up to 1.6.4, with a slight increase in 1.7 due to less dirt, gravel, and caves; you can see how all ores are more common in the first chart (e.g. iron increased from about 0.6 to 0.7%);:
All ores together are around 4% of all blocks at layer 11, with diamond being around 0.12% or 1/33 of that, suggesting that if the same percentage mentioned above for diamond applies to all ore you can find more than 1,000 ores per hour while branch-mining (1800 * 1.7% * 33 - and that's with having to find ores by mining for them, not just going though caves and mining pre-exposed ores. Even if the Wiki's data is somehow flawed (the numbers for all ores do seem excessive, with more than half of all blocks mined being ores, and I wouldn't expect the efficiency to keep increasing much past a spacing of 3 as veins are no more than 2 blocks wide) my own experience does match with what they say for a tunnel spacing of 3, at least for diamond (about 0.9% of blocks being diamond, suggesting a rate of 500 of all ores per hour with a conservative mining rate of one block every 2 seconds, slightly faster when accounting for ores extracted from the sides of tunnels).
Also, the data given in the aforementioned Wiki article is based on an older version (1.6.4 or earlier), again, with less ores (the image they show of efficiency is from 2012), so you need to multiply all rates by around 20%, and larger veins can effectively increase rates even more (this is best seen by comparing the amount of coal and iron I find, where I find about 2.75 times more coal than iron, while the actual ratio is about 1.75 times, so I find about 57% more coal than expected, which also matches my findings when I modified the game to count all ores which were exposed, the numbers of which closely agree with what I find, including when factoring in the area I cover).
Silk Touch and Fortune are mutually exclusive, at least in vanilla. The IC2 mod has an Iridium Drill that allows you to switch between the two modes; perhaps other mods have something like this as well (the only other one I can think of is Actually Additions).
Level 30 is your best bet.
You can't get both on one tool. They're mutually exclusive.
Source: http://pernsteiner.org/minecraft/enchant/
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However,Fortune is different.It enables more amount of coal,lapis lazuli,redstone and diamond with the silk touch enchantment,it will ruin the whole thing.
And the higher level may be your best chance of getting a good enchantment.
Fortune gives you more items from mining.
Looting gives you more items from slaying monsters.
What would happen, is that you'd get a pickaxe that gives more loot when you slay monsters with it, and more ore from mining.
I assume, though, you meant Silk Touch and Fortune.
Would you rather read a story of knights and dragons, or be in one?
I'm glad people support my dragon raising. Could I ask for assistance with this one now?
Check out my dragon scroll(http://dragcave.net/user/Heric) if you want to see the dragons I have. I may get more dragons later.
In which case silk touch takes priority - I tested it a while ago.
I find Silk Touch more easy to obtain than Fortune III, but depending on what you need, sometimes Silk Touch is essential (to take ores, grass, beehivees, and so on)
Not quite sure what you're asking?
You can't get both on the same item, you have to choose, you click on the one you want.
Fortune is more generally useful, it doubles (on average) your drops of diamonds, redstone, lapis, potatoes, carrots, saplings, etc and harvesting potatoes and carrots won't even wear out your pick.
Silk Touch has more specialized uses, allowing you to obtain grass blocks, sea lanterns
, iron ore, gold ore, (oops! Brain fart! Thanks allyourbasesaregone!) diamond ore, redstone ore, lapis ore, nether quartz ore, podzol, mycelium, mushroom blocks and pick up glass blocks and pick up melons without having to get slices and put them back together.So I'd go for Fortune III first and try to get Silk Touch later (unless you have a specific use in mind for the Silk Touch)
Just testing.
Early game, Fortune III is somewhat more useful, as you are short on resources. Also, if you can score a Mending book and add it to a Fortune 3 pick, it will practically keep itself repaired while mining.
While F3 direct is lvl 30 and can be hard to get, do not forget to check the second row of the table. F2 can definitely be had from there, and you can make F3 by combining An F2 item with an F2 book. My nearby village has a librarian selling F2 books for like 20 emeralds, so putting F3 on anything is trivial.
Further game, I find Silk Touch immensely more useful, using it 100% of the time. F3 only comes out for specific tasks. Strip-mining, I get everything and store it in ore form (redstone, lapis, coal, diamonds), and break it up with F3 later when I have need. Working with ice and glass. Glowstone/sea lanterns. Getting stone instead of cobble. And when you get in the habit of carrying an ender chest with shulkers, you definitely want ST pick to be your default tool. Oh, and mining in strongholds and mountains, ST will not release silverfish.
ST shovel: terraforming is generally an easier task when you can grab grass instead of dirt. And digging gravel, you almost never want flint.
ST axe lets you harvest leaves in large quantity, and it is a much better tool for getting melons for trading.
You must be playing w/ mods or an older version or something because
A) I don't think you would see more than one enchant per enchant option on a table at a time
A book with both silk touch and fortune might give you both but probably not, and in either case they conflict with each other
C) Enchantment tables shouldn't allow this combo because of the conflict (silk touch overrides fortune)
D) There is no 'Silk Touch I' because there is no 'Silk Touch II' +, when there is only one level it is just called 'Silk Touch'.
You mean literally any ore besides those two, right? Ice is also silk touch affected.
Wiser words have never been spoken, fortune is all fun and instant-gratification but a smart player like you knows silk touch is where it's at.
I assume you mean the 3 Lapis piece enchantment (top) offered is Fortune III and the 1 Lapis piece enchantment (bottom) is Silk Touch?
As others have said, F3 is more useful for mining things that have drops as you can get better yield, whereas ST is useful for picking up blocks that would normally break or drop something else. I have an adjustable Enchanting table and i've often picked up Silk Touch for a lower exp value, although it usually in the top slot so still costs me 3 lapis. Getting it for 1 lapis sounds a good deal!
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I don't understand why so many people like using Silk Touch to collect ores since it is far better to directly harvest them instead of using Silk Touch - not only can you carry more by crafting the resources into blocks (aside from lapis, which averages 13.2 drops with Fortune III, but it is rare enough to have an insignificant impact), you save on tool wear; a stack of coal ore drops an average of about 141 coal with Fortune III but a stack of blocks can store 576 resources, or about 4 stacks of ore - this is how I can afford to mine more than 3,000 ores per play session without even filling up an ender chest (27 stacks * 576 = 15,552 resources), and why I added blocks to an otherwise vanilla world that let me do the same with rails and cobwebs (I've collected over a thousand rails in one day before; the abundance of mineshafts in 1.6.4 is unbelievable). I also don't have to worry about keeping my items in repair even without any XP farms; I gain over 5,000 XP per play session, all of which goes to repairing my items as needed (using the anvil as I play in 1.6.4 but this applies even more if you use Mending since you can't use your stored XP to repair items):
Yet, despite collecting nearly 6,000 resources and other items (after factoring in drops and the coal I consumed for torches and fuel) I still had several empty slots left in my ender chest, plus additional space in partial stacks:
I've also seen the claim that they like to keep their "valuable" Fortune pickaxe safe but Fortune III is just as easy to get as Silk Touch, if not even slightly easier (this tool says 21% for Fortune III and 20% for Silk Touch, both for a diamond pickaxe at level 30. Interestingly, the chances used to be much lower, 12% and 10% in 1.8, no idea about 1.6.4 or earlier as it doesn't go back that far (this thread was originally made in 2012) but it appears that Fortune was always slightly easier to get). Likewise, there's no point to any of the gear you see me using above outside of caving (I call it my "caving gear", though I use it all the time during the "end-game", which is nearly all spent caving) so it wouldn't make any sense at all to just use unenchanted/minimally enchanted iron gear, and it vastly reduces my risk of dying and losing my items (less so for just an enchanted pickaxe, but if you are simply branch-mining there is little risk).
The main use I see for Silk Touch is the ability to pick up ender chests; the need to carry around a second pickaxe is more than made up for the extra space it gives you (of course, shulker boxes make Silk Touch unnecessary but they don't exist in 1.6.4, including my modded version); otherwise, it is useful to obtain glowstone without loss or the need to craft it into blocks (basically like having ores drop blocks instead of resources). I also use it on emerald ore since its rarity and the abundance of emeralds themselves makes it more valuable as an ore.
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?
I would assume Silk Touch is more common that Fortune III (as opposed to Fortune I, II or III cumulatively) in reality as it can be obtained at lower levels than 30, hence the post by Saisuneeth about geting it for a lev 15 enchantment, I would guess F3 isnt available for that low a level, maybe F2 or F1 ... IME F3 is much harder to get on an encthanting table than ST because of this.
Mintutor now works in 1.13!
MrKite & Mc_Etlam ... I salute you!
Convenience and play style.
You like your caving, so you do it your way. Not to mention you are not even playing the same game as the rest of us here.
I like to plop down a beacon and strip mine. And I primarily want stone, not cobble. As I am ripping out whole layers of rock, I can't be bothered to swap my tool for every vein I come across. Or plop down a crafting table needed to craft blocks now and then. My inventory fills up with various stone way faster than with anything else, so keeping resources as ore is never a factor. And once I unload it off into shulkers, it is even less of a factor. Storage is cheap, time is precious. Since I generally end up actually using only a tiny portion of what I mine and store, the later need to place and break the ores is again a non-issue. XP is trivial. A couple minutes at XP farm, everything is recharged to 100%.
So for myself, I have determined that ST+E5+Haste2 and just letting it rip while stashing it wholesale into shulkers, not bothering with tool switches or block crafting, is by far the fastest and most convenient option that gets me what I require.
I often get this remark about how I play and it highly irritates me, as if the fact that I use some minor mods means I'm playing a totally different game (here is another example, "This is a useless statistic because you play on such a heavily modded version of the game that basically nothing is the same as the actual game" - yeah, right, they clearly have absolutely no clue as to what the mods I use are, or the fact that I play exactly as I did in vanilla regardless of the mods I'm using, which are more like minor tweaks (the addition of coal blocks in vanilla 1.6 had a vastly greater impact on my playstyle than any of my mods, from perhaps 1,000 ores per play session to over 3,000 as it was now practical to mine all coal), with many of the features I've added in TMCW based on features in newer versions (so I'm actually playing the game a bit more like one would in a newer version, such as having to get Mending for my gear instead of simply renaming them, of course, my version of Mending behaves the same as renaming did so it is really only different in how you obtain it); vanilla data packs can do far more, never mind that things like "rail blocks" are completely obsolete when shulker boxes let you carry vastly more individual items (27 * 27 * 64 = 46656 for an ender chest full of shulker boxes) than an ender chest full of resource blocks (27 * 64 * 9 = 15552).
You'd never even know that I've used mods on my first world if I didn't say that I did; the seed is also known and I often show coordinates so you can verify that things I've found actually exist in vanilla. Even if I do call the version I play my first world on "World1" (it even says "Minecraft World1" in the title bar and F3 screen) it is a lot more like Optifine than an actual mod (the vast majority of its 248 classes are for bugfixes and optimizations, and I've even added settings added by Optifine and newer versions).
Here's a challenge: I've never played multiplayer before but I would if that is what it takes to prove myself; find a survival server where I am given the gear I use while caving and a good cave system and have spectators observe me while caving, including counting how many ores I mine within a time limit; I'd prefer 1.6.4 but the version doesn't matter as long as the cave system is large enough so I don't run out of caves to explore within the time limit (or end it when I do run out; having a cave system of known size is also useful for comparing other players, as long as none know its layout beforehand). That said, my average ore collection rate is actually relatively low compared to what players find in ABBA caving competitions (a game where a group of players try to collect as many ores as possible within a time limit, with the winner taking all), especially for rarer ores (they often don't even count iron, much less coal), except my rate is sustained over the long-term, and interestingly, when only counting time spent caving it is slightly higher in my first world than many of my modded worlds (refuting claims that more/bigger caves increases my rate, or it is offset by more/harder mobs and difficulty in navigating through more complex caves).
Maybe you are referring to the fact that many things have been added to the game since 1.6.4 but those hardly matter to me; I'd still only go to the Nether to mine quartz for XP (a lot less thanks to the enchanting changes since 1.6.4) and collect just enough ancient debris (in 1.16) and never return again; likewise, the End is just for fighting the dragon; I might collect some shulker boxes and an elytra (for a trophy, not for use) but otherwise I'd never return, and my playstyle would otherwise be exactly the same as it currently is (of course, with the underground modded to be at least like 1.6.4 but all that means is larger and more varied cave systems and more underground structures, which have astoundingly not changed much since Beta 1.8. Similarly, if I modded biome generation to be random it would have little impact on my playstyle, just make the world more interesting than the vast expanses of the same few biomes that vanilla 1.7+ has, the same is also true of TMCW itself; the only biome-specific feature I've really used is 2x2 spruce trees as a source of wood for torches and those can just be grown from ordinary spruce saplings, otherwise I use 2x2 jungle trees in vanilla).
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?
It's mostly that you're playing a different era of the game. 1.5-1.6ish is the finalized versions of the post-Notch pre-Jeb era, while 1.6ish to 1.12 is sort of the transition era, and 1.13+ is the new era. 1.5 and 1.12 feel like final versions of the game to me (hence why I spent so much time on them in the past).
The truth is that your stats are interesting but they don't entirely apply because the gameplay has changed so much that literal similarities like number of spawning rates or ore gen doesn't compare to the practicals of how easy (or hard, rarely) it is to get materials now.
I highly disagree; how has the simple act of caving changed in newer versions? You just run though caves, placing torches, and fighting off any mobs, which have hardly changed (most of the mobs added since don't even spawn underground), and mine any ores you see - indeed, many people want a cave update because this part of the game has hardly changed for nearly 9 years now (Beta 1.8 is the last update that actually added any new underground structures). Ore generation hasn't changed much either; if anything, ores became more common in 1.8 with no indications of changes since then, and I've even spent a bit of time in a newer version (I believe as recent as 1.12) just to compare the experience of caving to 1.6.4; I mined ores at a far faster rate than in 1.6.4, up to 1,600 per hour in one case, likely exceeding even my most extreme single-hour rates in 1.6.4, and that was with vanilla cave generation (which only matters more for long-term rates, as the highly interconnected underground in 1.6.4 makes it very easy to find new areas to explore):
Here are the stats for one such session, from 1.8; the time includes the time spent on getting the gear I use from Creative - even if I'd spent all of those 0.75 hours caving I still mined 1,237 ores per hour, including 392 iron, the latter also quite high compared to my average ratio in 1.6.4 (about 1/4 of total ores):
Note that even in 1.9+ I did not take advantage of any newer features that can help, such as shulker boxes, I just used the exact same gear aside from better armor (to offset armor penetration) and Mending (to test its sustainability; I had no issues keeping my gear repaired). I didn't even use the off-hand slot or the sprint key, still double-tap W.
Otherwise, the most notable difference was the relative lack of mobs, and I did make sure the render distance was at least 10 (the biggest changes to mob AI since 1.6.4 include the pathfinding range of zombies being severely nerfed in 1.8, from a difficulty-independent 40-100 blocks to a difficulty-dependent 35-55 blocks, most likely due to the lag they caused (even with my fixes the server tick time rises by a factor of 3-4 with a large horde of zombies trying to reach me, though still well below the maximum before lag occurs, while vanilla rises to 100+ ms) and mobs being less attentive - in 1.6.4 they will aggro the instant you come into line of sight while in newer versions I was able to literally run up to some mobs and kill them before they showed any signs of reacting).
Mind also that the sources I've referenced to back up my claims of how easy it is to gather resources are from people playing in newer versions; for yet another example, the Wiki has this to say about finding diamonds by branch-mining:
For perspective, this means that if you can mine an average of one block every two seconds, which is quite slow as even a stone pickaxe can mine stone in less than a second (including an additional delay between blocks which is not included in any of the times the Wiki shows) you'll find an average of 30.6 diamond ore per hour. Then consider the relative abundance of diamond to other ores:
Also, this this is an older chart made using data from 1.2.3, which would be the same as versions up to 1.6.4, with a slight increase in 1.7 due to less dirt, gravel, and caves; you can see how all ores are more common in the first chart (e.g. iron increased from about 0.6 to 0.7%);:
All ores together are around 4% of all blocks at layer 11, with diamond being around 0.12% or 1/33 of that, suggesting that if the same percentage mentioned above for diamond applies to all ore you can find more than 1,000 ores per hour while branch-mining (1800 * 1.7% * 33 - and that's with having to find ores by mining for them, not just going though caves and mining pre-exposed ores. Even if the Wiki's data is somehow flawed (the numbers for all ores do seem excessive, with more than half of all blocks mined being ores, and I wouldn't expect the efficiency to keep increasing much past a spacing of 3 as veins are no more than 2 blocks wide) my own experience does match with what they say for a tunnel spacing of 3, at least for diamond (about 0.9% of blocks being diamond, suggesting a rate of 500 of all ores per hour with a conservative mining rate of one block every 2 seconds, slightly faster when accounting for ores extracted from the sides of tunnels).
Also, the data given in the aforementioned Wiki article is based on an older version (1.6.4 or earlier), again, with less ores (the image they show of efficiency is from 2012), so you need to multiply all rates by around 20%, and larger veins can effectively increase rates even more (this is best seen by comparing the amount of coal and iron I find, where I find about 2.75 times more coal than iron, while the actual ratio is about 1.75 times, so I find about 57% more coal than expected, which also matches my findings when I modified the game to count all ores which were exposed, the numbers of which closely agree with what I find, including when factoring in the area I cover).
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?
Silk Touch and Fortune are mutually exclusive, at least in vanilla. The IC2 mod has an Iridium Drill that allows you to switch between the two modes; perhaps other mods have something like this as well (the only other one I can think of is Actually Additions).