savagelung wrote:Gilberreke wrote:Be sure to look up all the subtleties regarding diamond spawning. The poster above still seems convinced that staying above the lava layer is best for mining, which is not true. There's tons of videos out there that show empiric values for certain versions of Minecraft. Last I checked, just below lava layer gave a much better yield.
I've definitely heard this before, and I haven't done any analysis in MCedit, but I believe it.
However, I'm willing to bet that I can mine more efficiently (time per diamond) just above the lava level because I don't have to worry about plugging up lava lakes that I run into while mining.
Alright, time to break out the almighty Minecraft Wiki (and a fair amount of logic). So, according to this link:
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Lava, the lava level is y=10. Savagelung is using branch mining right on top of this to easily avoid the issue of lava clearing, which makes sense to me. Gilberreke says that greater returns could be achieved at lower levels. According to this:
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Diamond_ore, the best levels to mine diamonds are from y=8 to y=12, especially y=10 and y=11, which supports Savagelung's claims that his method is most efficient because, not only does he not have to clear lava , he is also in the ideal zone for diamonds. However, a large diamond mining survey was conducted with this result:
http://media-mcw.cursecdn.com/d/d0/Diamond_D_28x.jpg. This suggests that the best area to mine is at either y=5/6 or y=11/12, with slightly higher yields at the former, but the additional yields are quite trivial and lava could get in the way, leaving this issue still mostly in the air, though I personally side with Savagelung's method being the most efficient. Nonetheless, Gilberreke is right: this really needs to looked into closely, considering that diamond ore is some of the most elusive stuff in the Minecraft world.
Maybe I'm out of line, but I believe a race to see who can mine the most diamonds in an hour is in order!