[HN Gopher] The Rocks and Minerals of Minecraft
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The Rocks and Minerals of Minecraft
Author : colinprince
Score : 235 points
Date : 2021-08-09 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mindat.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mindat.org)
| bombcar wrote:
| Vanilla Minecraft has a decent smattering of ores (they just
| added copper) - but if you want the rabbit hole you head into
| something like GregTech: New Horizons and the massive ore
| dictionary it has.
|
| However, it's not entirely realistic as the only way to get
| titanium is from the Moon ...
| willis936 wrote:
| GT:NH does hit a lot of good points, but overshoots by quite a
| bit. My best experience in minecraft was from making my own
| GT5U kitchen sink pack with GT-based modified recipes.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I think gregblock could be to your liking. Altough it is greg
| lite. Same with omnifactory, sadly.
|
| Still quite enjoyable packs.
| willis936 wrote:
| I've tried it. GTCE's dev is on a power trip and completely
| misses the enjoyable aspects of gregtech. It's like if
| someone pissed in a wine you like then insisted that it's
| better and anyone who thinks otherwise is out of their
| depth. GTCE isn't even in need of a fork because all of the
| work has been shoddy from the beginning. It's a failed
| project.
| ilaksh wrote:
| copper wow.. what can you do with it? make wires?
| detaro wrote:
| a spyglas (=lets you zoom in) and lightning rods (catch
| lightning that would have struck in a radius around it
| otherwise). And the blocks look nice, and slowly oxidize and
| turn to green copper (which you can stop at any stage by
| waxing the block with bees wax)
| Hayarotle wrote:
| I like how unfocused article feels. With the videos, comments and
| interesting facts, it manages to replicate the experience of
| reading an article at the same time you're randomly browsing the
| internet and talking about it with your friends in a group chat.
| I wonder if it's deliberate?
| AnotherNotch wrote:
| I think the 'rocks and minerals' follow Notch'es psyche, he's
| insane, so, it's just a game!
| lordnacho wrote:
| For a while I would work as a coder during the day, and in the
| evening I would work in the mines, for my son.
|
| "Dad we need more iron ore. Dad, make sure the furnaces have coal
| in them."
|
| Eventually my kid worked out that you can build generators,
| effectively coding it in MC bricks and providing infinite
| resources. Probably the first time he's coded something, he just
| doesn't know it.
|
| This made my evenings a bit less monotonous to start with, but
| then I was managing a factory instead of hacking out blocks
| underground.
|
| One thing I never understood about the game was how TNT and
| minecarts are supposed to work, economically. It seems you need
| to kill creepers to get TNT? That takes time, even if you make a
| farm. And then when it blows up, it doesn't really blow up enough
| blocks to make it worth the time, surely? Same with the tracks
| for minecarts. How does the investment pay off? You need a huge
| amount of iron to make the tracks, and all it lets you do is
| transport stuff about as fast as riding a horse.
| tialaramex wrote:
| To be fair as a video game it doesn't need to have working
| economics. It's OK if something is _cool_ and doesn 't make
| economic sense.
|
| I rarely play Vanilla, but I _thought_ it had some type of
| powered minecarts allowing primitive automation? Maybe some
| types of rails that get a redstone signal speed up carts or
| something like that?
|
| In modded I take the same attitude as in programming: Don't
| Repeat Yourself. If I have to actually mine more than a few
| blocks of iron, I'm done. One of my favourite innovations of
| the past few years has been Hopping Bonsai Pots and subsequent
| iterations on that idea. Miniature tree (of whatever species)
| grows in the pot, when it reaches full size it is harvested and
| gets hoppered into a container below, then grows again.
| Awesome. But, not at all Vanilla.
| dannytatom wrote:
| you can make a creeper farm to automate gunpowder, that part is
| easy. the hard part is that sand isn't renewable. a lot of tech
| servers (scicraft being the biggest) just use tnt duping to do
| it until mojang makes sand renewable. i think that's the only
| "cheating" they do and it's kinda understandable cause
| otherwise it's impossible to get a lot of tnt.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > the hard part is that sand isn't renewable
|
| If you've opened The End, there's a way to use the End Portal
| to duplicate sand. In one of my worlds, I have that feeding
| into a 32 furnace super smelter with a tree farm nearby for
| fuel (although I could build a carpet duper for that,
| actually.)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfeGyXJOCBw
| kunagi7 wrote:
| If you dupe carpet you can use it as fuel (3 carpets per
| smelt item) so it's quite inefficient. Still, as an
| unlimited item... As long you can supply the super smelter
| quick enough with fuel efficiency isn't that important.
| handrous wrote:
| They rebalanced tracks at some point, and you get IIRC 3 or 4
| each time you build some now, instead of (again, IIRC) just one
| like you used to. Back then, tracks were _really_ expensive.
| Now, between the resource cost change and salvaging them from
| abandoned mines, they 're a cheapish way to connect places that
| are too close to bother with gates (or put them in the Nether
| between very distant gates for _super_ fast transportation).
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > I never understood about the game was how TNT and minecarts
| are supposed to work
|
| I haven't played for a long time but yeah it doesn't really
| make sense given that you have such a large inventory. If they
| added some extra difficulty level where the inventory is
| miniscule it might make more sense. Maybe they need to make
| mining slower and more rewarding per ore block as well.
|
| Has to be a mod for this?
| zanderwohl wrote:
| I've played on custom taller maps and they become more useful
| when exploring expansive cave systems. You walked all the way
| down for the resources but have too much to carry. So
| minecarts become useful for the very tall stairs you have to
| climb up and down a lot.
|
| I think they'll become way more useful with the 64 more
| blocks' height underground.
| tialaramex wrote:
| There are mods that make the game much harder, including by
| cutting your inventory and limits on weight, but in my
| experience people are drawn to increasing the horizon rather
| than restricting how far you can reach.
|
| So e.g. rather than forcing you to move more slowly (e.g.
| realistic walking pace, limited sprint, burden by weight)
| let's add _moon rockets_ so you can go further. In fact, why
| stop at the moon (albeit that is where the Rats went because
| it 's made of cheese -- in some continuities, I should really
| go beat that part of the pack one day)? Add space stations,
| ferry rockets, and eventually an interstellar drive so you
| can visit other solar systems.
|
| If I put an aerial with unlimited range upgrade on the
| outside of a Compact Machine on the moon, and then I run the
| network inside that Compact Machine over a wireless link to
| another Compact Machine on Mars, then I can use machines on
| the surface of Mars, wirelessly, while stood on the
| (notional) far side of the Moon. Unlike the real world,
| Minecraft doesn't know that the latency ought to be
| incredibly annoying when I do that :D
|
| "There's no wrong way to enjoy yourself". But on the whole
| the instinct to make it harder hasn't been as popular.
| 8note wrote:
| With skulk sensors doing sound based communications from a
| distance(next Minecraft release), you should be able to see
| that communication latency
| lukego wrote:
| I'm in the opposite situation. I setup a Minecraft server and
| outsourced the hard work to my kids. They are toiling away for
| a couple of hours most days building all kinds of elaborate
| structures. I just drop in to say a few words of appreciation
| and go mining in search of diamonds.
|
| They do cajole me into hunting food for them sometimes though.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Really prepping them for office life and working as an
| individual contributor with this approach
| KineticLensman wrote:
| i sense an opportunity for "My first timesheet".
| TchoBeer wrote:
| You've recreated child labor in Minecraft lol
| gmemstr wrote:
| At some point you start to learn how mobs (creepers, zombies
| etc) spawn and their various behaviors, which you can exploit
| to set up farms to automatically harvest their loot. Some farms
| are incredibly simple, and others very complex, but the end
| result is roughly the same. Some can be adapted to also let you
| farm experience for enchanting. Admittedly it can break
| progression a bit when you have enough of them but generally
| one or two well optimized setups can produce a fair amount of
| resources.
| tkahnoski wrote:
| I joked with my wife that I was being a parent in Minecraft.
| Which is sort of true... I kept building shelters, providing
| food, and other supplies.
|
| Now I try to strike a balance in being helpful as I'd expect a
| friend to be and letting him do some of the work. Regardless it
| still did wonders for getting our normally quiet kid to talk.
| Granted the signal to noise is about 15 minutes of Minecraft
| talk and 5 minutes of actual what happened in the day.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Rails are cheap if you setup an iron golem farm.
|
| There is a dupe mechanic with TnT that allows you to build
| machines that explode stuff without consuming TnT.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Minecarts get to be more useful when you want to travel long
| distances without having to touch the controls.
|
| TNT... personally, I've never found a use for it.
| cout wrote:
| When I used to play I found it more convenient to travel long
| distances using nether portals.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| > Minecarts get to be more useful when you want to travel
| long distances without having to touch the controls.
|
| This and you can (and should) build roller coasters.
| grawprog wrote:
| >This and you can (and should) build roller coasters.
|
| Last time I really played minecraft years ago, me an my old
| roommate would compete to see who could make the most epic
| ridiculous minecart rollercoaster track.
|
| It was pretty fun, we'd turn entire mountains into a giant
| roller coaster or build floating islands or have it go down
| to the center of a lava cave or something.
| kunagi7 wrote:
| With piston bolts [0] travelling long distances got even
| faster. They push the minecart forward at redstone tick
| speeds and are server side so they're really efficient.
|
| But there was a faster way with a machine called "ender pearl
| cannon" [1]. I don't know if they still work though. They're
| quite complex to build but allowed to travel tens of
| thousands blocks very precisely in less than a minute.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGcGU9ay9io [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eOIVPQYOt8
| trutannus wrote:
| You can make overly expensive unguided bombs by using TNT
| minecarts. They can be very effective for saturation bombing
| of areas. You can effectively eliminate the risk of Pillager
| outposts with a few of those configured around it. When they
| respawn you can trigger the system and have an on-demand air-
| raid. There's not much the mobs can do against an aerial
| bombardment.
|
| You can also create land-mines with pressure plates.
| anthony_r wrote:
| Step 1: install Baritone
|
| Step 2: type "#mine iron_ore"
|
| https://github.com/cabaletta/baritone
|
| https://youtu.be/CZkLXWo4Fg4?t=80
|
| I always wonder why so few people know about Baritone. It can
| do so much: move the player, clear areas, mine ores and other
| blocks, construct simple surfaces such as roads or even paste
| complicated Schematicas layer by layer. Perhaps it takes away
| too much of the fun.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Step 1: /give @p iron_ore 64
|
| If you are going to cheat, you might as well be efficient
| anthony_r wrote:
| If you want to play creative - sure. About survival - I
| mean, would you think using Google Maps for driving
| instructions is cheating? What about those cheater self-
| driving cars, damn them! Back in my day we used to walk
| uphill both ways, etc.
|
| Besides, it's mostly for multi-player. Playing this game
| single-player is only the beginning.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| Tnt is useful for it's efficiency. Gunpowder can be
| automatically farmed through relatively simple means, while
| sand (for instance) is not so easily automated. With a few well
| placed blocks of tnt, entire inventories full of sand can be
| collected in moments compared to digging it block by block.
|
| Minecarts and their tracks are useful for automation of
| resource transmission- while faster modes of player
| transportation exist, it's difficult to transport thousands of
| items by hand- with a line of tracks and some simple
| automation, this becomes trivial.
| weeeeelp wrote:
| >One thing I never understood about the game was how TNT and
| minecarts are supposed to work, economically
|
| They're not, really. Both function as a "fun" kind of item, TNT
| gets more useful in player-vs-player as an item to destroy
| other's bases, if you're into that sorta thing.
| eric__cartman wrote:
| or blast villages out of the map when playing in creative
| mode :)
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| I think the ideal way to use TNT is place it in the center of a
| 3x3x3 block room, suspended on dirt or something with low blast
| resist. It'll expand the room to roughly 5x5x5. You can do this
| again to expand to 7x7x7 So basically you're getting ~250
| blocks removed per 2 TNT. A mob spawner/farm can produce 100 or
| more gunpowder in 10 minutes. Rails are more easily found in
| mine shafts than crafted. Dump water instead of pickaxing them.
|
| This is from personal experience, I'm not sure what the ideal
| strategies are in newer versions of the game.
| yreg wrote:
| I always thought the intended ideal way to use TNT is to put
| it under a pressure plate in your friends home.
| Nition wrote:
| You might be looking for a kind of deliberate planned game
| design that just isn't really there in Minecraft.
|
| The world is destructible so why not have a block to blow it
| up? TNT takes gunpowder to create because why wouldn't it?
| Gunpowder comes from creepers because they're around and they
| explode.
|
| Minecarts are for riding in, but the first thing Notch
| demonstrated for them was a rollercoaster. Horses weren't added
| until some time later. You can still craft a Minecart With
| Furnace even though powered rails made them obsolete.
| 8note wrote:
| Hopper minecarts pickup items really quickly, and hoppers can
| pull stuff out of them
|
| For tnt, there's a duplication glitch that lets them rain down
| nightpool wrote:
| Along with the technical uses that Hesinde outlines below,
| minecarts see a lot of use on casual multiplayer servers
| because they provide a method of AFK-able transportation.
| Powered minecart rails in the Nether can travel about 325k
| (Overworld) blocks per hour, so if you want to visit some far-
| flung territory you can set your character in a minecart, go
| get a snack, and come back 10 or 20 minutes later. This is
| slower than many other transportation methods (for example,
| boats on ice can travel 144k blocks per hour, or 1.1M Overworld
| blocks if traveling in the Nether), but requires much less
| active user involvement.
| xmprt wrote:
| If you want to take the game to the next level there are many
| different mods that you can add that would add another layer of
| complexity to the game with new challenges and problems to
| solve. It could be great if you feel like the vanilla game is
| getting a little stale or too straightforward.
| Hesinde wrote:
| Minecraft provides surprisingly many opportunities for
| automation. Most of them are pretty unintuitive though. A good
| source on how things can be automated are technical Minecraft
| Youtubers like ilmango.
|
| TNT is used in farm designs, which generate blocks needing
| breaking, e.g. wood farms, cobble stone farms, dirt farms.
| There are two ways to get a lot of TNT for this: a) duping b)
| building a farm yielding gun powder (generic mob farm, creeper
| farm, witch farm) and duping or gathering sand
|
| Hopper minecarts can collect items from below a magma block,
| which allows for easy killing zones in mob farms. Normal
| minecarts are sometimes used as gondolas for slime block
| bouncing lifts as the position of a player in a minecart is
| more accurate on servers. Minecarts can also be used to kill
| creatures via entity cramming. If there are more than 24
| entitities within a block, creatures receive damage until the
| entity count drops. Once you have an iron farm, the minecarts
| and tracks become cheap.
| bombcar wrote:
| Minecarts are usable as part of red stone computers and other
| automation, too.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3RLNCpS6YY
| conradev wrote:
| I thought you could use Obsidian to construct an explosion-
| proof farm, but my information might be out of date
| kunagi7 wrote:
| For most cases that's true. Still, Wither explosions and the
| Ender Dragon can destroy obsidian. That's why most people
| kill the Wither using the Bedrock located on the Nether roof.
|
| Still, no material is free from destruction using glitches
| and some technical users remove entire chunks of
| obsidian/bedrock to make their farms more efficient.
| 8note wrote:
| Things that explode in water don't do environment damage iirc
| Darmody wrote:
| A good creeper farm can provide thousands of powder very
| quickly. You just need to "code" it the right way to break the
| mob cap.
|
| Iron is probably the easiest mineral to get. Even a small iron
| farm on the starting chunks, will get you hundreds of bars per
| hour, as it never stops working there, even if you're away.
| Carts are great to distribute materials around or to collect
| them, not to just carry them around.
| jandrese wrote:
| Once you have a good Creeper farm you suddenly have the
| problem of there not being any kind of sand farm in the base
| game AFAIK. You can dig up a desert to get a big supply, but
| even that will get consumed by a constantly running TNT
| factory.
| Darmody wrote:
| But there are enough deserts. With a couple efficiency 5
| shovels you can fill a full inventory of shulkers in less
| than 10 min.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Or use TNT. Running around with TNT and a flint and
| steel, in a desert, is a very quick way of getting sound.
| [deleted]
| nitwit005 wrote:
| You can find a ton of minecart tracks in old mines if you look
| around for them.
|
| TNT is probably intentionally a bit difficult to get as it's a
| performance problem. The work the game has to do to simulate
| the explosion grows exponentially as long as there is more TNT
| to consume.
| Chazifraz wrote:
| If you're using minecarts to move yourself around in Minecraft,
| it's certainly a terrible investment. However, when used as a
| tool, they are incredibly useful and an excellent investment.
| Minecarts can do two things that no other setup can: transport
| items between inventories consistently without the player's
| involvement, and move entities like villagers around the map.
| This makes minecarts a really useful tool in the later stages
| of the game, when you might want to use them to distribute
| items across an array of furnaces to be smelted or to move
| villagers to a central location to make trading easier.
|
| TNT is sometimes worth the time it takes to make. Every block
| in Minecraft has a blast resistance, so if you're using TNT
| underground, you're running into stone blocks that will shrink
| your blast radius. On the other hand, TNT can be used on the
| surface of the desert to get sand quickly and profitably. It
| can also be used at the lower levels of the nether to blow up a
| bunch of blocks in the search for netherite scrap.
| bonzini wrote:
| Minecarts really are useful only to transport creatures around,
| and to distribute stuff from and to furnaces.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Right but you can find these abandoned mines with nicely laid
| out track along the whole length. The game sort of suggests
| that you should do that too?
|
| But basically if you don't find enough iron in a given length
| of cave, you can't have tracks all the way.
| outworlder wrote:
| You can decomission the track when it is no longer useful
| and build it somewhere else. As you find more iron, the
| distance you can go increases.
|
| There are some mods with excavators that can also lay
| tracks. Those were great fun.
| munk-a wrote:
| The iron to track conversion ratio is pretty efficient
| though - so I don't know how often you'll find an area
| devoid enough of iron to be building at a loss... That all
| said if you're laying a continuous path while spelunking
| you'll probably manage it.
| marpayne wrote:
| It's probably amazing to incorporate what we can do in Minecraft
| and convert it into a real-world object. Given that we will only
| use it for good purposes. It will drastically transform our world
| and imagine the countless possibility of the creative minds can
| do.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Not sure what you mean and honestly in English that doesn't
| come across as fully coherent. But it is a really fascinating
| idea.[
|
| How would we manifest Minecraft things? You mean like a
| Microsoft Hololens demo or something?
| bovermyer wrote:
| Since you've got a pretty new account, here's a tip: Hacker
| News is not Reddit. This community takes a very dim view of
| sarcastic dismissiveness.
|
| You're welcome to dislike anything you want, but generally
| speaking, let those of us that are more playful enjoy our
| whimsy.
|
| Or, to borrow a phrase that's long out of favor - don't harsh
| the mellow, man.
| scollet wrote:
| I am surprised you got any information out of gp. I have no
| idea what that comment is supposed to be saying.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I am not sure either but I have a feeling English is not
| their first language.
|
| Regardless, most interesting comment in the thread in my
| opinion.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Geology lesson!
| eloeffler wrote:
| Strike the Earth!
| Sharlin wrote:
| Like almost everything else, Dwarf Fortress's geology is in a
| class of its own. There are about two dozen stone types that
| form layers, divided quasi-realistically into sedimentary,
| igneous intrusive, igneous extrusive, and metamorphic [1]. Then
| there are forty other types of stone that occur as veins and
| pockets [2]... and _then_ there are about twenty types of metal
| ore and _130_ different types of gem!
|
| [1]
| http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Stone#Stones_f...
|
| [2]
| http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Stone#Other_St...
| treeman79 wrote:
| My daughters love to play Minecraft with me.
|
| My youngest one collects Pets. To the point I had to ban them
| from the house as 7 wolfs and a dozen cats in the room is a bit
| much. She has many stables around the house for them.
|
| I have hitting turned off to reduce drama. So same one will leash
| a bunch of wolves and walk in front of older sister. Causing an
| accidental hit and wolves then proceed to eat the sister.
|
| The older one loves diamonds. She follows along my mining and
| rushes to grab them ahead everyone else. We are working on
| sharing.
|
| She also loves to produce fancy houses, better then I can do.
|
| It's quite heart warming when I log And a new chest is there with
| a sign "for Dad" and it will have whatever oddball crafted items
| they want to leave for me; Last was a telescope.
| ilaksh wrote:
| To me hitting should maybe be on for kids because its a way for
| them to learn.
|
| Although after being hit a few times by my nephew when he was
| younger, I understand turning it off. I have not had kids, but
| I get the impression that most kids are just prone to certain
| tendencies at a young age. Like, they are kids. Maybe there are
| a rare few that act less like kids, but I think there may be
| limitations on training especially for the young ones.
|
| But anyway I was happy to find the last time that I was in with
| my nephew, I had no fear of being accidentally attacked with a
| sword.
| Darmody wrote:
| That's wholesome.
|
| I used to play a lot with my niece. I can't wait to have my own
| children to play with them. It's so full of possibilities. Not
| many games are this entertaining and educational at the same
| time. Even though it depends very much on how you play it.
| charliea0 wrote:
| The process of going from rocks to manufactured goods is
| fascinating, and probably part of the interest in Minecraft.
|
| Obligatory link to a video showing the home refinement of iron
| metal from minerals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBBt7IhHOFQ
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The best ref on _primitive_ Iron production I've seen is
| acoup.blog ... also textiles, food, etc
| [deleted]
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| I went on a game hiatus in June just to see if I'd even miss them
| or if they were nothing but a time sink. So far there's only two
| games I'd really like to play, Battlefield 2042 (which hasn't
| released yet) and Minecraft. To my mind it is a perfect sandbox
| game. Solid core loop, various secondary objectives you can set,
| high replayability, and deep customization. There is an
| impressively deep level of interaction between different objects
| in the game, combined with the redstone logic system there's no
| real limit to what can be designed. It's the Lego of the digital
| age.
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