Lapis Lazuli Ore



Lapis Lazuli is an ore block that is used to make blue dyes and decorative blocks. Like coal, redstone, and diamond ore, the block yields the resource immediately after mining, requiring no crafting or smelting. It drops 4-8 Lapis Lazuli shards, which can be used to create blue wool as a dye color, crafted into a Lapis Lazuli Block, or mixed with other dyes.

Lapis lazuli is based on the real stone for which it is named and has historically been a prized and rare stone used in jewelry and as a dye.

Lapis Lazuli can be mined with a stone or better pickaxe. It is usually found at a depth of 31 and below. The highest concentration of Lapis Lazuli Ore is found between levels 13 and 16. At this level the concentration is about 0.083% of all blocks (0.1013% of stone). The concentration drops linearly as one gets farther from these rows. Overall, Lapis Lazuli is around 1.1 times as common than Diamond ore with an average of 3.43 Lapis Lazuli per chunk.

History
Lapis lazuli was introduced in Beta 1.2, making it the 2nd newest ore. Initially, it only dropped one dye per block. Jens Bergensten acknowledged that the ore was too rare and increased the drop rate to 4-8 in the Beta 1.2_02 update.

Prior to 1.9 prerelease 6, it could not be smelted to obtain the dye. The introduction to enchantment has lead to the mining of lapis lazuli ore using a pickaxe with the "silk touch" enchantment. During this time the ore could have then been smelted to obtain lapis blocks.

Trivia

 * Lapis Lazuli and Emeralds are the only ore blocks with a different pattern from the other ores.
 * Just like with redstone, maps generated before lapis lazuli was added will have none of this ore unless new terrain is generated.
 * In the real world, Lapis Lazuli has been mined from mines in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan for over 6,000 years and there are sources that are found as far east as in the region around Lake Baikal in Siberia. Trade of the stone is ancient enough for lapis jewelry to have been found at Predynastic Egyptian sites, and as lapis beads at neolithic burials in Mehrgarh, the Caucasus, and even as far from Afghanistan as Mauritania. In South America, Chile is the only country that has natural lapis lazuli. Lapis Lazuli was used by the ancient Egyptians for their sarcophaguses.
 * Lapis Lazuli is the only ore that spawns exclusively below level thirty that can be mined with a stone pickaxe.
 * When you use the Pick Block function in creative mode when looking at this block, you get an ink sac in return. This is because lapis lazuli is considered a dye, along with bonemeal and the ink sac.