Ore

An ore is any uncommon rock-type block used to obtain specific resources.

Usage
Ore blocks are primarily collected for crafting purposes, such as for tools and armor. Redstone is obtained from redstone ore or deepslate redstone ore, which can be used to create redstone circuits. Ore can also be combined to create a block of the material's type.

There are two ways to obtain a resource from an ore block, depending on the type of ore:


 * Mining: The indicated yield can be increased by mining the ore with a pickaxe enchanted with Fortune. Ores that drop their resource when mined require a Silk Touch pickaxe to drop themselves.
 * Coal, diamond, deepslate diamond, emerald, and nether quartz ores drop 1 unit of corresponding raw material.
 * Redstone and deepslate redstone ores drop 4–5 redstone dust.
 * Lapis lazuli and deepslate Lapis Lazuli ores drop 4–9 lapis lazuli.
 * Smelting: Iron ore, deepslate iron ore copper ore, gold ore, and ancient debris all drop themselves when mined. They must be smelted to obtain the corresponding resource (iron, copper, gold, and netherite scraps, respectively).

As a smelting ingredient
Ores can be smelted faster using a blast furnace.

It is not efficient to mine with Silk Touch and then smelt an ore block that normally drops multiple pieces of its resource, because smelting these ores yields less experience and only 1 piece of the resource.

Further uses
All mineral blocks except quartz and copper are crafted by putting 9 of the raw material items in a square. Quartz blocks are irreversibly crafted with 4 nether quartz and thus can be crafted in the inventory. Copper blocks are also crafted from 4 copper ingots, which is reversible only if the copper block has not started oxidizing.

All raw materials except quartz can be crafted from their mineral blocks.

Iron and Gold ingots can be converted into nuggets and vice-versa.

Lapis Lazuli can be crafted into a dye, or even used as one.

Netherite scraps, obtained by smelting ancient debris, are used alongside gold ingots to create netherite ingots. This is the only mineral used alongside another mineral to create an alloy. Netherite tools and armor also require you to first have diamond tools and armor.

Netherite ingots can be used on a smithing table to upgrade diamond items to netherite items. Data such as durability, enchantments, and custom names are preserved.

Availability
The following is the distribution of ores according to the altitude (layers are number of blocks above the lowest layer of bedrock) in the Overworld and the Nether. The highest layers that gold, redstone, diamond, and lapis lazuli ore can be found on are two layers lower.

Trivia

 * Ancient debris has two ways to generate, similar to gold ore.
 * Since it is exclusive to only one Overworld biome, Emerald ore is actually rarer than ancient debris per chunk.