Ore



Ore is a block type in Minecraft. Ores are primarily collected for crafting purposes, such as for tools and armor. Redstone Ore is used as a type of "wiring" that can be used to create Redstone circuits, compasses, clocks, and other items. Ore can also be combined to create a block of the material's type for iron, gold, diamond, redstone, lapis lazuli, emerald and Nether quartz. Blocks are hard to make, as they require nine pieces of material to create (blocks of quartz, however, require 4 Nether quartz crystals).

Availability
In Minecraft Beta, the following is the distribution of ores according to the altitude. (Layers are number of blocks above the lowest layer of bedrock.) Since the beta 1.8 patch, the highest layers that Gold, Redstone, Diamond, and Lapis Lazuli can be found on are now two layers lower. The graph on the right shows the ore distribution in 1.1. The change to the 256-block worlds in the weekly releases before 1.2 did not affect world generation, as seen in this interactive chart.

Redstone has the same layer and line-size statistics as Diamond, but is generated 8 times per chunk as opposed to 1.

In chunks generated prior to Beta 1.6, ore also varies depending on the section of the map it is generated in due to a bug (fixed in 1.6) in the spawning algorithm. In the quadrant southwest of the point (0,0), ore spawns approximately 50% more than in the quadrant northeast of the point (0,0). The quadrants northwest and southeast of the point (0,0) split the difference between the extremes. (See image below) Any chunks generated after Beta 1.6 do not show this disparity as the spawning algorithm has been fixed. The bug fix did not modify any already existing chunks.

Craftable blocks
So far, Coal is the only material that comes from an ore that lacks a block, but on the joke April Fools 2.0 update, there's a coal block.

Trivia

 * Iron and Gold are the only ores that drop the actual ore block when mined without the Silk Touch Enchantment. All of the other ores drop the usable item when mined.
 * Ore veins do not pass through chunk borders.
 * Lapis Lazuli, Nether Quartz, and Emerald are the only ores that do not have the same texture as the other ores. All of the other ores have the same texture, but with a different color.
 * Gold ore is the only ore that can't be mined by its own pickaxe.
 * Iron, Gold and Diamond are the ores that can be used to make a tool.
 * Coal is the only ore that cannot be crafted into a placeable block.
 * Nether Quartz is the only ore whose texture does not resemble stone, as it is the only ore found in the Nether.
 * Nether Quartz Ore is the only ore where 4 items make a block instead of 9, and it is the only ore where its block can't be crafted back into the item.