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, lapis lazuli, and emerald. Blocks are hard to make, as they require nine pieces of material to create.

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.

* Based on the graph on the right.

** Only in Extreme Hills or Extreme Hills Edge biome. Also, the distribution is different - instead of multi-block veins, emerald ore is placed in scattered blocks. (As of Weekly Snapshot 12w42b, emerald will now spawn in veins.)

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

Ore is created by picking two points a certain distance apart, drawing a line between the points, and filling in any Stone blocks within a certain distance of the line with the ore being done in that round. Source (Section 3.11)

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.

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 and Emerald are the only two 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.
 * Emerald and lapis are the only ore that cannot make a tool.
 * Redstone and coal are the only 2 ore that cannot make a placeable block.