Gold Ore

"It's Gold! Striking this magnificent mineral is something of a rite of passage in Minecraft. After spending ages mining through cobblestone and coal, you finally see a shiny gleam winking at you from inside the rocks. A few whacks with your pick later, you've struck gold! (Ore!) Said gold ore can then be smelted into shining nuggets of success. This mineral has multiple crafting uses in the game, like clocks and powered rails. Sadly, the golden mining tools you can craft with it may be powerful, but they also break quickly."

- Tom Stone

Gold ore is one of the rarest types of mineral blocks found underground.

Obtaining
Gold ore will drop as an item if mined by an iron or diamond pickaxe. If mined by any other tool, it will drop nothing.

Natural generation
Gold ore generates in veins of 4-8 blocks (sometimes up to 16 if two veins happen to spawn together, and as few as 1 if the block that was supposed to be gold ore is occupied by a generated structure). In the vast majority of biomes, it only appears in the bottom 32 layers of the map. From levels 2-29, gold ore's occurrence underground is at 0.1437% (about five times as rare as iron). On average there are 8.2 gold ores per chunk.

In mesa biomes, an additional 20 veins generate between layers 32 and 79 (inclusive).