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 dust is obtained from redstone ore or deepslate redstone ore, which can be used to create redstone circuits. Refined ore can also be combined to create a block of the material's type.

Most ores drop their resource when mined, and require a Silk Touch pickaxe to drop themselves.
 * Coal, diamond, emerald, their respective deepslate variants, and nether quartz ores drop 1 unit of their corresponding material.
 * Iron, gold, and their respective deepslate variants drop 1 unit of their raw form.
 * Copper and deepslate copper ores drop 2-5 raw copper.
 * Redstone and deepslate redstone ores drop 4–5 redstone dust.
 * Lapis lazuli and deepslate lapis lazuli ores drop 4–9 lapis lazuli.
 * Nether gold ore drops 2–6 gold nuggets.
 * Ancient debris is the exception; it drops itself when mined and must be smelted to obtain netherite scrap.

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. Nether gold ore is the only exception, as each ore block drops an average of 8.8 gold nuggets even when mined with Fortune III, which is less than a guaranteed gold ingot obtained from smelting the ore obtained using Silk Touch.

Note Blocks
All types of ores can be placed under note blocks to produce "bass drum" sounds.

Distribution
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.

Trivia

 * Since it is exclusive to only two categories of overworld biomes (mountains and windswept hills), emerald ore is actually rarer than ancient debris per chunk.
 * The texture of ores were changed in 1.17 to make them distinct for color blind players.