Lapis Lazuli Ore



Lapis lazuli is an ore block that is used to make blue dyes and decorative blocks. Like coal, redstone, and diamond ore, the block yields the resource immediately after mining, requiring no crafting or smelting. It drops 4-8 lapis lazuli shards depending on which tool you use to break it, it will drop more when broken with a diamond pickaxe, than with a stone pickaxe, then these shards can be used to create blue wool as a dye color, crafted into a lapis lazuli block, or mixed with other dyes.

Lapis lazuli is based on the real stone for which it is named and has historically been a prized and rare stone used in jewelry and as a dye.

Lapis lazuli can be mined with a stone or better pickaxe. It is usually found at a depth of 31 and below. The highest concentration of lapis lazuli ore is found between levels 13 and 16. At this level the concentration is about 0.083% of all blocks (0.1013% of stone). The concentration drops linearly as one gets farther from these rows. Overall, lapis lazuli is around 1.1 times as common as diamond ore with an average of 3.43 lapis lazuli per chunk.

Smelting
Note that the Lapis Lazuli ore block can only be obtained with a pickaxe enchanted with Silk Touch. Also, smelting the ore instead of mining it is highly inefficient. Mining the ore block yields 4-8 units of Lapis Lazuli dye, but smelting it only gives one.

History
Lapis lazuli was introduced in Beta 1.2, making it the 2nd newest ore. Initially, it only dropped one dye per block. Jeb acknowledged that the ore was too rare and increased the drop rate to 4-8 in the Beta 1.2_02 update.

Prior to 1.9 prerelease 6, it could not be smelted to obtain the dye. The introduction to enchantment has lead to the mining of lapis lazuli ore using a pickaxe with the "silk touch" enchantment. During this time the ore could have then been smelted to obtain lapis blocks.

Trivia

 * Lapis lazuli and emeralds are the only ore blocks with a different pattern from the other ores.
 * Just like with redstone, maps generated before lapis lazuli was added will have none of this ore unless new terrain is generated.
 * In the real world, lapis lazuli has been mined from mines in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan for over 6,000 years.
 * Lapis lazuli is the only ore that spawns exclusively below level thirty that can be mined with a stone pickaxe.
 * When you use the Pick Block function in creative mode when looking at this block, you get an ink sac in return. This is because lapis lazuli is considered a dye, along with bone meal and ink sacs.