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 table or smelting. It drops 4-8 Lapis Lazuli shards, which 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 more common than Diamond ore with an average of 3.43 Lapis Lazuli per chunk.

Smelting
(In Minecraft 1.0.0 you only need to smelt if acquired with the Silk Touch enchantment.)

History
Lapis lazuli was introduced in Beta 1.2. Initially, it only dropped one dye per block. Jens Bergensten 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.

Trivia

 * Lapis Lazuli is the only ore block with a different pattern than 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 and there are sources that are found as far east as in the region around Lake Baikal in Siberia. Trade of the stone is ancient enough for lapis jewelry to have been found at Predynastic Egyptian sites, and as lapis beads at neolithic burials in Mehrgarh, the Caucasus, and even as far from Afghanistan as Mauritania. In South America, Chile is the only country that has natural lapis lazuli.
 * Lapis Lazuli is the only ore that spawns only below level thirty that can be mined with a stone pickaxe.