Ore

Ores are rare blocks used to obtain resources.

Purpose
Ores are primarily collected for crafting purposes, such as for tools and armor. Redstone is obtained from redstone ore, which can be used to create redstone circuits. Ore can also be combined to create a block of the material's type.

Availability


The following is the distribution of ores according to the altitude (layers are number of blocks above the lowest layer of bedrock). The highest layers that gold, redstone, diamond, and lapis lazuli can be found on are two layers lower. The graph on the right shows the ore distribution.

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

Ore varieties
All ore blocks except iron and gold require a Silk Touch pickaxe to drop themselves. Coal, diamond, emerald, and nether quartz ores drop 1 unit their corresponding raw materials. Redstone ore drops 4-5 redstone dust, and lapis lazuli ore drops 4-8 lapis lazuli.

Crafting recipe
All raw materials except Nether quartz can be crafted from their mineral blocks.

Smelting recipe
Any ore block can be smelted to produce a single unit of raw material. Note that this is the only way to obtain iron and gold ingots.

Crafting recipes
All mineral blocks except quartz are crafted by putting 9 of the raw material items in a square. Quartz blocks are crafted with 4 nether quartz and can be crafted in the inventory.

Trivia

 * Iron and gold drop the actual ore block when mined without the Silk Touch enchantment. All of the other ores drop the usable item when mined.
 * Gold ore is the only ore that can't be mined by its own pickaxe.
 * Only iron, gold and diamond can be used to make tools.
 * In PC edition, none of the ores are renewable, but every raw mineral except diamond and nether quartz are renewable.
 * In Console Edition, All ore blocks are not renewable except for Nether Quartz Ore. This is because you can reset the Nether in the Console Edition through the world options. Because of the nether reset option, diamonds are renewable in Console Edition, but not in any other version, as there is a chance of diamonds spawning in nether fortresses chests. Therefore, in Console Edition only, every raw mineral is renewable!
 * In Pocket Edition, none of the raw minerals, ores, or mineral blocks are renewable.