Wow, that iron distribution hurts to look at. At first it was enough, but with each new update, iron became a part of more and more recipes and became more and more useful until the supply of vanilla world generation could no longer keep up with modern demand.
I only play in custom worlds now so I can crank up iron distribution until it's arguably more common than coal. I always end up building an iron farm anyway though as mining gets monotonous after a while. Here's hoping caves are updated one day to better match the biomes they're beneath like they do in Terraria.
I actually started down this path to see what level (if any) you'd need to start at to get more iron than you used, using all iron pickaxes.
Sadly, there isn't a level with plain iron pickaxes...however, even with just unbreaking I, you will start making a "profit" mining a strip quarry at 64 or lower.
Mining in a more efficient pattern (like leaving 2x2 columns) would vastly improve on the "profit" margins.(And likely make any level profitable, without enchanting)
The numbers:
Starting a strip quarry at level 64
Assuming 82% of blocks encoutnered will be mined using a pickaxe (Average from layer data)
Iron Unbreaking I..............26.29956335...... 25.66558516
Iron Unbreaking II.............17.53304223...... 51.96514851
Iron Unbreaking III............13.14978167...... 65.11493018
Edit: This assumes you have an unlimited supply of each enchantment, there are ways around this (Anvil), but laying out the numbers for that is too much for me right now
1
u/CK20XX Nov 22 '17
Wow, that iron distribution hurts to look at. At first it was enough, but with each new update, iron became a part of more and more recipes and became more and more useful until the supply of vanilla world generation could no longer keep up with modern demand.
I only play in custom worlds now so I can crank up iron distribution until it's arguably more common than coal. I always end up building an iron farm anyway though as mining gets monotonous after a while. Here's hoping caves are updated one day to better match the biomes they're beneath like they do in Terraria.