How Minecraft’s Cave Update Changes Iron & Gold Ore

The latest Minecraft snapshot (21w14a) of the upcoming Caves & Cliffs update has revealed a major change to a couple of the game’s most iconic ores that will make both iron and gold much easier to obtain. Iron and gold ore are the only ores in Minecraft that don’t drop raw materials when mined. However, the Caves & Cliffs update will change how iron and gold ore are gathered for the first time since their release.

Iron is one of the most useful materials in Minecraft because of how many recipes it is used in. Yet, players usually opt for automatic farms to produce iron as it can take a long time to gather manually. Iron is used to make armor, tools, Redstone components, and minecart rails; and players will need a large amount of this precious metal to complete large projects. Gold is used in fewer recipes, but it is equally important when it comes to using minecarts or building large-scale farms. While it’s still faster to use automatic farms to gather materials, the new update will make it much easier for those who opt for mining.

The Caves & Cliffs update is making a lot of changes below Minecraft’s surface including iconic ore textures, cave generation, and the maximum depth of the world. This will make mining for materials more exciting and profitable as larger caverns will increase the visibility of precious ores. The update also looks to make mining more beneficial which is evident through the changes being made to iron and gold ores.

Minecraft Caves & Cliffs Changes Iron & Gold Ores

The biggest change to Minecraft’s iron and gold ores is that they will no longer drop ore blocks when mined with a pickaxe that doesn’t have Silk Touch. Instead, iron and gold ores will now drop new materials called Raw Iron and Raw Gold. These will drop from the ores similar to how coal, Redstone, and diamonds drop from their respective ores. Raw Iron and Raw Gold will need to be smelted using a furnace to turn them into ingots. Since these ores now drop raw materials, iron and gold ores are affected by Fortune enchantments meaning players have a chance to get more than one ingot from a single ore block.

In addition to raw iron and gold, copper ore now drops raw copper which can also be smelted to make copper ingots. Unlike iron and gold nuggets, raw metals offer a 1:1 return when smelted, meaning players won’t have to combine several raw materials to get a single ingot. The changes to gold ore do not affect gold ores in the Nether ,which will continue to drop a number of gold nuggets when mined. With each new snapshot, Mojang reveals how it plans to change mining in Minecraft forever. Although the latest snapshot revealed the game-changing updates to iron and gold, there is still plenty of new content coming to Minecraftthat Mojang likely has yet to reveal.

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