The Science of Minecraft (Part 2): Metal and Minerals
Think video games aren’t educational? Think again! In Part 2 of this series, Ask Science looks at the relationship between your pickaxe and the type of ore you can mine in the popular 3D video game, Minecraft.
Lee Falin, PhD
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The Science of Minecraft (Part 2): Metal and Minerals
As I mentioned in Part 1 of my Science of Minecraft series, one of the goals of the popular game called Minecraft is to mine for the raw materials you need in order to create cool stuff. If you dig deep enough, you’re able to find metal ores that you can smelt in a forge in order to make things out of metal.
To mine the ore, you use a traditional miner’s pickaxe. While it sounds simple enough, there’s a bit of a complication in that the type of ore you’re able to mine depends upon the material your pickaxe is made of. Let’s take a look at some of the science behind that relationship.;
Diamonds Are a Miner’s Best Frends
When you first start out in Minecraft, the only material available to you for building tools is wood. Fortunately, you’re able to cut down trees and shape the logs into wooden tools with your bare hands, something I don’t advise you try at home.
With a wooden pickaxe in hand, you’re able to mine coal and stone. Once you have enough stone, you can start mining faster, because the stone pickaxe is more durable and cuts through stone blocks more quickly than wood. Stone pickaxes also allow you to harvest iron ore.
We talked about turning iron ore into iron metal previously, but once you have iron metal, you can create an iron pickaxe that allows you to harvest the other underground materials, such as gold, lapis lazuli, and diamond.
While you can create a gold pickaxe, you can’t use it to mine anything other than stone or coal, making it useful only for adding some bling to your tool collection. Diamond pickaxes on the other hand can be used to mine anything, even the hardest substance in the game: obsidian.
So in Minecraft, wood is weaker than stone (which is about equal in strength to gold) next comes iron, obsidian, and finally diamond. Let’s see how that compares to the real world.
Larry, Curly, and Moh
As any geologist worth their rock hammer can tell you, one of the basic ways of classifying the hardness of rocks and minerals is by using a system called Mohs scale of mineral hardness. While it is no longer widely used for its original purpose (organizing minerals for display based on how hard they are), it’s still a useful tool for determining what that strange rock you found in your backyard is made of.
Obsidian is a form of volcanic glass that is created by the rapid cooling of lava. In Minecraft, obsidian is one of the most durable materials.
The Mohs scale runs from 1 to 10, with lower numbers being softer than higher numbers. Talc (used to make talcum powder, among other things) is the softest mineral on the scale with a hardness of 1. On the other end of the scale, we have diamond with a hardness of 10.
It’s important to note that unlike the pH scale, the Mohs scale is simply ordinal. This means that while the Mohs scale tells us that gypsum is harder than talc, and that calcite is harder than gypsum, it doesn’t tell us how much harder. This means that the amount of hardness separating talc from gypsum isn’t necessarily the same as the difference between gypsum from calcite.
Obsessed with Obsidian
Now let’s take a look at obsidian. First, the game gets the creation of obsidian correct. Obsidian is a form of volcanic glass that is created by the rapid cooling of lava. In Minecraft, obsidian is one of the most durable materials.
While any pickaxe in the game can technically break obsidian, only a diamond pickaxe can do it in a reasonable amount of time. However, in real life, obsidian has a hardness of 5 on Mohs scale, making it considerably softer than it is portrayed in the game.
And Now for the Big Finish
So now that we know how to classify the hardness of minerals in the real world, let’s see how the relative strengths of the various Minecraft pickaxes compare to real life.
We unfortunately aren’t told just what kind of stone the “stone” pickaxe is, but let’s pretend that it’s granite, since that’s a common type of stone used to make cobblestone. Granite is made up mostly of feldspar and quartz, which would put it between 6 and 7 on the Mohs hardness scale.
Iron comes in at 4 on the hardness scale, which makes it considerably softer than granite. We might imagine that the iron used in the game is actually an iron alloy. Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and claim it is actually tempered steel, which has a hardness of around 7.5.
Gold, as you might imagine, isn’t anywhere near as hard as stone, with a hardness between 2.5 and 3, depending on how pure it is. While in Minecraft a gold pickaxe is able to mine the same materials as a stone pickaxe, its softness is partially accounted for by the fact that a gold pickaxe will break about four times faster than a stone one.
The diamond pickaxe seems to correspond well to its real life counterpart, since diamond comes in at level 10 on the Mohs scale.
Conclusion
If you find an unknown mineral in your backyard, you can take advantage of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness to try and figure out what it is. If you can scratch it with your fingernail, you know its hardness is less than 2.5. If your fingernail won’t scratch it but a penny will, then you know the hardness is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5. And if it is somewhat shiny and cuts your glass window in half, then you better get to your jeweler fast.
For more details and other tests you can do to identify unknown minerals, check out the great resources on RocksForKids.com.
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Obsidian Rock image, B.D.’s world at Flickr. CC BY SA– 2.0.
