Our Minecraft where to find diamonds guide will take you step by step on the best ways to locate and farm it! Diamond is one of the most important resources in the game, and it is used to craft the best tools, armor, and weapons.
how to mine diamond
The first thing you need to know before heading into the depths of your Minecraft map is how to mine Diamond. You will need an iron pickaxe before you go, as you cannot mine it with a lower level pickaxe. That said, to get an iron pickaxe, you'll need at least three iron ingots. Follow the steps below to get iron in Minecraft.
Step 1: Find Iron
Iron can be found fairly regularly in just about every area of a mine. You will need a stone pickaxe to harvest it. The easiest way to find iron is to search a cave system or a crevasse/gulch. These are natural areas that don't require a lot of mining to open up. Using them gives you a large area to survey, and it should lead to easy resources like Coal and Iron.
Step 2: melt the iron
Once you find iron ore, you will want to create iron ingots. Create a furnace, place iron ore inside with coal, charcoal or wood and it will create ingots. If you don't have an oven, you can crate it with pebbles.
Step 3: Create the iron pickaxe
Once you have the three iron ingots, get some sticks and you can craft the iron pickaxe in the crafting table.
It is not recommended to use the Iron Pickaxe on anything other than Diamond or Redstone unless you have excess Iron Ore. If you waste your pickaxe on stone in general, you might break it before you find what you're looking for and then can mine it.
Where to find the diamond
Diamond is located deep within the map. It can only be found between certain layers. What is a layer? Well, whatever block you're standing on has an X, Y, and Z coordinate associated with it. You can find it by pressing F3 on your keyboard to open the debug screen.
If you're not on a PC/Mac, you can dig yourself down to bedrock (black and gray blocks that can't be broken). You'll first start seeing Bedrock at layer 5, so you can count upwards from there to figure out which layer you're on.
Why do you need to know this? The diamond only appears between layers 5 and 16, but most often you will find it between layers 5 and 12, so you will need to be between these layers to find it. We recommend creating a mine shaft or finding a cave and building a staircase to layers 5 and 16.
How to farm diamond
Now that we know where to find it, we need to know how best to grow it. It's not an exact science, but there are ways to maximize the means of locating it.
Look for caves
While in the Diamond spawn layers, you'll want to search for cave systems. If you find them, you can explore large parts of the map in this area and inevitably come across Diamond.
To find cave areas, it's best to listen for both lava and monsters. This usually means there are gaps in the areas around you, but you'll have to be careful! Finding lava while mining is generally not a good thing as it is very dangerous.
If you find Diamond near the lava, be sure to either use a bucket of water to create a safe area, or cover it with all that extra cobblestone you should have!
If you hear monsters, that means there's a big enough space in a nearby area for them to spawn. Mine towards this area and you might find a cave system. Be prepared though, you may need to fight monsters before you can explore. Make sure to place torches around so more mobs don't spawn.
Mining
Probably the most common and best way to maximize your chances of finding Diamond is to fork mine. Go down to the lower layers, you'll want to start at layer 6 to make sure there's no bedrock below you.
Mine straight in line for about 20-30 blocks (you can decide how far you want to go). Once you've gotten as far as you want, mine three to the right or left and then back to where you started in line. It should look something like this:
This effectively checks the entire area for Diamond. You can repeat this over and over as much as you want as long as you are in layers that contain Diamond.
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General Diamond Tips and Tricks
- Create a crafting table, oven, and storage area near where you do all of your mining. These are all very easy to craft and don't require a lot of resources. This allows you to return to this area, drop items, and empty your bag. You can smelt ore while you are doing all your mining activities and you can protect your resources while you are mining.
- Lava is the deadliest aspect of any kind of deep mining. So if you find Diamond, be sure to bring it back to a storage area. If you die from lava, it's possible that all your stuff will fall into it and burn. You will not be able to recover it and you will lose it forever!
- Take all the iron ore, gold, and redstone you see while searching for the diamond! These are all very useful to you, so be sure to pick it up when you find it. Diamond is a key material, but don't just focus on it!
- Never dig straight! This is a common rule that most Minecraft players know, but it's important to keep in mind. You can fall into a cave or fall straight into lava. Always be safe when mining an unknown area.
- Enchant your pickaxe with the Fortune enchantment! This will give you a chance to get an extra diamond when you find one. The higher the enchantment you place on it (it goes up to Fortunte III), the more you can potentially get.
- Create a path to get back to the surface, it's easy to get lost in the caves, so we recommend creating a staircase up to the demon level and having a row of torches that go up with the star path. This will allow you to easily find your way back to your base.
Check out some of our other awesome Minecraft Pro Game Guides.
