The Deeper You Dig In Minecraft 1.17, The More Diamonds You’ll Find

This week’s snapshot showed off a ton of little tweaks and changes to 1.17’s cave and ore generation. One of the most important changes, though, was to ore distribution. Essentially, the deeper you dig, the more diamonds you’ll find.

That’s a big change from the existing 1.16. Currently, diamonds are most often found between y-level 0 and 16 and are exposed to air. In 1.17, though, you’re going to want to go as deep as you can to find the most diamonds. Developer Henrik Kniberg shared a graph that shows how this kind of distribution is going to work.

Snapshot time! Mostly cave tweaks. We've increased the cave sizes again, tweaked ore distribution, and renamed Grimstone (among other things). Unfortunately we accidentally messed up iron ore spawning, it is basically missing. Will fix ASAP. https://t.co/b2M3K7RZh8 pic.twitter.com/YGqPQz5ZPv

— Henrik Kniberg (@henrikkniberg) February 24, 2021

Looking at the side-by-side comparison, it’s clear that you’re going to find the most diamonds at y-level (-)64. However, there is a little bit of a twist. Diamonds aren’t going to be found just lying around anymore. The ores will try not to generate next to an air block, which means that you’ll need to dig to find them. The other thing to keep in mind is that, the deeper you go, the more likely you are to run into a Warden.

Developer Kingbogz assures us, though, that the Deep Dark isn’t the only biome that you’ll find at these depths. You’ll also find the Lush and Dripstone cave variants along with the “Cheese” and “Spaghetti” noise caves. That being said, you might want to be extra careful, because while you’re looking for diamonds, you could be lulled into a false sense of security and tip off the Warden—who will then quickly take you down.

All of this appears to be working well for the balance of the game. New players will still be able to access diamonds without going below y-0, and veteran players are going to have to worry about running into a Warden when they are strip mining at the deepest depths of the world. If that wasn’t enough, the new deeplsate block—which is about all you’ll find at the bottom of the world—is twice as hard to mine as stone.

Of course, there are still several more weeks until the update is set to be released, so we are going to see further tweaks to how everything is working. Based on community feedback, though, it appears that we are nearing the final version of the caves side of the Caves and Cliffs update.