Have you ever wondered how similar the Minecraft resources are to rocks and minerals in the real world? Let's find out!

Yes, plain old Stone. You get to see a lot of this in Minecraft, and you get to dig through a lot of it. It's boring, it's everywhere, but it's useful as a building material and it's critical for making tools during that very brief period when you start the game before you discover Iron.



In the real world, we use the words 'stone' and 'rock' to describe any natural stone or rock that hasn't been identified more accurately. So, here on mindat.org we use the page rock to group all different types of rock together. You might be surprised at how many many different types of rock exist!


Rocks are made up of multiple minerals. For example, the rock granite is made up of feldspar and quartz, often with mica and other minerals thrown in for good measure. Granite isn't a mineral in exactly the same way that a fruit salad isn't itself a fruit, it just contains lots of them.

Since we were talking about Granite, here it is! A relatively recent addition to Minecraft, it's found in the game as a type of stone in thick seams, often in mountains, but can be found anywhere. It's pinkish and can be polished and used as a nice building material.


Further, it's a plutonic or intrusive rock, which means that the molten rock cools slowly underground rather than quickly from a lava that has erupted onto the surface. Because it cools slowly, the crystals have time to grow bigger than in volcanic or extrusive rocks (that's the stuff that erupts!). We'll talk more about this soon.


Granite doesn't have to be pink. It's often whitish or grey. But reddish/pinkish granites are certainly not uncommon. There's also an unusual type of granite that's called graphic granite - this granite has crystals of quartz and feldspar that have grown together in a weird oriented way which often resembles ancient writing.




In the real world, granite isn't usually found in seams and small clusters of blocks as it is in Minecraft - instead, it makes up entire mountains! Granite is very common, and large areas of the Earth's crust are built from granite.

In Minecraft, Diorite is another recent addition and is found and used in pretty much the same way as Granite.



It still contains feldspar, but has much less quartz and usually contains amphibole and biotite which are both dark-colored minerals, which makes the rock darker than granite.





The rock above is called a hornblende oligoclase diorite because it contains hornblende (a type of amphibole) and oligoclase (a type of feldspar), but is otherwise quite a typical diorite.

Anyway, you know lava. It's hot and it comes out of volcanoes. It's this stuff:




Firstly, let's talk about liquid hot magma...




Generally, as we mentioned before, lava cools quickly and makes rocks with tiny crystals, magma cools slowly and makes rocks with larger crystals. So, if you want to be accurate when describing your Minecraft explorations:

Andesite, in Minecraft, is found in exactly the same sort of places as Granite or Diorite (and for reasons I can't quite understand, in the basements of igloos).


It has the same mineral composition as diorite, but with smaller crystals.

Andesite isn't really the most exciting rock to look at in the real world.

The Minecraft Nether Update (1.16) has filled the underworld with dark basalt columns. Basalt, as you could easily guess, is another type of rock that's found in the real world.

It's another extrusive volcanic rock that forms when lava cools relatively quickly. Here are some exciting basalt photos.


Ok, yes, I lied about the 'exciting' part. Sorry.

Well, actually, it kinda is. Except we should probably call it 'soil' rather than 'dirt' because 'soil' sounds just a tiny bit more scientific, and we like that.

To be more strict, we're talking about sediment rather than rock.


Over time sediment can get buried and compressed, and that can turn soft sediment into hard rock.

So, you compress sediment into rock, what kind of rock do you get? That's right - sedimentary rock! We should see some of that soon here...

Podzol, or as it's known in most places spodosol, is a very special kind of FANCY dirt.


And forests are exactly where you'll find it in Minecraft (well, Mega Taiga biomes to be precise).

One of the first things new Minecraft explorers discover is that the smooth nice Stone they mine turns into ugly, lumpy Cobblestone.


Now, building materials are all very interesting - I could talk for hours about bricks - but it's not what we are here to discuss, is it? We're only looking at natural materials in Minecraft and their natural counterparts in the real world.

So why is Cobblestone in our list? Because in Minecraft it can be found naturally, where Lava has come in contact with water.


Here's what pillow lava looks like when you dig through a deposit of it in the real world:



That's our Cobblestone, for sure! But what's WAY more exciting is how it is formed!

Also new in the 1.16 update is blackstone which is a sort of basalt cobblestone found in the Nether. It can be used in the same way that cobblestone can, to make various decorative blocks, slabs, furnaces, weapons and tools.


Here's a picture of a nice basalt pillow lava.

If you dig deep enough, you'll hit Bedrock. This is true both in Minecraft and the real world.


What do we have that's similar? Do we have a rock that's so tough it's impossible to dig through?

Not exactly.

But it turns out it's really difficult to dig very deep holes in the Earth anyway.





The Earth is mostly made up of very hot rock and metal. The thin outer layer of rock called the crust is all that we can see.

But don't let the name 'crust' fool you. It's not like bread at all with a hard crust protecting a soft spongy starchy interior. The deeper you go inside the earth, the hotter it gets and that makes it very difficult to dig through.

You see, no-one has ever dug deep enough to go through the crust.


But let's just say that you did manage to dig down through the crust and reach the mantle. What do mantle rocks look like? Are these our 'bedrock'?

Fortunately, we do know what they look like because sometimes fragments of the mantle are carried up by volcanoes. Here is a piece of the mantle - a bit of rock that's come from tens of kilometers down and was brought up to the surface through a violent volcanic eruption.



The green stuff is the mantle rock - in this case, it is mostly the mineral forsterite, which a type of olivine.




So, perhaps this green, olivine-rich rock (more properly called olivinite) is the closest thing to our Minecraft bedrock.

But wait. This olivine isn't the only thing that's carried up from deep below us in the mantle by volcanoes...

In Minecraft, you have to dig DEEP to get Diamonds. In the real world that's not always true!

Diamonds do form deep, deep in the Earth. We think they form at around 160km (100 miles) down inside the Earth's mantle.


But that's exactly what you need to create a diamond!

But before we get too deep into this subject, let's take a couple seconds to appreciate how beautiful diamonds are!

Here are some natural, uncut diamond crystals.



Now, back to the science! Diamond is, as you know, made completely from carbon.

Some diamonds are thought to have been formed from organic matter that has been carried down deep into the earth. So if something that dies (a dinosaur, for example) gets buried it can turn into oil if the conditions are right. But if it's really, really lucky and gets transported deep enough, it could turn into a diamond.


Now, that's not to say that somewhere deep below us the remains of a dinosaur aren't turning into a diamond right now, but we may have to wait a few hundred million years before it finds its way back up to the surface!



"Diamond ore" is the rock that diamonds are found in. We generally don't call it 'diamond ore', most geologists only use the term 'ore' for rock that needs to be heated or treated with chemicals to process it, with "diamond ore" the rock is just ground up and the freed diamond crystals picked out. We'll explain a bit more about ore later, because right now you want to read more about diamonds!

There are several types of rock that diamonds can be found in.

The most famous is one called kimberlite, named after the town of Kimberley in South Africa where the Cullinan Diamond (the world's largest diamond) was found. Kimberlite forms 'pipes', which are big solid tubes of rock that started way deep down in the mantle and (because of some pretty complicated stuff) the magma expanded rapidly towards the earth's surface. (They were very explosive, but they're also very rare so you don't need to be worried about that.) The tubes of magma that flowed up towards the surface carried the diamonds with it, cooled, and turned into solid rock, trapping the diamonds within the rock.

Another rock that diamonds can be found in is called eclogite. It's another green mantle rock like the olivinite we saw earlier. Here are some of these rocks:



So this is how diamonds, even though they formed very, very deep below us, can be found at the surface of the Earth.

Many diamonds are mined from alluvial deposits - sands and gravels - where they collected after being released from the rocks they were originally trapped in over millions of years of erosion.

Of course, it's not "diamond ore" unless it has diamonds in it. But diamonds are exceptionally rare, even in a diamond-bearing rock such as a kimberlite and only one in a hundred kimberlite 'pipes' contains any diamonds at all.






In Minecraft, diamonds are extremely tough and can be used to make pickaxes and diamond armor. In the real world diamond is hard, but it is not tough, and there's a big difference!


Diamond is hard, which means it can scratch any other natural material and no other natural material can scratch it. Hardness describes a thing's ability to resist abrasion.

Diamond is not tough. In mineralogy, the measure of how tough a thing is is discussed using the term tenacity, which describes the type reaction the thing has to physical stresses like bending, crushing, and breaking.

There are lots of words that describe how materials react to these stresses, and diamond is what we call "brittle." This is why if you take a hammer and hit a diamond, you'll suddenly have a lot of very tiny pieces of diamond (and the person you took the diamond from will be very upset).

So diamond is used for drilling tools, grinding tools, and anything where the abrasive nature of the diamond is important. But it can never be used for things like a sword or a pickaxe (at least, not if you want to accomplish anything)!

I'm assuming you already know what coal is, but I'll tell you again anyway.


In Minecraft, you find 'veins' of a few dozen blocks associated together. In the real world these coal veins, or coal seams as they are more usually called, can be tens of meters thick and cover vast areas!

Here are some coal photos I found especially for you.

Yes, clay is a rock. It may not seem like it, but it is - not all rocks have to be, um, rock hard.


So it's a sedimentary rock!

It's formed from tiny particles of mashed-up rock which has been altered into brand new minerals - primarily a group of minerals called, quite predictably, clay minerals. And because they're made up of tiny particles you can't see without a microscope they tend to be very, very boring.


Actually, I lied - they can be fascinating! Here are some photos. On the left normal clay in a rock face, on the right some highly magnified clay mineral photos.

Yes, now we're getting lazy and combining sand (and red sand) and gravel to talk about them all together. But that's because in the real world, they're quite similar!


Technically, "sand" is a sediment where the grain size is between 0.0625mm to 2mm, and "gravel" is a sediment where the grain size is between 2mm and 64mm. Unlike clays, these are generally grains and pieces of the original rocks that have been ground up and rounded rather than changed into new minerals.

In Minecraft, if you dig through gravel, you'll soon enough start collecting flint. Like many things in Minecraft this isn't far from the truth.


In some gravels, especially those that formed where chalk rock was eroded, pretty much every single pebble is flint.

The best flints are the jet black flints found in the white chalk, especially in the South East of England and across parts of Europe. In Poland and Russia they even find banded flint which is especially fancy.




Yes, flint and steel is a real and very traditional way to start a fire. If you ever wanted to try it, look at this video:

In the real world, gold is a precious metal prized almost like no other. Other metals (such as platinum) may be more valuable, but everyone understands gold and it's value.


But wait, that doesn't mean there are just big chunks of gold laying around all over the place!

Usually gold ore looks like this:



No, that's not gold you see on the rock. That's rust.


Big pieces of gold can be found, but they're much, much, much rarer. And of course, we've got all the photos to prove it. Some are nuggets (water worn) and some are even crystals. (Yes, gold can form crystals too!)

Deep in the Nether (version 1.16 onwards) are the remains of the Piglin castles, the Bastion Remnants. Sometimes these contain Gilded Blackstone which is a type of blackstone that's a source of gold nuggets.

Finding iron is the important step in transitioning from your Minecraft 'stone age' to the age of metal tools.






But some early cultures, such as the Ancient Egyptians, had a very small number of iron objects and weapons before they knew how to smelt the ore. How did they do this?

They found metallic iron in meteorites and used that! Some meteorites are composed almost entirely of iron and nickel. A dagger found in the tomb of Tutankhamun was shown to be made from meteorite metal!

In Minecraft (1.16 upwards), a lodestone can be used to alter the direction that compasses point - very useful for finding your way home.

In Minecraft, Lapis Lazuli can be turned into a blue dye, but in the real world Lapis Lazuli was ground into a powder and used to make blue oil paints.

The big difference between Lapis Lazuli in the Minecraft world and the real world is that there really isn't such a thing as "Lapis Lazuli Ore". The rock Lapis Lazuli is quarried and the rock is then carved into whatever shape item is needed - no smelting or processing other than this is needed.




Lapis Lazuli is a rock composed significantly of a blue mineral (lazurite* or hauyne) along with some calcite and pyrite.

In Minecraft sandstone is a rock that's made out of sand. No prizes for guessing that's exactly what it is in the real world too.


Sometimes the grains of sand are cemented together naturally and it's a very hard rock, other times it's quite loosely compacted and you can break it back into sand grains again using your fingers.

Here's some sandstone:



Most sandstone is made out of grains of the mineral quartz, which we'll see more of later...

What about Red Sandstone? Yes, sandstone is often red, this is quite common especially in desert environments.

Now, Moss Stone in Minecraft is just a Cobblestone with moss growing in the cracks.


The most famous of these is called moss agate. Have a look at some pieces:




These inclusions are not fossils, they're not something living that's grown into the rock, they're 100% inorganic, just irregular groups of chlorite crystals that grow in a way that resembles moss.

It's also sometimes called tree agate.

What do you get in Minecraft when you put water onto lava? That's right, obsidian!

In the real world that's almost how it works, except usually it's a very sticky slow-moving lava which cools very quickly in cool air.


Here are some photos of natural obsidian. The one on the right is called 'snowflake obsidian', the white patches are a mineral called cristobalite.



As far as we know, there is no way in the real world to open up a gateway to another dimension using obsidian bricks. But if you have some spare time feel free to try...

A new type of obsidian is found in the 1.16 update of Minecraft, it glows and drips glowing purple particles. It's found as part of ruined portals.

Redstone isn't obviously mapped to any real-world rock or mineral. It's something that's been made-up for the game.

But that hasn't stopped geologists and mineralogists from coming up with their own theories.

The best theory is that redstone's electrical properties relate to copper in the real world.

One popular theory is that redstone relates to a beautiful red copper mineral called cuprite.

Here are some photos of cuprite:



Cuprite is sometimes mined as an ore of copper, and it can be smelted to produce copper metal.

But we don't have to put redstone ore in a furnace to get redstone out in Minecraft, so I think that Redstone is not cuprite, but native copper - a pure copper metal found in some rocks.


The problem is that it's not really red, it's more, well, coppery. Sometimes it does get quite red, and I'll try to find the reddest of our red copper photos for you (sometimes it's red because it's coated with a very thin layer of cuprite, but pretend I didn't tell you that).

Yes, ice is a mineral. Not the ice cubes in your freezer because those are man-made. But natural ice, such as you'd find in glaciers, at the North Pole or as snowflakes.


Here are some natural ice crystals for you to enjoy. They're quite beautiful and believe it or not, there are some people that collect ice crystals!



As with all of these entries if you want to learn more, just click the mineral name link and you can view lots more photos. As of today we have 274 photos of ice! Or just click here if you're too lazy to follow the links.

Now, this is going to be a fun one to try and match with the real world.

Let's check the properties.


Strangely there is something that almost matches. It's rock-like. It can burn (but it doesn't burn the same way that Netherrack does). And it is historically associated with the Devil and the underworld.

That thing was known as Brimstone and is now known as sulfur. Ok, but there's one big problem. It doesn't look anything like Netherrack.



Let's scratch that and look just for rock-like things that burn and look just a little bit more "Netherracky".



Who? No, what.

Peat is another type of soil. This time one that is mostly made of plant debris. It can be cut into blocks, dried, and burned as a fuel.



Well, peat is associated with wet marshlands, not the lava caverns magma chambers of hell. So it's not a perfect match either.

One last try. Let's look at sapropelite, which you may have heard about under the more informal name of 'Oil Shale'.





Here's a photo - it definitely looks a little more "Netherracky!":



And since shale is a rock formed by compression of clay, silt, or mud, it was buried pretty deep at some point!

So it's not perfect, but it's at least a better match than sulfur or peat. So, until we can think of something better, this is our Netherrack in real life.

Ok, since we've already set sail on the good ship U.S.S. Tenuous, we might as well complete the voyage and say that Soul Sand is "oil sands" or "tar sands" or, again to be scientific (but with a cool name this time round) bituminous-sand.


These are being talked about a lot right now as they're seen as a major source of oil for the future. Of course, a huge new source of oil might not be the best thing for the world right now as we try to move towards cleaner, renewable, energy sources - so perhaps there is at least the tiniest link between hell and bituminous-sand.

Here's a photo of a quarry with bituminous-sand. It does look quite menacing.

Here we go again... End Stone, in Minecraft, is the material found in 'The End', which unsurprisingly is at the end of the game when you play it as a proper game. It looks a bit like cheese but we really have no other properties of note to make any judgement about it.

So, judging by appearance alone, and because I want to get back to real rocks in Minecraft, I'm going to assign it to something based just on appearance*.

And that would be conglomerate.


Here are some examples:

Glowstone is found in the Nether in Minecraft and emits light.


These are minerals that show the property of fluorescence, and they are quite beautiful.

On the left is the rock under normal light, on the right, the same rock in short-wave ultraviolet light.



Here's a gallery of some more fluorescent rocks and minerals...



But wait! There may be an even better match for Glowstone.


And we all know that the Nether is a hot place. Maybe that's what causes the Glowstone to glow?

Here are some bits of thermoluminescent fluorite that have been thrown in a camp fire and are now glowing blue:

In Minecraft, Emerald is a precious gemstone rarer than diamond only ever found in extreme hills biomes. In reality? Yes, it's another thing Mojang got exactly right! Emeralds - or at least the best quality gem emeralds - are rarer than diamonds. They're also usually found in mountainous regions.


Most beryl is pretty ugly. Here are some ugly beryls for your enjoyment:



But occasionally as a beryl crystal grows, it captures a little chromium (or possibly vanadium) which can, in the right conditions, turn it a brilliant green color. This is what we want to see! Non-ugly emerald:



What about "emerald ore"? What do these rocks look like?

Emerald is unusual for a gemstone because it can be found in a variety of different rock types. In Colombia, it is associated with black shale, in many other places it is found in a metamorphic rock called schist (no jokes, please).

Ok. Quartz ore is not a thing, at least not in the real world. Rock with quartz in it isn't usually called quartz ore. Its called, um, a rock with quartz in it.



Anyway... In Minecraft "Nether Quartz Ore" (ugh) is found (surprise!) in the Nether. You mine it and smelt it to get Nether Quartz which can be used to make certain redstone devices such as the Redstone Comparator or the Daylight Sensor. You can also use Nether Quartz to turn Cobblestone into Diorite, and Diorite in to Granite. We'll talk about that in a bit.

So, back to the real world.


Most sand is tiny rounded grains of quartz, so sandstone is mostly made up of quartz. Quartz is a common mineral in many igneous rocks such as granite as we mentioned before. To read more about the most common minerals, click here.

So what does quartz look like? I'm glad you asked... Here are a few, but you can also view a whole load more quartz photos here.




Actually, this is quite a smart thing that Mojang put into Minecraft because it shows the difference between some of these rocks. Pay attention carefully here!

Diorite is an igneous rock that contains only a small amount (if any) quartz. If we assume that our 'cobblestone' is a volcanic rock that contained no quartz (and although that's possible, it's certainly not always the case), then it's fair to say that adding some quartz to a 'cobblestone' could, if you remelted it and let it slowly cool, give you something similar to a diorite.

And if you add more quartz again? Well, granite has a lot more quartz than diorite, so again, cook up some diorite with added quartz, let it cool for a few years and you might just get something more like a granite come out (technically it'd be something called a granodiorite, but they look quite similar to granites.)

Tip of the hat, Mojang. That is a clever one.

In Minecraft, a Daylight Sensor is crafted using Glass, Nether Quartz and Wood Slabs. In the real world of electronics, a common type of light sensor is called a CdS cell, or CdS photoresistor. They have historically used a material called cadmium sulfide to measure the amount of light falling on them. Cadmium is a toxic metal so the use of CdS cells is now very much restricted and other materials have taken their place.

But yes, cadmium sulfide is found as a mineral in the natural world. The most common of these is called greenockite, and here are the obligatory photos:

In Minecraft, Prismarine is found in underwater ocean monuments. It's a building stone for sure, but so far in the game we've never seen where prismarine actually comes from, whether it's something that the sea creatures made or if it's something they mined from somewhere under the ocean that hasn't made it to the game yet.

So, what can we match this to in the real world? I'm afraid to say there's only one real option, and it's another variety of that ugly beryl we talked about before. It's aquamarine.


It forms hexagonal prisms so the name 'Prismarine' really does suit this stuff.



Now I'll let you into a little secret: aquamarine is my least favorite mineral.


Well, yes maybe, but the photos I've shown you are some of the best. More often it's a very pale blue and the shape of the crystals is a plain hexagonal prism, not very exciting at all - at least to me (we all have our likes and dislikes). So I'm all for taking all the aquamarines and using them to build undersea monuments!

What are my favorites? Well, have a look through our past Photo of the Day gallery to see some great minerals (and locations minerals come from!) that we've posted.

There's just one final question.


Well, a large percentage, maybe the majority*, of the world's minerals come from huge open-cast (also called open pit) mines.


To get an idea of the scale of a large mine, here is an open-cast mine we visited recently in Russia:



If you want to read more about our collecting trip to Russia, see the following articles:
1. Part 1!
2. Part 2!

But most mines are much smaller and are actually very similar to the sort of holes you'd dig in Minecraft (except it's a LOT harder to dig through real rock - trust me!)

Smaller mines often have a different "anatomy" than large mines. Instead of large holes open to the surface, small mines are made up of intertwined tunnels and chambers (there's a lot of very specific words for different types of tunnels and chambers, but we'll talk about that another day).


Here are some scenes from a couple of smaller mines I have visited:



Read more about some of my underground adventures in the following articles:
1. Fluorite mine, UK!
2. Fluorite mine, UK! (same mine, later visit)
3. Dioptase mine, Kazakhstan!

I hope you've enjoyed reading this, and if you want to see more minerals or learn more then stick around and explore our site. Maybe you can find somewhere near where you live to go out exploring to find minerals of your own. We'll help where we can!

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