The Bug:
Ores have lower blast resistances than stone, despite taking longer to mine or even requiring higher tools.
Steps to Reproduce:
Summon a large block of stone and diamond ores.
/fill ~1 ~ ~1 ~9 ~5 ~9 minecraft:diamond_ore
/fill ~-1 ~ ~-1 ~-9 ~5 ~-9 minecraft:stonePlace some TNT on top and in the center of the two big blocks of stone and diamond ores. See setup.png
Ignite both blocks of TNT.
❌ → Notice how more of the diamond ores are destroyed compared to the stone, therefore indicating that ores have lower blast resistances than stone, despite taking longer to mine or even requiring higher tools.
Expected Behavior:
The expected behavior would be that ores would have higher or equal blast resistances compared to stone, as they take longer to mine.
Original Description
When mining an ore block, it becomes obvious that they take noticably longer to mine with any pickaxe than normal stone would. In addition, several ores require high-tier pickaxes to be properly mined at all.
This increased hardness, however, is paradoxically not reflected when it comes to explosions. In the image examples, TNT is blown up on cubes of stone, coal ore and diamond ore, and contrary to what would be expected from mining them directly, much larger craters were left in the ores than were left in raw stone. It would be expected that ores would have higher blast resistances than stone, resulting in smaller craters, to reflect their increased mining toughness.
I'm aware this has been the case in game for over a decade, but it still seems off, and contradicts more modern changes such as MC-94013.
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Comments 5
I can confirm that this is an issue. Also affects 1.17.1. Just in case the provided information isn't clear, here are some extra details.
The Bug:
Ores have lower blast resistances than stone, despite taking longer to mine or even requiring higher tools.
Steps to Reproduce:
Summon a large block of stone and diamond ores.
/fill ~1 ~ ~1 ~9 ~5 ~9 minecraft:diamond_ore
/fill ~-1 ~ ~-1 ~-9 ~5 ~-9 minecraft:stonePlace some TNT on top and in the center of the two big blocks of stone and diamond ores. See
Ignite both blocks of TNT.
→ ❌ Notice how more of the diamond ores are destroyed compared to the stone, therefore indicating that ores have lower blast resistances than stone, despite taking longer to mine or even requiring higher tools.
Expected Behavior:
The expected behavior would be that ores would have higher or equal blast resistances compared to stone, as they take longer to mine.
All ores (stone, deepslate, and even nether quartz/gold) have a blast resistance value of 3. That seems wildly inconsistent with most stone variants, deepslate, netherrack, and the individual resource blocks, which all have blast resistance of 6, except netherrack at 0.4 and quartz blocks at 0.8. Even cobblestone and cobbled deepslate have blast resistance 6, so you can't really argue that the mix of ore and base material weakens the combination.
Why should hardness and blast resistance be the same, or even proportional? Otherwise there isn't any need for two separate attributes. Blast resistance could simply be tied to hardness.
It makes sense that something hard and brittle would have less blast resistance than something just as hard and tough (not brittle).
In the real world, hardness is resistance to deformation, and brittleness is how easily something fractures when subjected to deformation forces. Blast resistance is simply how well something can absorb energy. Usually energy is absorbed by deformation or dissipated by breaking into small pieces after sufficient deformation.
Real world example: On the Moh's hardness scale, glass and quartz are harder than iron, but glass and quartz are more brittle than iron. Iron, therefore, would resist blasts better, by deforming plastically to absorb energy.
Minecraft has its own hardness scale that doesn't really mirror real world properties. However, it makes perfect sense to me that cobblestone (a rather soft stone) would have a high blast resistance. I would say, the softer the substance, the higher its blast resistance should be.
Is this also the case for the deepslate and nether ores, or only "normal" ores?