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Minecraft has tons of natural resources that help the player in many different ways.
Players can find plants to make dyes or for decoration, mobs like animals, spiders, skeletons, zombies, and creepers for experience points, food, and drops, and entities like trees for their wood and other resources. However, one of the most important natural resources in the game is its collection of ores.
Gold is among the eight primary ores found in Minecraft's overworld dimension. While resources can also be found in the nether in gold nuggets and blocks, a major chunk of the game's gold deposits lies in the overworld.
Gold ore can be transferred to a furnace to be smelted into gold ingots. Gold ingots are used to make tons of items, including weapons, armor, golden apples, clocks, and tools.
Making armor sets, tools, and weapons is something iron, gold, diamond, and netherite share. However, gold is often called the weakest out of all the ores in the game. This article will explore and try to list the reasons for this notion.
Gold: Is it really the weakest ore in Minecraft?
The most significant difference that gold items and gear pieces have compared to entities made from other resources is that they have significantly lesser durability, and gold tools and weapons have lower attack power.
A golden pickaxe, for example, is a highly unpopular choice. This is primarily due to its comparison to a tool that has 5 minutes' worth of usage potential at the beginning of a player's save: the wooden pickaxe.
A golden pickaxe can mine 32 blocks, while a wooden pickaxe can mine 59 blocks, which is almost double compared to the golden pickaxe.
The same statistics hold true for other pieces of gear. A golden sword can only hit a mob 32 takes before breaking, a golden hoe can only break or “till” 32 blocks of dirt, and a golden axe can only chop down 32 blocks of wood.
This is one of the reasons that gold is almost always ignored by players when it comes to progressing in the game’s survival mode. Survival progression in ores and related resources usually takes the following route: Wood > stone > iron > diamond > netherite.
Another possible reason for gold having a lesser amount of durability in Minecraft could be that it references the real-life properties of gold.
Gold is known to be quite malleable (it can be hit and bent quite easily), meaning that a gold tool would not be viable for hitting solid stone and ores like diamond and iron and blocks like obsidian.
The biggest reason for the unpopularity of gold in Minecraft remains the lack of durability that golden tools, weapons, and armor sets suffer from. It doesn’t make sense for most players to keep crafting more and more tools and weapons. Therefore, they prefer to use stone, iron, and diamond (at later stages).
However, gold gear does have a couple of advantages as well. Gold tools have a significantly higher mining speed and are prone to securing better and more effective enchantments. This fact can be showcased in the availability of enchanted golden weapons, armor pieces, items, and tools from ruined portal chests.
