Gold Mining: Y Levels, Badlands and the Nether

The quick ranking

If there's a badlands biome anywhere you can reach, tunnel at Y 40 inside it. If there isn't, go to Y −16. And if you're in the Nether anyway, a Y 15 tunnel pays you in gold nuggets while you hunt debris. Here's what each one found per 100 blocks of 1×2 tunnel (counting the tunnel, both walls, the floor and the ceiling) on Java 26.3.

Ingots assume no Fortune: one raw gold per overworld ore, and an average of four nuggets per nether gold ore (it drops two to six, and nine nuggets make an ingot).

Normal gold: Y −16

Outside badlands, gold lives below Y 32 and gets thicker the deeper you go until about Y −16, then thins out again. There's also a small extra batch spread flat across the very bottom, Y −64 to −48. Across the 1,024 chunks around 0, 0 we counted 27,071 gold ore blocks on seed 0 and 25,703 on seed 123456789, so about 25 per chunk, which is a third of what iron gets.

The best tunnel heights came out at feet Y −15 on seed 0 and Y −23 on seed 123456789, but the whole stretch from Y −24 to −14 was within 10% on both. We'd pick Y −16: it's the classic number, it's on the peak for most seeds, and it keeps you well clear of the lava that floods the deepest caves.

Diamond miners get gold for free, by the way. A diamond tunnel at Y −58 still turned up 0.9 to 1 gold ore per 100 blocks, thanks to that flat bottom batch. A tunnel at Y 12 for iron got only 0.5 to 0.6.

Badlands: where gold stops being rare

Badlands (plain, wooded and eroded) get a whole extra gold batch that no other biome has. It's placed from Y 32 upward, but it can only replace stone, so in practice it stops where the ground stops. In our patches almost all of it ended up between Y 32 and 79. We found two big badlands areas and counted 16×16 chunk patches of them.

That's well over twice the gold per chunk. And because the extra batch is spread between Y 32 and 79, the best tunnel sits right in it: feet at Y 42 came out on top on both seeds, and anything from Y 40 to 44 was close. We ran the tunnel test at Y 40. Under the badlands, the normal Y −16 layer is exactly as good as anywhere else (1.5 per 100 blocks on both seeds), so the extra gold is all up high.

Bonus: badlands are also where mineshafts poke out of the ground. Loot a shaft and mine gold on the same trip. One thing to know about the finder here: it marks most badlands gold as Likely rather than Exact (59% on seed 8675309123456789, 70% on seed 0), because those deposits sit close to the surface, where the terrain model approximates the badlands' terracotta layers. Treat those as very likely, not guaranteed.

Nether gold: better than it looks

Nether gold ore is everywhere in netherrack from Y 10 to 117, and the basalt deltas get their own extra batch. Our counts: 59,407 blocks in 1,024 Nether chunks on seed 0 and 45,164 on seed 123456789. That's way more blocks than overworld gold. The catch is the drop. Each block gives two to six nuggets, so roughly 2.2 ores per ingot.

Where to dig? Feet somewhere in Y 10 to 17 came out best on both seeds, because below the lava sea there's solid netherrack in every direction. That happens to be the ancient debris layer, and that's the real argument for nether gold: you don't mine it for itself, you mine it on the way. A Y 15 debris tunnel picks up 2.3 to 2.5 nether gold ore per 100 blocks, about an ingot's worth of nuggets, and you need four gold ingots for every netherite ingot anyway.

Two warnings. Mining any gold ore, nether gold included, makes nearby piglins angry, gold armour or not. Look around before you swing. And since a lot of nether gold sits in the open (about 7% of it touched air on seed 0, way more than overworld gold), you'll see it on the walls everywhere. Don't chase every speck across lava.

What the gold is for

• Netherite: four gold ingots per netherite ingot. A full netherite kit is nine ingots, so 36 gold.
• Golden carrots: eight nuggets and a carrot each, and the best everyday food in the game. One ingot covers one carrot with a nugget left over.
• Piglin bartering: one ingot per trade, for ender pearls, fire resistance, obsidian and string. This is where badlands gold really pays off.
• Powered rails: six gold ingots, a stick and redstone make six rails.

If you need serious amounts, a gold farm on the Nether roof beats any tunnel. Tunnels are for the first few dozen ingots.

Finder accuracy and other versions

Checked block by block against worlds generated by the official Java server, 96.5% of the gold blocks the ore finder showed were really there, and it found 97.5% of the gold the game placed. For nether gold it was 96.2% and 100%. The finder is Java only; Bedrock places ores with a different random generator, so we have no Bedrock deposits or counts.

The badlands batch is old, it existed long before 1.18, but the heights changed with the 1.18 world height update. Chunks generated before 1.18 follow the old rules, and the finder switches when you pick your version. The ore levels page has the range for each one.