Best Y Level for Redstone and Lapis Lazuli

The answers

Redstone: feet at Y −58. Same layer as diamonds. Lapis: feet at Y −2. Right where stone turns into deepslate. Both numbers come from counting every block the game places in the 32×32 chunks around 0, 0 on seeds 0 and 123456789 (Java 26.3, 1,024 chunks each), then checking which tunnel height sees the most of each ore in its four visible layers.

Read that bottom row again. A diamond tunnel at Y −58 already gets about four redstone ore per 100 blocks, five times what you'd find anywhere else. If you're strip mining for diamonds, you're a redstone miner too, so nobody needs a separate redstone trip.

Redstone: dig to the floor

Redstone ore stops at Y 15. Above that there's none at all; a Y 16 tunnel through our whole test area saw 10 redstone ore on one seed and 7 on the other, all of them in the floor at Y 15. Below Y 15 it comes in two batches: one spread evenly from Y 15 down to the bedrock, and a second one that keeps getting stronger the deeper you go.

Add them up and the bottom of the world is stuffed. Seed 0 had 37,296 redstone ore blocks in the area and 42% of them sat in the lowest 16 layers, Y −64 to −49. Seed 123456789 had 36,520, with 44% in those same layers. The best tunnel was feet at Y −59 on seed 0 and Y −58 on the other seed. Go any lower and bedrock starts eating your floor and ceiling.

Each ore drops four or five dust without Fortune, so the 4 ore per 100 blocks at Y −58 is about 18 dust per 100 blocks of tunnel. That's a lot. A full stack of dust every 350 blocks or so. Most players end up with chests of the stuff from diamond mining alone.

Lapis: the ore that hides from cavers

Lapis is the odd one out. It has two batches too: a regular one between Y −32 and 32 that peaks at Y 0, and a buried one spread evenly from Y −64 to 64. Buried means any block that would touch air is thrown away, every time. Not sometimes, every time.

The buried batch is the big one. On seed 0 it made 16,886 of the 25,820 lapis blocks in the area, and on seed 123456789 it made 15,751 of 24,220. That's 65% on both seeds, and none of it can ever be seen from a cave. Only 1.4% and 1.7% of all lapis touched air. If you've ever spent an hour caving and come back with three lapis, now you know why.

So lapis is a tunnel ore. Feet at Y −2 won on both seeds (1,705 and 1,616 blocks in the four layers), with Y −5 to 0 right behind. That height sits on the peak of the regular batch and in the middle of the buried one. It's below Y 0, so you're in deepslate, which mines slower than stone. Feet at Y 0 found about 10% less, if that bugs you.

Each lapis ore drops four to nine lapis, so 1.3 ore per 100 blocks is about eight lapis per 100 blocks. One enchanting session at a table costs one to three lapis per enchantment, which means a 300 block tunnel keeps you enchanting for a long time. Lapis only needs a stone pickaxe, by the way.

One tunnel for both?

Not really. At Y −2 you'd get lapis, plenty of iron (3.2 to 3.4 per 100) and about one gold, but redstone is down to 0.8. At Y −58 you get redstone, a bit of gold, diamonds, and lapis drops to 0.4. Pick the one you need more. Our honest take: tunnel Y −58 for diamonds and redstone, and grab lapis from a dedicated Y −2 branch when your enchanting table runs dry. Or skip the branch and trade for it; clerics sell lapis.

On seed 123456789 the closest lapis to spawn is a five-block deposit at 52, −5, −52 (Y −6 to −4), 13 blocks away, and a buried six-block one at 74, −1, −61. On seed 0 there's a three-block redstone deposit at −30, −58, −4, four blocks from spawn, and a ten-block one from the deep batch at −49, −53, −2. Every seed has deposits like that right under spawn. The ore finder just tells you where to put the pickaxe.

Accuracy, versions and Bedrock

Compared block by block with worlds the official Java server generated, 97.8% of the redstone the finder showed was real and it found 99.7% of the game's redstone. Lapis: 99.0% and 99.6%.

Before 1.18, redstone sat between Y 0 and 16 and lapis peaked around Y 16. Old chunks keep those rules, so pick the version your chunks were generated in and the finder follows. The ore levels page lists every range by version. The finder is Java only: Bedrock uses a different random generator for ores, so we don't have Bedrock deposits or Bedrock numbers.