Welcome to c/WouldYouRather, where we present you with the toughest, most ridiculous choices you never knew you had to make! Would you rather have a third arm that's only useful for picking your nose, or be able to talk to animals but only if they're wearing hats? Yeah, it's that kind of vibe. Come for the absurdity, stay because you've clearly got nothing better to do with your life.
Rules:
The returns on grinding Minecraft diamonds would be linear and have a practical cap on earnings.
$100,000 invested for one year would (likely) see an ROI of ~10%, so $110,000 by the end of the first year, and would grow exponentially.
Give me the $100,000.
I mean.... The cash is still the right choice, but you can invest the Minecraft earnings too
This made me curious, and while I could have done the long-form math, I’m about to go to bed, so I asked a popular LLM:
To estimate the number of diamonds one could mine in vanilla Minecraft for 40 hours per week over a year, we need to consider a few factors:
- Diamonds per hour: This varies based on mining efficiency, methods used (e.g., branch mining, strip mining), and luck.
- Hours per week: 40 hours.
- Weeks per year: 52 weeks.
Estimation of Diamonds per Hour
A reasonable average estimate, assuming effective branch mining techniques and using the Fortune III enchantment, is approximately 10 diamonds per hour. This estimate can vary significantly depending on mining strategies and in-game conditions, but it's a good baseline for our calculation.
Calculation
- Hours per week: 40
- Weeks per year: 52
- Total hours per year: 40 x 52 = 2080
- Diamonds per hour: 10 (average estimate)
Now, multiplying the total hours by the average number of diamonds mined per hour:
Total diamonds = 2080 x 10 = 20,800
Conclusion
Mining efficiently in vanilla Minecraft for 40 hours per week over a year, one could mine approximately 20,800 diamonds.
20,800 x $1.50 = $31,250
This yield would never match the returns of the $100,000 up front.
This may even be worse since the LLM is saying 10 diamonds per hour with the fortune 3 enchantment. That being said, is this true? I haven't played minecraft for a while and 10 diamonds per hour seems really low with no enchantments. Sure, there's more or less an upper limit to how many diamonds you can get in a map, forcing you to have to generate a new map and rebuilding your supplies (which slows you down) but for the most part, i can imagine you get a lot of diamonds in between worlds.
I honestly do not know. With some research I am certain I could find some upper and lower bounds, mostly based on the average prevalence of diamond ore, block-break-time, and time spent. The magnitude is probably correct, but the actual value would probably vary greatly.
E: And we haven’t even considered opportunity cost! If we use the LLM estimate, 10 diamond per hour equates to $15/hr. Awful, and you couldn’t even rest or your average goes down.
E2: And since this is vanilla MC, you would have to spend a great portion of time mining for resources just to be able to mine, it’s kinda like the rocket fuel problem. You’d necessarily have to spend time getting wood, coal, and iron. All this drives down the per-hour earnings dramatically.
Alright, so I got some sleep, and found a page talking about efficient mining techniques. I was right that the magnitude would probably be the same, I fed some info (https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Mining) to the LLM and got this:
From the discussion in the ingested content, it is estimated that the maximum efficiency for mining diamonds is about 1.7% of blocks mined being diamond ore. If you can mine approximately 2500 blocks per hour with a stone pickaxe, you can expect to find around 42.5 diamonds in one hour. This number can vary based on factors like mining technique and enchantments used on tools.
~$132,600 at the end of the first year. This still does not account for inefficiencies like having to stop to make torches, and other issues, but is much better.
At the end of the day, it would still be better to nab the $100,000 up front, invest it, and then you can still go and do other, more time-profitable things.
I'm not certain where it gets that 2500 blocks per hour which make it difficult to interpret (does that already assume getting supplies?) and it become more inefficient because I believe cave exploring is more efficient than straight mining for Diamond. Regardless, 132,000 is not bad actually.
Since I see this as, whether getting 100k now (taking into account 10% interest rate on that money per year, and the fact you can work a job) vs 132k per year in mining diamonds, I made the following table:
It basically shows that if your goal is to make more money within 15 years, then the question becomes, do you make over 100k per year? If you do not, then within 15 years making diamond mining your job makes a lot of sense. Bonus, you will never be out of a job or get fired. If you can make over 100k a year or you want to make more money sooner (want to retire soon) then it starts to make more sense to just take the 100k
Fascinating study, thank you for making this table. I don't know what the mining assumptions are in terms of speed. You're right that $132,000 is nothing to thumb your nose at. It's certainly really grindy, but extra returns can be made by investing what you don't spend. I think I would still struggle to find myself mining every day of the week for 15 years though!
oof, it looks like you calculated 132k with a 60 hour work week. I guess that's not exactly the worst, but at 40 hour work weeks you're making 88,400 USD. I think that's still not too bad but it definitely changes the math quite a bit. if you're living almost anywhere in the world except for the top 10 countries in income, 88,400 USD per year is pretty good.
It is quite unfortunate that I've never played minecaft, so I'll have to go for immediate money without a doubt.
Also, if you have to play the game for it ... thats just a job at that point. I'll take free money thank you very much
Ok, here's what you do. You dig up ~20 diamonds to start. Create a new world, open up a server and pay for a bunch of fortnite buck giftcards in exchange for set rates of diamond nodes people scout out for you. Only log in on the weekends, mine it up, and pay the children in their v-bucks while you get your real money. Rinse and repeat.
The children yearn for the mines.
The Minecraft one is just an hourly wage job with an, at best, just ok pay rate and mind-boggling monotony...
I'd go with the former. The latter is literally just a job. An extremely repetitive and pointless job. And from what I can tell from spawn probabilities after considering the time you'd need to spend playing the game enough to keep mining, we're only talking 3 or 4 diamond ore blocks per hour max so like 100k annually as a full time job. You could do it as a part time side gig but by the time you hit the 100k from choice 1 you'd be chasing the compound interest.
Edit: oh it says $1.5 not $15. Make that hell no then
I found a video where a player mines for 10 hours, using fortune, and slightly outdated techniques, on an older version of Minecraft. They got 535 diamonds. Assuming fortune III gives 2.2x, that's 24 per hour. With the modern technique, you get 30% more exposed surface per block mined, but because most pockets of diamond have multiple chances to be exposed, this only really nets 20% more per time spent (roughly).
Also, my understanding is that the latest version spawns diamonds nearly twice as much. That's roughly $75 per hour of tedious activity, with only very slight possibility for improvement.
If you make anywhere near $75 per hour, it's probably not worth as much as the cash up front, because continuing in your line of work can net pretty solid gains. If you don't, probably spend a few hours with an efficiency V diamond pickaxe, and sanity check my numbers before deciding. Use the dive+crouch movement to dig 1 block high tunnels, and change your graphics settings so you can work in the dark. If it works out, I guess take the diamond mining job, and figure out what you can do to stave off carpal tunnel.