Learn where to find diamond ore and how to craft diamond items in Minecraft.
How to Find Diamonds
Diamonds can be found in a chest or by mining diamond ore.
Chests that contain Diamonds
Minecraft chests that can contain diamonds include:
- Shipwreck Treasure Chests
- Stronghold Altar Chests
- Village Toolsmith Chests
- Village Weaponsmith Chests
- Fortress Chests
- Jungle Temple Chests
- Desert Temple Chest
- Chest Minecarts
- Buried Treasure Chests
- End City Chests
How to find Diamond Ore
Diamond ore is a rare spawn, only around 1/10th of 1 percent of blocks are diamond ores. Diamond ore can only be found between block levels 0 and 16.
Since Diamond Ore is only found on a few block levels, you need to know your block level when mining for diamonds. On Java editions of Minecraft you can press F3 to show the debug screen. The Debug screen provides lots of useful information including your block level which is the Y value of the displayed “XYZ coordinates” as shown below.
For Bedrock / Mobile editions of Minecraft, you need to dig down to bedrock which is level 0 and count up block levels from level 0 at bedrock.
Concentrate your efforts around levels 8 to 12 which are the best levels for mining diamonds. After a few minutes, you should find a vein of diamond ore between 2-4 ore in size. Each diamond ore will only drop 1 diamond.
Example of Diamond Ore and Diamonds:
Mining Diamonds
Mining diamond ore requires an iron pickaxe or diamond pickaxe. Take several pickaxes with you because you will need to mine a lot of blocks to find enough diamonds to craft diamond armor and other diamond items.
Be careful while mining for diamonds. Lava pools, underground water and dangerous mobs spawn near diamond ore. Take plenty of food and leave non-essential and valuable items back at your base.
To increase the drop rate of diamonds from ore, use a Fortune enchantment.
Crafting Diamond Items
Crafting a complete set of Diamond armor requires 24 diamonds. A diamond sword requires 2 diamonds and a diamond pickaxe requires 3 diamonds. Thus, you will need to mine 29 total diamonds to outfit your Minecraft character with diamond armor, a diamond sword, and a diamond pickaxe.
Diamond Blocks
A diamond block is made from 9 diamonds with a crafting table.
Diamond blocks can also be found enclosed in lava or obsidian blocks in a Woodland mansion. See video below.
Diamond blocks can be used to create beacons that grant player status effects including speed, haste, strength, jump boost, resistance, and regeneration.
Smelting Diamond Ore
To smelt diamond ore into diamond place the ore into a furnace or blast furnace with a fuel source such as coal.