Block of the Month: Nether Quartz Ore

The Nether is hotter than a ghast’s armpit (where is that located btw?) and not much more safe to hang around in. So players don’t generally like to spend a lot of time there – darting back into their portal the very instant a piglin looks at them the wrong way. To get them to stick around a bit longer, our developers were forced to pack the Nether full of goodies – like Nether quartz ore – our block of the month.

Nether quartz ore wasn’t added in the Nether Update as you might expect. No no, this special stuff has actually been a part of Minecraft for much longer – since the Redstone Update all the way back in 2013. That’s the same update that added activator rails, for those keeping track. I know you are, esteemed reader.

To no one’s great surprise, you’ll find Nether quartz ore in the Nether. It’s all over the place! It generates in little blobs in netherrack – and it’s twice as likely to generate in a particular chunk in basalt deltas, because they have less Netherrack. Mine it with a regular pickaxe to get Nether quartz, with a fortune-enchanted pickaxe to get lots of Nether quartz, or with a silk touch-enchanted pickaxe to get the block itself, which can be smelted into Nether quartz later.

Once you’ve got some Nether quartz, you can craft it into a whole range of things. The prettiest are blocks of quartz – which make for stunning buildings, but it’s also useful for making diorite, and granite. A plethora of sensor-related redstone gadgets need it too, like daylight detectors, observers and redstone comparators.

Image credit: Didier Descouens // CC BY-SA 4.0

Outside of Minecraft, quartz is used in all kinds of things. I’ll quote the inimitable Tom Stone on the subject:

The equivalent of quartz ore in the real world would probably be granite, which is chock-full of the stuff. But it’s also common in sedimentary rocks like sandstone and shale, and metamorphic rocks like schist, gneiss. Nice. It mostly crystallizes out of molten magma – with those crystals occasionally getting really big. The largest single crystal ever found measured 6.1m x 1.5m x 1.5m, and weighed almost 40 tonnes.

Luckily, you don’t need to worry about weight when carting your treasures back out of the Nether to your base. So pack your pockets with quartz – you’ll never know when you’ll need it!