Where to find iron?
How deep do you have to be to find iron?
I am trying to find iron because my iron pickaxe broke.
I have tried digging straight down and branching out but all I could find was coal.
2 Answers
According the the Minecraft Wiki, iron can be found anywhere from above the bedrock layer to near sea level, usually appearing in a 2 x 2 x 2 vein with a very common appearance with about 77 ore blocks per chunk:
Iron occurs only around from bedrock to slightly above sea level (layers 1-63). However, almost all of the iron ore will be at the lower levels. On average, there are about 77 iron ores per chunk.
Veins can vary in size, but the most common is 2×2×2. Iron always comes in veins of 4 to 10 unless dirt, gravel, a cave, or another ore overlapped into it. Each block in the vein, which otherwise would be stone, has a random chance of being iron ore instead.
Exploring caves or mineshafts will usually have a ton of iron in them, as well as coal to smelt the iron in furnaces.
Finding iron depends on the level you dig at. Generally Iron will not spawn above level 64. If you were on PC you could find your level by pressing the F3 key and looking at the y coordinate, but I don't think you can access the debug screen on the xbox version. As JonK mentioned Iron is usually as common as coal, but that's at the lower levels. Near the higher levels you will find tons of coal but not much iron. Strip mining is an effective technique to find ore in vanilla, but without an iron pickaxe it may be a nuisance. Normally in the early game I would just explore mine shafts and would usually find coal in the beginning but as I went deeper I would find ores like iron and even redstone.
