[Hello, gentle reader. As I finish up the editing of my book (coming soon to kindle stores in your area), I needed a distraction piece to clear my mind. Et voila.]
Netherite! Its inclusion in Minecraft in mid-2020 was, rather obviously, a game-changer. Since Minecraft’s inception, the most valuable material in it was the humble diamond. People fought over them, mourned their loss in lava, and went to extreme lengths to hoard them. Diamond blocks were the status symbol sine qua non of the accomplished Minecrafter – they demonstrated a player’s grit. Defeating The Wither and building a beacon powered by a pyramid of diamonds was, to some, the whole point of the game.
But diamonds, unlike emeralds, were valuable as more than just a sign of wealth. Diamond armour, diamond swords and diamond pickaxes were more than just status symbols: they were essential items for the hardy traveller who wanted to defeat the Ender Dragon, an Ocean Monument, or really anything more aggressive than a Creeper. Some items could only be mined with a diamond pickaxe, like Obsidian. Diamonds, like gold, had intrinsic value. Unlike gold, they also had utility.
Apart from Diamond Horse Armour, which is just pointless.
Then came the Nether Update. In one fell swoop the entire structure of status symbols changed. Diamond was suddenly relegated to a second-stringer: Netherite became where it’s at. A dense, hard, darkly lustrous metal, Netherite is both incredibly strong and fiendishly difficult to get hold of. It’s derived from Ancient Debris, an extremely rare ore. According to the Minecraft Wiki,
“As of Java Edition 1.16.4, on average they generate 1.56 ores per chunk. Given this number, and that there are 65536 blocks in a chunk (16 * 256 *16), there is approximately a 0.002% chance that any randomly selected block will be an ancient debris block.”
And, of course, Ancient Debris is usually – and ‘usually’ is clearly a relative term – found in the bottom of the Nether hellscape, underneath floating screaming monsters that shoot fireballs, aggressive pig-men, more-aggressive undead pig-men, actual pigs that fight you, skeletons and unanticipated lakes of fast-moving lava. Getting diamonds is comparatively easy.
Once you’ve got four pieces of Ancient Debris, they can be smelted into Netherite Scrap and alloyed with gold to make a Netherite Ingot. Then you can bond this to an existing diamond tool or piece of armour.
In short, Netherite is super hardcore.
Some gamers – especially ones who’ve been playing Minecraft for a while – still adhere to the idea that diamonds are more intrinsically valuable, because they’re pretty and have greater raw utility – you can’t make a Netherite pickaxe, just add Netherite to a diamond one. This is a fair point. However, to a wonk like me who likes spinning nerdy theories (see my Tom Bombadil post) and who positively thrills at metallurgy, Netherite and Ancient Debris pose an interesting problem which gives further depth to Minecraft.
I’ll explain. Most ores in Minecraft are analogous to something that exists in the real world. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, of course, because this is a magic world full of weird and usually lethal things. But gold is gold, emeralds are emeralds and diamonds are diamonds. Things may not always be analogous – obsidian in Minecraft and real-world obsidian bear only a passing resemblance to each other – but they are comparable to one degree or another. And because Minecraft is a game, it has its own internal logic that suggests – but doesn’t definitively state – that Ancient Debris and Netherite are comparable to something that exists in the real world. I’m not going so far off the beaten track that there aren’t a thousand YouTube videos on this subject. It’s possible that Ancient Debris and Netherite could correspond to something that exists in the real world, and – if that holds true – it might shed some light on the hidden logic of the game and help its players world-build to their own satisfaction.
Let’s go over what we know. Ancient Debris is a rare, dark-brown scaly-looking block that, according to Minecraft lore, is the remnants of the mining activities of the Piglins.
“Pure netherite—the strongest, most durable material in Minecraft—is no more. Piglins mined it all out. Now the only way to obtain it is by salvaging netherite scrap from ancient debris.”
Ancient Debris is one of the hardest materials in the game, comparable to Obsidian. It resists explosions, lava, and fire, and these facts indicate it is both dense and has a very high melting point. It’s clearly reactive, as it doesn’t appear in its elemental form (as opposed to diamonds, for example).
Using the periodic table as a guide, this narrows the compound form (Ancient Debris) and the elemental form (Netherite) down to a very narrow band of the Transition Metals, specifically the four metals that exist between Hafnium and Iridium: Tantalum, Tungsten, Rhenium and Osmium. All four have extremely high melting points – Tungsten has a melting point of 3695K, followed by Rhenium, Osmium and Tantalum – and all of them are dense, hard, lustrous metals.
Two of these ores can be discounted based on their appearance alone: Rhenium is unbelievably rare and usually only found in Molybdenite, which has a texture and colour similar to graphite, and Osmium – a white, reflective metal – usually appears only in alloys bonded to Iridium and Platinum.
That leaves Tantalum and Tungsten. This is where it gets interesting: of these two, we have to exclude one based on induction. You may feel free to disagree with my conclusion that Netherite is most certainly not Tungsten, despite it having the highest melting point of all known elements (this is not strictly true: Carbon melts at 4000K, but only under very specific pressures – in general, Carbon sublimes directly from solid to gas).
Tungsten can be excluded because of its physical properties – it simply doesn’t make very good armour. As anyone who’s ever bought a cheap gold-plated tungsten ring knows, polycrystalline Tungsten has a nasty habit of shattering when it encounters blunt force – dropped on, say, a tiled floor, Tungsten is liable to fly apart. In this form it’s difficult to work, as the multiple crystals interfere with each other and form stress points throughout the metal, making forging it difficult – most cheap Tungsten rings are made by ‘sintering’ instead. Monocrystalline Tungsten is actually a splendid material, workable and ductile, but it is extraordinarily difficult to produce – you can’t easily make it with a furnace.
We’re left with Tantalum. And, I’ll admit, I’ve slightly weighted the argument in Tantalum’s favour, because I’m one of those nerds who has favourite metals, and it’s quite simply one of my most favourite metals ever.
Tantalum, which you might not have heard of, is very cool. If you’re viewing this post on a smartphone, you can thank Tantalum: it’s used in high-powered capacitors in portable technology, and this by itself makes it a material of immense value in the modern world. In its pure form, it’s a dense, ductile, lustrous dark metal. In its ore form, it’s often found in striking reddish-grey organic shapes. Look – let’s just do a set of side-by-side photo comparisons.
I don’t want to sound too much like Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon, but do you see?
Material Stresses
If we accept my (admittedly wonky) conclusion, it lends itself to some satisfying theories. Tantalum is dense, ductile, extremely resistant to heat and chemical attacks, and has a very high electrical capacitance. In the world of Minecraft, these properties would make its use in armour and tools extremely interesting. I’ve already noted that Netherite is added to pre-existing diamond tools, adding to their strength and making them fire-resistant.
Tantalum has extraordinary capacitance – the ability of a material to store a charge. This is also true of diamonds, and if we just start postulating wildly at this point, we could draw some comparison between stored charge and Enchantments, since they both rely on the input and subsequent manipulation of work, which functionally describes charge. However, I’m not Big Brain enough to make that argument without being shot down by people who actually understand electricity.
I will instead settle for more obvious physical properties. Diamonds are extremely hard, which makes their use in tools obvious, but an oft-overlooked quality of diamonds is that they’re very brittle. This is one of the reasons why diamonds are expensive – in the cutting and shaping, one tap in the wrong place can reduce your priceless gem to glittering fragments. When Joseph Asscher correctly cleaved the priceless Cullinan Diamond for the Crown Jewels in 1908, he is reported to have immediately fainted.
Tantalum, by comparison, is both hard and ductile. This makes it – and metals in general – superior to non-metals in all sorts of ways. The difference in the atomic structure between something brittle, like a diamond, and something flexible, like a metal, is the ability of atomic bonds to absorb energy without the bonds becoming weaker. Diamond is harder than metal, but its atomic structure can flex less. Hardness has to be matched by flexibility for the material to be useful in tools and armour.
A Tantalum (read: Netherite) pickaxe will absorb some of the energy of the impact due to deformation instead of transmitting it back along the handle to the holder. The same is true for armour: Tantalum, being softer than diamond, will deform more as a result of impact than diamond armour, which is more likely to shatter – or transmit kinetic energy to the wearer.
I would like to make the argument that electrical capacitance and kinetic capacitance are the same thing, but this is the point in Physics where my brain makes left-turn signals. I know that gravitational potential energy and electric potential energy are quite analogous, but I dropped Physics as soon as I could in High School and so can’t follow the equations after F=MA. I tried to look at what would happen if you allowed Tantalum with Gold in the real world – as that’s what you do with Netherite Scrap in Minecraft, and while I feel it would result in a more ductile alloy I couldn’t find anything beyond discussions on quantized capacitance in cubic alloy structures – in German, no less. So, uh, no thanks.
But What of Piglins
Piglins are a bit of a sore spot for me when it comes to Minecraft. They are, notionally, a hostile species that inhabits the Nether – pig-creatures (or anime girls in pig hats, depending on who you believe) who take exception to anyone not wearing or offering gold. They have structures they inhabit, they barter, seem to have an independent social structure, and – as we have already seen – are responsible for the dearth of Ancient Debris in the Nether. Piglins appear to be functionally intelligent, or more intelligent at least than Villagers, Pillagers or any of the other pseudo-human NPC inhabitants of Minecraft. They exhibit human-like emotions, especially with regards to Zombie Piglins. I do not feel good about having to kill them and try to avoid it.
Piglins, Mojang tells us, removed most of the Netherite from the Nether. The question remains: why? Piglins don’t wear Netherite. They don’t trade it. It’s not built into their society. The only place you find it is in Bastions, and then only in tiny amounts.
This leads me to assume that when the Piglins mined Ancient Debris, it wasn’t for the Netherite. Piglins care about gold. It’s the only thing they actively hoard and protect, and they get mightily cross when you try to steal it. So why did they mine it out?
Thankfully, science comes to the rescue again.
This is Columbite. In the real world, Tantalum is most often found in veins of what’s usually called Coltan, short of Columbite-Tantalite. As you can see, Columbite, which is the world’s main source of Niobium, is yellow, lustrous, and obviously similar to gold. Columbite and Tantalite are usually found together in various combinations, ranging from the black and gold of Coltan to the shiny loveliness of Columbite and the odd scaly black-brown of Tantalite.
In the real world, Niobium is valuable but not particularly useful, most often found in hypoallergenic jewellery. My theory is that the Piglins, motivated by their love of gold, accidentally mined most of the Coltan, depriving the Nether of a relatively useless Niobium compound and the far more valuable Tantalum compound. Once they discovered that what they’d mined was most emphatically not gold, they threw it away.
This means, possibly, that somewhere in the Nether is a vast dumping-ground of unprocessed Netherite, just waiting to be discovered. It is waiting for a brave ethnolinguist, who will decipher the snarls and grunts of the Piglins and learn where they dump their rubbish – there’s gold in them thar hills.
James Rayneau 