Minecraft wiki entry for Mining, associated text: Also known as cave hunting, caving, or spelunking, cave mining is simply the practice of exploring caves and extracting the ores found on its walls, floors and ceilings. Exploring a large cave system almost always results in finding large quantities of ore, though players probably will find bigger blobs of ore unexposed, because cave generation sometimes cuts off the blob generation. Cave mining has a high return on investment, yielding more ore per unit time and requiring fewer tools (less pickaxe and shovel durability is lost mining stone, dirt, and gravel) than other approaches.