So recently I have been thinking about how the use of gold in Minecraft is very overrated. Many people assume it is good because its gold, isn't it? Well not exactly, in this article, you will find out that our precious yellow stick of butter is not as swag as it is cracked up to be.

The Ore Itself
Gold is rare. Long story short. It is an eye opener as we mine. Admit it, you have always stopped to mine a small gold vine while digging through the earth. Gold is like iron, it must be smelted. So you are using good coal to smelt some gold ore, this article will make you think before you throw it in the furnace next time. Yes, it has a pretty ore and all, and yes it has a good reputation in the real world, but it's purpose serves little. Especially when you get into tools and crafting, which we will ease into right here...

The Golden Pickaxe
One of the most common arguements with gold is its tools and armor. You can craft a bunch of tools in Minecraft using the following: wood, stone, iron, gold, and diamond. Wooden pickaxes mines slow, stone is a bit of an upgrade from wood but can mine iron, iron is a lot faster, stronger, and can mine every other ore in the game, diamond is very fast, extremely durable, and is used to mine obsidian, and then there's gold. Golden pickaxes only take 33 hits. Yes, i said 33. However, its one benifit is that it can mine EXTREMELY fast! It mines faster than the efficiency enchantment on most pickaxes, but the downside of this is that you mine so fast that you will use up a lot hits in one click, and 33 hits is the bare minimum. The gold pickaxe also has the highest enchantability, which means that you could spend 1 level of XP for a silk touch pickaxe. Performing this is impossible with the other tools. Yes, those things are pretty nice, but gold is not capable of mining any ore other than coal and iron. It cannot even mine its own ore! That is not something to be proud of.

Other Golden Tools
There are other tools besides the pickaxe that make this raw material seem even more unreliable. The axe has a similar story to the paragraph above, but the hoe is a different tale. The gold hoe has no benifits. All hoes scrape the dirt at the same time, so its value mainly consists on its durability. A golden hoe is a very fragile tool and it makes no sense on why you would even craft it. I usually just start my farm with a stone hoe and then finish my survival series with still half its durability left. My gold hoe would last one session of farming if you make a decent sized farm. People complain about the diamond hoe and how it is worthless, but at least it has strong durability. Same with iron. A golden hoe is probably going to crafted on accident if crafted at all because that thing is worth 33 patches of soil for a freaking farm. You will waste two gold ingots for a farm tool you use 33 times. Tip: use a stone hoe...

Gold Weapons and Armor
A golden sword is a common weapon in the "Survival Games", but it isn't really that helpful. Did you know that a golden sword has +4 attack damage? Also, did you know that a wooden sword has +4 attack damage? So obviously the golden sword isn't an effective weapon for combat. A stone sword deals more attack damage (+5) and a stone axe does the same amount of attack damage (+4). This rare mineral is not going to be much useful in this category, now let's start with the armor. A full set of golden armor fills up 5.5/10 protection. That's nearly half. Chainmail does 6/10 protection which is .5 better. Gold armor is the least durable obviously but, like the pickaxe and sword, has a very high enchantability. So saving up a few levels could really help if you have a piece of golden armor in your inventory for a PVP survival. Gold is not really the hot topic in the armor category either. Now let's move on...

Gold's Other Uses
Gold may have some more uses besides weapons and tools. Gold is used for a little bit of things in the world of Minecraft. One of them, and probably the most famous one, the golden apple. This apple is extremely rare to spawn naturally in dungeons or mineshafts. It also gives you regeneration, resistance, saturation, absorption, 2 hunger spaces, and instant health, and that's just the normal kind which needs 8 gold nuggets (or about 1 gold ingot) to craft. They might even change that in the new update to 8 gold ingots AND make it more powerful. An enchanted golden apple takes 8 golden blocks, or 72 (8x9), golden ingots. That is probably going to take a long time considering how "rare" gold is. Another use for gold is the infamous powered rails, or speed rails, which give the minecart acceleration as it moves along the rails. It needs gold, redstone, and sticks to make. They really never come in handy though for survival mode. I could only make a few powered rails in my map, but over time I just went to the minecart furnace which needs coal to run. 1 coal block can throw you a good long distance with the minecart furnace. Gold can also make a clock, which is pretty self-explanatory, and a golden carrot to make night vision and invisibility potions, which is actually pretty cool. However, iron has way more uses than gold. Some uses are the bucket, the compass, the minecart, the anvil, iron bars, iron doors, iron trapdoors, flint and steel, sheers, cauldron, tripwires, rails, and many more. Iron is usually passed up but isn't valued as much. Maybe if they called it silver more people would like it...

Gold is Renewable
Gold is in fact renewable. Gold nuggets are a natural drop from killing a zombie pigman and can be traded with villagers normally. Gold swords are actually a common drop with zombie pigmen and still have half durability left. Having a zombie pigman grinder in the Nether can increase your amount of gold fast. Gold is the only mob drop that can be dug from the earth (except when zombies drop iron ingots but on extremely rare cases).

This is not an article to hate on gold, I know, it is pretty cool, but what I am trying to say is how it is overrated. Many people always stop to dig up that gold but usually skip iron and redstone. Gold is almost worthless for tools and weapons, but has some other cool purposes people admire. Gold in Minecraft is not like it is in the real world. We will sometimes mistaken that. Thanks for reading this article, I want to hear your thoughts below, I will respond if it is interesting. I didn't mean to offend anyone who read this so please don't hate in the comments. If you enjoyed or thought this was interesting, smack that diamond, or even click subsribe for more coming soon! Thanks again everyone. Goodnight...