Diamonds may be a gamer's best friend, but just how much money would Minecraft's diamond armor actually be worth?
Pull out your ****! Cuz Game Theory's getting bejeweled!
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory!!!
Where we mine the interwebs to craft mind blowing episodes on your favorite video games!
Mine the interwebs to craft episodes, God!
Terrible puns aside, if this weeks episode looks a little different it's because I'm on location scouting for information for an upcoming episode
That may, or may not be about Assassin's Creed...
So today we're featuring the editing talents of fellow game theorists Ronnie Onnie Edwards
host of Digressing and Sidequesting another excellent video game over-analysis show!
also on this channel!
If you haven't check him out yet ,watch his episode on the Wii U's gameplay
it's my favorite I told him to find a happy balance between our two visual
styles so if you love it great if not well it'll all be over soon anyway even
if you live in a console gaming cave chances are you've heard about the pc
sensation minecraft and the literal jewel in its crown diamonds
these blue beauties are the prize ores that keep players glued to their screens
for hours digging deeper and deeper in the hopes of finding that one elusive
vein or they just switch to creative mode and spawn a couple hundred either
way finding enough enables you to make the strongest items in the game picks
swords and what we're interested in armor. So being the Curious George of
gaming commentary that I am I wanted to find out just how much money a suit of
armor made entirely of diamonds actually would be worth. And more importantly, would
it be able to protect me from a sword or an exploding block creature? Diamonds may
be forever but your attention span isn't. So enough with elegant intros let's get
to the research.
So we're going to find out how much diamond armor is going to cost us we
need to figure out how much diamond we actually have to do that we need to get
a sense of the minecraft world
scale according to the creator of the game each block translates to 1
meter tall with each block face in its original low res graphical style
measuring 16 pixels by 16 pixels with one meter divided along 16 pixels each
individual pixel is going to equate to .0625 meters
since minecraft a three-dimensional world though we need to know the volume
of each cubic pixel so we take .0625 and cube it to get point .000244m^3
now hold on to that number it's going to be important in a second.
We're interested in diamond armor specifically so we need to find out how
many individual pixel blocks make up a full set:
helmet, chestplate, shoulder coverings, and leggings.
Now i'm no professional modder, but from what I've been able to calculate through
Photoshop skins and the like
the helmet is made up of a 172 pixel blocks the chest plate
186 shoulder pads 116 for 2 and leggings at 144 somewhere around 618 pixel blocks is
a fair estimate 618 x .000244 cubic metres per block means that the
armor is made up of .15 cubic meters of diamond. Since gemstones are measured by
their weight and the density of diamond is 3,510 kilograms per cubic meter
that's 526.5 kilograms of gemstone or 1,160 pounds that is one a heck of an
engagement ring but no jeweler in the world can possibly handle a stone that
large Ha they wish
so we need to break it down into a much smaller scale
carrots the standard of measuring gemstone weight
it takes 5000 carats to equal one kilogram meaning that our suit of
diamond armor in Minecraft would be an astounding 2,632,500 carats
to give you some perspective the Cullinan diamond is the largest rough
gem quality diamond ever found it was 3100 carats or probably the diamond
more people are familiar with is the Hope Diamond
a beautifully cut gemstone weighing in at a whopping at 45.52 carats
needless to say our sparkling suit put these dinky diamonds to shame
so now that we have some numbers back to our initial question how much would
diamond armor actually be worth
well as any jeweler will tell you it's not just the size of a diamond that
counts
the price of a diamond actually depends on the four C's carat cut clarity and
color
we've already covered carat and the cut of the diamond armor is actually pretty
plain so it won't be adding any significant value
clarity is ranked on a scale ranging from flawless to included with lower
scores meaning that their imperfections you can see with the naked eye that make
the diamond to cloudy or unclear looking at diamond armor in Minecraft and the
clarity is pretty bad you can't see through it at all
so let's give it the lowest score of i 3 so a rough estimate for a colorless
diamond that's cloudy and lacking a fancy cut is 1615 dollars per
carat or if you're in the market for a full suit of armor $4,251,487,500 you think
that's a lot
we haven't even taken into account that last C color
notice that the diamonds in Minecraft aren't clear and radiant like most
diamonds were familiar with
instead they're tinted blue this comes from a small amount of boron or a large
amount of hydrogen being present when the diamond is forming this imperfection
actually makes them more rare and thus much much more costly where the going
rate of a cloudy nearly colorless diamond was 1615 dollars per carat a
cloudy blue minecraft diamond would cost around thirty three thousand five
hundred dollars per carat which means that the final price tag for a shining
new suit of diamond armor weighing in a 2.6 million carats is
88,188,750,000.98 cents
so congratulations you just dropped more than the gross domestic product of
Rwanda on a shiny new body suit think you're ready to handle some creepers now
well think again minecraft Steve because you're wearing a crappy piece of
protection
you see diamonds may be the hardest natural mineral on earth but hardness
and toughness are two separate things
diamonds and other gemstones are all crystals and crystals by their nature
have a regular atomic structure that's what defines them as a crystal this
predictability make them beautiful but it also gives them a lot of cleavage for
planes worth of cleavage in fact we're not talking about the pamela anderson
Bermuda Triangle brand of cleavage here we're talking rocks and minerals because
of the parallel arrangement of atoms diamonds have multiple cleavage planes
or directions in which you can slice through it causing it to split this
means that in some directions they're extremely difficult to break but in
others
it's easier to do them well pamela anderson in Minecraft with armor being
flat and blocky the cleavage planes would all be a 90-degree angles
meaning that one strong straight slice from either the top or the side will
easily cut through our billion-dollar bodysuits wasting hours of mining and
crafting
so in short diamond armor kinda sucks as armor
it weighs thousands of pounds and falls to pieces if your cleavage gets hit
but on the plus side and a net worth of eighty eight billion dollars
it'll make you 11 billion dollars richer than the world's richest man so it may
not be all bad
but then again in Minecraft what are you really going to spend your money on
anyway
a giant gold statue of yourself oh wait nevermind i already crafted that from
the hundreds of blocks of gold i found while searching for my diamonds
well you know what they say Mo Money mo problems LOL!!!
Anyway, it's just a theory.
A Game Theory!!!!
Thanks for watching!!!!!