Diamonds aren't rare, and you don't need to hoard them like a dragon with its gold

[u/_amongstreality]

People have talked about jukebox being expensive for a long time, and I saw this mentioned many times since the last snapshot released, so I just wanted to explain why from my point of view it's simply not true.

First of all, let's establish the use cases diamonds actually have in Minecraft:

• Tools
• Weapons
• Armor
• Templates duplication
• Enchanting table crafting
• Jukeboxes

With Mending being a thing, once you craft your tools, weapons and armor, you almost never need to replace them, and if you do - you can buy new tools, weapons and armor from vilalgers and disenchant it to put the enchantments you need on them, so you don't actually need diamonds for that, it's a one time investment at most.

So the player doesn't need that many diamonds before they become mostly irrelevant to them as a resource in the game.

But how do you actually find diamonds, and is it hard to do?

Simple and short answer is that finding diamonds isn't hard at all.

Long answer is, finding diamonds is easy, because there's a lot of ways to do that. The most obvious is going to a cave and just looking around, you'll find tons of them very reliably, and if you have Fortune on your pickaxe, as one should, you'll be literally drowning in them. Simply find an opening to a big cave on the surface, go down, and there's so many of them, you'll be catching yourself missing multiple veins of diamonds, because you notice a different vein and went to it.

But what's there other than caves? Well, there's lots and lots of structures. You can find diamonds in shipwrecks, and shipwrecks have maps that lead you to buried chests, that also have diamonds in them. There's also diamonds in villages, abandoned mineshafts, desert temples, trial chambers, stronghold, and now also abandoned camps.

And it doesn't stop with the overworld, there's diamonds in bastions, nether fortresses, and end cities. Especially end cities, there's loads of them in the end cities.

All you have to do is explore the world.

Conclusion

I have no issues with the jukebox using a single diamond in its crafting recipe, because I don't need these diamonds anyway, and I always find more and more of them. And if you'd ever leave your base? So would you.

Mojang is very clearly aiming to add more things for players to explore, but I notice that a lot of players just stick to sitting at their base forever, never leaving to explore the world, which in some cases leads to players having a very hard time gathering any resources, not just diamonds, hence everything seems "too expensive".

Maybe I'm wrong, because I never needed and never intend to need 10000 jukeboxes for any build, I see it as more of a complementary decorative block, maybe something subtle to use for a wall, but not something I would ever need hundreds and thousands of, hence why the crafting recipe doesn't bother me. I could craft a few stacks and have enough for decorations in my builds for months.