/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Ok anons, I've been doing some experiments working with TNT. Here is what I've found.

First of all, it's clear that material matters.
A single block of TNT will carve out a 7 block radius in dirt, but only a 3 block radius in stone. Embedding the TNT in dirt and placing a piece of stone on one side results in a lopsided explosion. Empty air also seems to have a "resistance", as the explosion reaches slightly further when it's surrounded by air, rather than by dirt or wool.

The second thing which is clear, is that explosive power increases as you add TNT blocks.
Placing a single block of TNT will carve out a 3x3x3 cube, or a total of 27 blocks. But placing 2 blocks of TNT next to each other and triggering them simultaneously will carve out a 5 block radius all around. Similarly, placing 3 blocks of TNT will carve out something like a 7 block radius all around. So the marginal value of every single TNT increases slightly as the number of TNT increases.

Doing some test explosions, and then measuring the size of the crater, I find that there is an element of randomness at play. You cannot get the same crater twice. When the TNT blocks are triggered, they move slightly in their sockets in a random fashion before exploding, this seems to effect the size and shape of the explosion. When the TNT is placed in a line, the explosion size has a greater dispersion. The most efficient explosions seem to be packing all the TNT together as close as possible.

The most important thing is to trigger all the TNT blocks simultaneously. If this doesn't happen, not only is the explosion diminished, but the second explosion will destroy many of the harvested blocks. I do this by placing them in the ground, and laying redstone on top of them. But be careful, when TNT is triggered it moves and breaks the redstone on top of it, so it's important that a redstone circuit is laid around the formation, touching each TNT block individually.

These are by no means exact figures, but can be treated as ballpark estimates. This is the size of the 3D crater you can expect by detonating each of these inside a stone mountain. In each of these figures, the blocks occupied by TNT itself is subtracted off.
1 TNT = 26 blocks --> 26 blocks/TNT
2 TNT = 110 blocks --> 55 blocks/TNT
3 TNT = 204 blocks --> 68 blocks/TNT
4 TNT = 312 blocks --> 78 blocks/TNT
5 TNT = 390 blocks --> 78 blocks/TNT
6 TNT = 468 blocks --> 78 blocks/TNT
It seems like the marginal value of TNT levels off after 4 blocks. Larger explosions can be fun, but they aren't getting you more value.
You certainly don't want to be doing just 1 block at a time, it's a tremendous waste.