Personally, I prefer either iron or emerald, depending on which I have more of. That usually ends up being emerald, given that I need so much iron for bridges, buildings, lanterns and railroads and tend to habitually sell my junk to villagers and hoard emerald blocks for later use. Gold is also renewable, but it's handy for piglin bartering, golden apples/carrots and powered rails and is the hardest of the three renewable options to obtain in bulk. I still genuinely wonder how many people prefer diamond or even netherite, and who. They're non-renewable in vanilla Minecraft, and indeed, netherite can only be renewed with each wastelands reset even on EMC. Besides, diamond and netherite are useful for the best tools/armor we can get, and diamonds are necessary for jukeboxes, enchanting tables and smithing template replicas too. As for netherite, each ingot uses four gold ingots in addition to four netherite scraps, so you may as well just use the gold on its own for a beacon anyways. Even in my challenge to get a full double chest of each mineral block, I'm limiting it to overworld ones, given that netherite is so rare, gold is found in both dimensions and quartz is so common. Anyways, I digress. What do you think?
iron because that way i dont need to carry multiple minerals, only iron blocks to build the beacon and activate it. the resource type is purely cosmetic (for build) and irrelevant for activating it, so the smartest option is always the cheapest or convenient one. Breaking times between iron and emerald are the same, it might be worth looking into building beacons out of gold since they are the fastest block to break at a ~40% time reduction compared to former, so it actually might be the best option, especially since its so easy to acquire... Now I know to change iron blocks into gold blocks from my beacon shulker . This is for beacons which are to be reconstructed elsewhere, permanent ones, there might be the benefit to use different cosmetic choices
I had no idea that iron and emerald blocks are harder than gold blocks! That's interesting! After all these years, there's still stuff to learn!
I spent years afking the giant iron farm Mr_Zulus built back in the olden days so I have always had a stockpile of iron. So mostly it's a matter of convenience because I'm already carrying iron around for general use. However, after reading this thread I might switch to gold for when I'm specifically setting up a beacon. Diamond and netherite are purely a flex as far as I know lol. I have built a diamond one, since voting rewards make those somewhat renewable... Pretty sure it was hollow, full of iron though 😂
basicly in my case its the material i have the most of i have like a single chest of shulkers with Iron blocks but i have 5000000 emrolds so emerolds it is
I go with iron just because that is what I have stocked in my wasteland exploration shulker kit. But, I might go with gold now. That will give a shinier look especially if I place an ochre frog light at each corner.
