Is Quarry Mining As Effective As Staircase Mining?

Solution 1:

Staircase mining is more effective than quarry mining. Since mining a 2 wide staircase shaft, each block you mine reveals 3 new blocks, and on discovering a mineral you branch out to clear the vein. With quarry mining in most cases you just reveal 1 unseen block, the one below you, which makes it very inefficient.

More effective even than a staircase shaft would be branch mining: you mine long tunnels of 1x2 next to each other with 2 solid blocks in between them. You can stack them on top of each other too, again with 2 solid blocks in between. This reveals the most blocks in a solid mass (all of them) with the least of digging, so the chance of finding something is greater.

There are even more effective ways of mining if you use mods. I am currently playing FTB Unleashed, a mod pack. It includes some completely automated options that require a little or more work to set up first, but which save time in the end. Some of these options are:

• Automated quarry
• Mining turtle
• Arcane Bore

Solution 2:

No, it is not as efficient as you are mining much more blocks than you need to. The most effective way to mine for ores is branch mining. You dig a tunnel on levels 12 to 6 and every 2 blocks you branch off with another tunnel for about 20 to 30 blocks.