Related to Sneakys post on market undercutting (https://zedwork.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2780) an important question needs to be answered. How can one say that a venture is profitable? This here, is the answer.
BEHOLD!!!! The Diamond Time Standard...
The idea behind the Diamond Time Standard (what a fancy name, I wish i'd made that up) is that for a venture to be profitable it must generate more diamonds per hour of work than the average amount you'd get out of a really good mine. That gives a baseline, so if it takes you 10 hours to make something you sell for 100 diamonds you are making a loss as you could have mined 600 diamonds in that time.
I got some numbers already! These will be updated as more experiments are carried out.
These are recources gained per hour using a beacon mine. If a better mining method is available, I do not know of it but would like to as then I would be very rich. Coal, redstone and diamonds are only realistically obtainable from mining. Gold and iron can be farmed, with large farms making recource faster than can possibly be collected by hand all while putting in zero effort.
Recource (single item) gained per hour, beacon mining, after adjustment from downtime multiplier...
The number you can realistically expect to get per hour, including pick repairing and beacon moving.
Diamond: 48.9
Gold: 38.6 (note that in a gold rich mesa this would be far higher, will update with mesa mine data later. Also gold farms, though a gold farm would have to be huge to top mesa mining)
Iron: 165.1 (Iron farms make 40 iron per hour per cell. So a 7 cell iron farm will beat beacon mining)
Lapis: 216 (villagers might beat this in speed to be honest)
Redstone: 1412 (can be bought from villagers but who cares, they sell it very expensive)
Coal: 729
Estimated time not mining is 25 minutes for every 100 mining, made up of 20 minutes pick repairing and 5 minutes moving beacon (which has to be done about every 2-3 hours). Gives a multiplier of 0.8 to the number mined per hour mining.
Currently have 4 trips of 40-45 minutes in. More data is needed for it to be truely useful. Your help would be much appreciated! To help out is very easy. You simply need to go beacon mining (how we all love this), time how long you go for and count what ores you collect. Counting silked ores would be most helpful. Send me the numbers and I'll put them in my spreadsheet to adjust the values, which will increase the significance of the data.
NOTE this is assuming beacon mining is the fastest method of obtaining diamonds. If this is not the case then the faster method will be used instead.