Breaking blocks
Hold the break control while aiming at a block. Most blocks take 3 seconds by hand. The right stone tool halves the time, and the right iron tool cuts it to a quarter. The tool must be in your selected hotbar slot to help.
Mining times
| Material | By hand | With the right stone tool | With the right iron tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stone and ores | 3 seconds | 1.5 seconds with a pickaxe | 0.75 seconds with a pickaxe |
| Deep crystal ore | Stays intact | Stays intact | 30 seconds with a pickaxe |
| Wood | 3 seconds | 1.5 seconds with an axe | 0.75 seconds with an axe |
| Dirt, grass blocks, snow, gravel, podzol, coarse dirt | 3 seconds | 1.5 seconds with a shovel | 0.75 seconds with a shovel |
| Sand | 2 seconds | 1 second with a shovel | 0.5 seconds with a shovel |
| Torches, grass, flowers, and leaves | Instant | Instant | Instant |
Coal, copper, and iron require a stone pickaxe or better; silver, gold, and Deep crystal ore require an iron pickaxe or a Deep Pickaxe. Without the required pickaxe, the ore stays intact. See Materials and stations for the tool recipes and mining progression.
Leaves from every tree species break instantly and never return a leaf block. Natural leaves have a 1 in 58 chance of giving an apple; leaves placed by players give nothing. If an apple rolls and it will not fit in your inventory, the leaf block stays intact. If there is no drop, you can break it even with a full inventory.
Tool wear
Tools wear out. A stone pickaxe, axe, or shovel lasts 150 blocks and an iron one lasts 250. The rare Deep Pickaxe has the same mining speed, mining requirements, and 250-use durability as the iron pickaxe. Each block you break uses one charge, and breaking a block with the wrong tool, such as a pickaxe on dirt, uses one too. Blocks that break instantly (leaves, grass, flowers, fibrous plants, and torches) cost the tool nothing. The Protection viewer never wears.
A thin bar at the bottom of a worn tool's slot shows what is left, from green to red. It appears in your hotbar, backpack, and chests. Tools you have not used show no bar.
On its last charge the tool breaks: the block still breaks and drops its items, the tool disappears, and the message Your <tool> broke appears. Make a spare before that happens. Switching to another tool partway through a block, even an identical one with different wear, resets the cracks.
Wear stays with the tool when you move it, store it in a chest, drop it, or die. Two tools of the same type with different wear never merge into one stack.
Mining without food
Breaking blocks costs hunger: every block you break, instant ones included, uses 1/25 of a hunger point, so about every 25 blocks one segment of the hunger bar goes down. Refused breaks cost nothing.
With zero hunger points, you can still mine, but every mining time in the table above is doubled: stone by hand takes 6 seconds, and Deep crystal ore takes 60 seconds even with an iron pickaxe. Instant blocks stay instant. Eat something to mine at full speed again; see Health and death.
Keeping your progress
Cracks show how close a block is to breaking. Releasing the control, changing tools or target blocks, moving out of reach, opening a window, or switching away from the game resets your progress. It also resets if the block changes while you are mining it. Disconnecting partway through a block loses the progress.
A slow connection can delay the block disappearing after the cracks finish. Broken blocks release a burst of fragments, and you can see nearby players breaking blocks too.
When a block will not break
You cannot break blocks where you lack permission, such as another player's protected plot. A block also stays intact if you cannot carry all its drops. Empty storage stations before breaking them, and follow the rules for chests and protection cores.
See Inventory for gathering, equipment, and managing your items.