Mining Speed Calculator

Every tool tier carries a base speed multiplier — Wooden 2, Stone 4, Iron 6, Diamond 8, Netherite 9, and (surprisingly) Gold 12, the fastest of all despite its poor durability. That multiplier only kicks in when the tool is the correct TYPE for the block in front of you; swing a sword at stone and the game quietly treats it as a bare hand, multiplier 1, no matter how expensive the sword was.

Efficiency adds a flat level² + 1 to that speed value, but only once a real tool bonus is already active — Efficiency on the wrong tool (or bare hands) does nothing at all. Haste multiplies whatever speed you have by 1 + 0.2 × level, so Haste II is a 40% boost. Mining Fatigue does the opposite through four hardcoded multipliers rather than a clean formula — 0.3, 0.09, 0.0027, and 0.00081 for levels I through IV — which is why an Elder Guardian’s fatigue effect can make even a diamond pickaxe feel like digging through solid rock with a spoon.

Being underwater without Aqua Affinity divides your speed by 5, and being off the ground — jumping, flying, or swimming — divides it by another 5 on top of that, so an unlucky combination of both can leave you at just 4% of your normal speed.

The single most consequential rule is what happens when your tool cannot actually harvest the block: every block that requires a specific tool has a minimum tier, and falling short of it (or bringing the wrong tool type entirely) doesn’t stop you from breaking the block — it just breaks with zero drops and uses a divisor of 100 instead of 30 in the final formula, roughly 3.33× slower on top of losing whatever tier speed bonus you thought you had. Mining Iron Ore with a wooden pickaxe is the classic example: the pickaxe swings, the ore shatters, and nothing drops.

All of this feeds into one final formula: progress per tick = speed ÷ hardness ÷ divisor. The game accumulates that progress once per tick and breaks the block the instant accumulated progress reaches 1.0, which is why the number of ticks needed is ceil(1 ÷ progress-per-tick) — always rounded UP to a whole tick, never a fraction. If a single tick’s progress is already 1.0 or higher, the block breaks the moment you start swinging, commonly called “instamine.” Every tick is exactly 1/20 of a second, so seconds are just ticks ÷ 20 — and because of that rounding, two setups with very close progress-per-tick values can land on completely different whole-tick times.