Breaking Time: the Formula, Checked Cell by Cell

Verified: Java 26.3 / Bedrock 26.50 · 2026-09-23 · Java model; Bedrock matches it without Haste or Mining Fatigue

This guide explains the arithmetic behind the block breaking calculator, then does something a formula page rarely does: it checks the formula against the Minecraft Wiki's own table of break times, cell by cell, and reports where the two disagree.

The rule in one paragraph

A block does not have a break time. It has a hardness, and every game tick your tool deals a little damage against it: your tool's speed divided by the hardness, divided again by 30 if the tool can harvest the block or by 100 if it cannot. When the damage adds up to 1 the block breaks, and the total is rounded up to whole ticks, 20 to a second. The rule is stated on the Minecraft Wiki's Breaking page (revision 3787463, read 2026-09-23) and in the same terms by the mining speed calculator at minecraftmaps.com.

The speed is 1 for a bare hand or the wrong kind of tool. The right kind uses its material's multiplier: wood 2, stone 4, copper 5, iron 6, diamond 8, netherite 9 and gold 12. Efficiency adds its level squared plus one, so Efficiency V adds 26, but only to a tool that is already the right kind. Java's Haste adds 20% per level. Mining with your head underwater and no Aqua Affinity divides the speed by 5, and so does having your feet off the ground.

Harvesting is a separate question

Whether a tool is fast on a block and whether the block drops anything are decided separately, which produces the calculator's most useful surprise. Obsidian has a hardness of 50 and drops only for a diamond or netherite pickaxe:

The golden pickaxe beats iron by twenty seconds and gets nothing for it. It does the same to iron ore, which needs a stone pickaxe or better: gold breaks it in 1.25 seconds and drops nothing, where a stone pickaxe takes 1.15 and drops the raw iron. Stone itself shows the divisor at work from the other side: 7.5 seconds by hand, because a hand cannot harvest it, and 1.15 with a wooden pickaxe. On deepslate diamond ore a golden pickaxe takes 1.9 seconds to get nothing and an iron pickaxe 1.15 to get the diamond.

Instant, and the pause you only lose by being instant

A block breaks instantly when the damage in a single tick is above 1. For stone that means a speed above 1.5 × 30 = 45. A diamond pickaxe with Efficiency V has a speed of 34, and Haste II multiplies it by 1.4 to 47.6, which is enough; the wiki uses this same example. With Haste I it is 40.8, and stone takes two ticks.

That gap matters more than two ticks suggests, because the game adds a 6-tick pause before the next block after every block that is not instant. Mining a line of stone with a plain diamond pickaxe is 6 ticks plus 6, a 12-tick cycle, which is 100 blocks a minute. One-tick mining is a 7-tick cycle, 171.4 a minute. Instant mining has no pause at all, one block a tick, 1,200 a minute: seven times the one-tick rate. That sevenfold jump, not the few ticks saved per block, is the whole case for building a beacon for Haste II.

What rounding does to the penalties

The wiki describes being underwater without Aqua Affinity as five times slower and floating in water as 25 times slower. Rounding to whole ticks changes that. Stone with a diamond pickaxe is 5.625 ticks, rounded up to 6, which is 0.3 seconds. Underwater it is 28.125 ticks, rounded to 29: 1.45 seconds. Floating, it is 140.625 ticks, rounded to 141: 7.05 seconds, 23.5 times the dry figure rather than 25, because rounding up added 6.7 per cent to the dry time and only 0.3 per cent to the floating one.

Checking the formula against the wiki's own table

The Breaking page carries a large table of break times by block and tool, maintained separately from its formula. For the 23 blocks this calculator offers there are 177 cells with a number in them, and for each one the table gives a Java value and a Bedrock value, which are usually the same.

The calculator reproduces 177 of 177 Bedrock cells exactly. It reproduces 166 of 177 Java cells exactly, and each of the other 11 is exactly one tick, 0.05 seconds, longer in the table: obsidian by hand, with wood and with stone; cobblestone by hand; iron ore with gold; gold and diamond ore with copper and with gold; and grass block and clay with netherite. All 11 are cells where the formula lands on an exact whole number of ticks. But there are 101 such cells, and the other 90 match, so "whole number" is not the rule, and we have not found one. The calculator shows the formula's value, and in Java it may therefore read one tick short on a block like obsidian.

Getting that far needed exact arithmetic. In ordinary floating point, a wooden pickaxe on deepslate comes to 45.000000000000014 ticks, which rounds up to 46 and is wrong. The calculator guards against that, and the test behind it does the whole check in exact fractions.

Where the sources disagree

Two things are held rather than settled. First, at exactly 1 damage per tick, the one case offered here being a golden pickaxe on netherrack, the wiki's pseudocode and minecraftmaps.com both say the block breaks instantly, while the wiki's prose says the damage must exceed the threshold and its table records one tick in both editions. The calculator follows the table and says so on the page.

Second, five cells of minecraftmaps.com's quick-reference table disagree with its own formula. It lists stone by hand at 2.25 seconds, iron ore and deepslate by hand at 4.5, and iron ore with a wooden pickaxe at 2.25: those are the times for a tool that can harvest the block, and its formula and the wiki give 7.5, 15, 15 and 7.5 seconds, because none of those tools can. It also lists stone with a diamond pickaxe at 0.25 seconds, where 5.625 ticks round up to 6 and the wiki's table says 0.3. Its formula is the part this site relies on.

What the calculator leaves out

Mining Fatigue, whose Java values are hard-coded per level; Bedrock's own Haste and Mining Fatigue arithmetic; shears, swords and the blocks they are fast on; and the Silk Touch rules that decide whether a block drops itself or its contents. The harvest column answers whether anything drops, not what.