If you’ve just spawned into a new Minecraft survival world, your first 10 minutes are a race against the setting sun, and the first tool you’ll ever need is a pickaxe. I still remember my first playthrough, punching stone for 5 straight minutes before a friend hopped on voice chat and told me I wasn’t missing a trick, I just didn’t have the right tool for the job. If you’re asking how do i make a pickaxe in minecraft, you’re already way ahead of where I was back then. This guide covers every pickaxe tier, common mistakes to avoid, and little tricks that make mining way less of a chore, no matter if you’re playing on Java, Bedrock, or even a modded server.
How Do I Make a Pickaxe in Minecraft: Core Crafting Rules You Need to Know First
Before you gather any materials for your pickaxe, there’s one basic item you need to make first: a crafting table. You can only craft pickaxes in a 3x3 crafting grid, and your inventory’s 2x2 grid is too small for the pickaxe shape. To make a crafting table, punch a couple of tree logs, turn them into 4 wooden planks, and arrange the planks to fill all four slots in your inventory crafting grid.
Once you have your crafting table placed down, the pickaxe crafting shape is the same for every tier that you make from scratch. You’ll put three of your pickaxe material (planks, cobblestone, ingots, or diamonds) across the entire top row of the 3x3 grid. Then, you’ll put two sticks down the middle column, one in the center slot and one in the bottom center slot. If you put the items in any other order, you won’t get a pickaxe, so double check the layout if you’re new to crafting.
Sticks are the same for every pickaxe tier, so you can stock up on them early by combining two wooden planks vertically in your crafting grid. You can use any type of wood for planks, and they’ll all work exactly the same for both sticks and wooden pickaxes, no difference in durability or speed.
Every Pickaxe Tier Explained, From Wood to Netherite
Not all pickaxes are created equal, and each tier has specific blocks it can mine, different durability, and different use cases. It’s tempting to skip straight to the highest tier possible, but most players will work their way up through the tiers as they gather rarer materials.
Here’s a full breakdown of every pickaxe tier and the materials you need to craft or upgrade them:
- Wooden pickaxe: 3 planks (any wood type) + 2 sticks
- Stone pickaxe: 3 cobblestone/blackstone/cobbled deepslate + 2 sticks
- Iron pickaxe: 3 iron ingots + 2 sticks
- Golden pickaxe: 3 gold ingots + 2 sticks
- Diamond pickaxe: 3 diamonds + 2 sticks
- Netherite pickaxe: 1 diamond pickaxe + 1 netherite ingot + 1 netherite upgrade smithing template
Wooden pickaxes are only good for mining stone and coal, so you’ll only use yours for 5 minutes tops to get enough cobblestone for a stone pick. Stone pickaxes are a big step up, they can mine iron ore, coal, and all stone variants, and last 131 uses, which is 3 times longer than a wooden pick.
Iron pickaxes are the workhorse of early to mid-game survival, they can mine every ore except ancient debris, and last 250 uses, which is enough for multiple mining trips before you need to replace them. Golden pickaxes are a weird outlier: they mine faster than iron, but only have 32 uses, so they’re only worth using if you enchant them with Unbreaking and are mining large batches of soft blocks like netherrack.
Diamond pickaxes are the only overworld tool that can mine obsidian and ancient debris, so you’ll always want to use your first 3 diamonds for a pickaxe, not a sword or armor. They last 1561 uses, which is more than 6 times longer than an iron pick. Netherite pickaxes give +1 attack damage, knockback resistance, and don’t burn in lava, which makes them perfect for long nether mining trips where you might accidentally fall into a lava pool. You can’t craft a netherite pickaxe from scratch, you have to upgrade a diamond pickaxe at a smithing table with a netherite ingot and a smithing template found in nether fortress chests.
Common Pickaxe Crafting Mistakes New Players Make
After playing Minecraft for over 10 years and walking dozens of new players through their first survival worlds, I’ve seen the same pickaxe mistakes pop up over and over again. Most of these mistakes are easy to avoid once you know what to look for, and they’ll save you a ton of time and rare materials.
The biggest mistake I see is new players wasting their first 3 diamonds on a sword or armor instead of a pickaxe. A diamond sword only gives you a little extra attack damage over an iron sword, but a diamond pickaxe lets you mine obsidian to make a nether portal, which unlocks way more content than a better weapon ever could. You can get iron armor and swords from zombie drops or village chests, but you can’t get a diamond pickaxe without mining diamonds yourself.
Another common mistake is making golden pickaxes as a default mid-game tool. A lot of new players see gold as a rare, valuable material and assume it’s better than iron, but gold pickaxes break so fast they’re not worth the ingots unless you have a specific use for them. I once watched a new player burn through 12 gold ingots making 4 golden pickaxes to mine a stack of cobblestone, when a single iron pickaxe would have done the same job for way less resources.
Never use a netherite pickaxe to mine basic cobblestone unless you have enchants that repair it automatically, it’s a huge waste of a rare material for a job a stone pickaxe can do just fine. You only need your netherite pick for mining ancient debris, obsidian, and high-value ores, save the cheap picks for all the busy work.
Pro Tips to Make Your Pickaxes Last Longer and Work Better
Crafting a pickaxe is only half the battle, there are a ton of small tricks you can use to make your picks last longer, mine faster, and get you better drops when you’re underground. These tips work for every edition of the game, and most of them don’t require any rare materials to pull off.
Enchants are the easiest way to make your pickaxes way more useful. Fortune 3 is the best all-around enchant for ore mining, it gives you up to 4 times more drops from coal, diamond, redstone, lapis, emerald, and nether quartz. Silk Touch is another great option if you want to collect blocks as themselves, like grass blocks, ice, or ore blocks that you can smelt later for extra XP. Unbreaking 3 increases your pickaxe’s durability by 300%, so it’s a must-have for any high-tier pick you plan to use regularly.
If you can get Mending on your pickaxe, it will last forever as long as you earn XP while using it. Mending repairs your tool with XP orbs you pick up, so if you’re mining coal or redstone that drops XP, your pickaxe will never break. I have a Mending Unbreaking 3 diamond pickaxe that I’ve been using for 2 years of regular play, and I’ve never had to repair it once.
You can repair two damaged pickaxes of the same tier in a crafting grid to combine their durability, no anvil needed if you don’t care about keeping enchants. This is a great trick for early game when you have a bunch of half-broken stone or iron picks lying around, you can combine them into one full durability pick without using extra materials.
Another easy tip is to keep a spare pickaxe in your hotbar whenever you go mining. I’ve lost count of how many times my pick broke right as I found a diamond vein, and I had to run all the way back to the surface to make a new one, only to forget where the vein was when I got back. I keep a cheap iron pick in the last slot of my hotbar now, just for emergencies.
At the end of the day, knowing how do i make a pickaxe in minecraft is the first skill that turns you from a helpless new spawn wandering the overworld into a survivor that can build bases, mine diamonds, and take on the Ender Dragon. Don’t stress too much about getting a netherite pick right away, work your way up through the tiers, and don’t forget to keep a spare in your hotbar for those unexpected diamond finds. Next time you spawn into a new world, you’ll be able to make your first pick in under 2 minutes, no punching stone for half an hour required. If you play with friends, you can even teach them the crafting recipe and skip the same frustrating first mistakes I made when I started playing.