The large selection of tools available in Minecraft serves as trusty allies to survive in the game’s challenging world. Among the most vital pieces of equipment for players, pickaxes sit in the front row.
Every tool in Minecraft has a purpose; pickaxes are necessary to progress from early to late game status. You’ll need this tool to collect minerals and blocks in the Overworld, Nether, and End dimensions.
Nevertheless, like weapons, armors, and most tools, pickaxes have an effectiveness and durability hierarchy depending on their materials.
In this sense, you’ll find that iron pickaxes overtake stone pickaxes, diamond ones overtake iron ones, and so on.
Additionally, since pickaxes sit in the category of tools, they’re eligible for enchanting. So, you can apply a specific enchantment on an iron pickaxe, further improving its productivity. Pickaxes hold perks that you can add through the enchantment table.
Therefore, let’s discuss what is the best pickaxe and Minecraft and dive a bit deeper into this tool’s concept.
Pickaxes
Pickaxes are tools in Minecraft that are necessary for mineral-gathering. The only way to progress into the end-game and access high-tier weapons and equipment is through resources available in the Overworld, and pickaxes are vital in this context.
You can understand a bit more about the mineral resources in Minecraft to progress safely.
Pickaxes follow a hierarchical order according to the materials or minerals you’ve used to create them. The order is:
- Wood
- Stone
- Gold
- Iron
- Diamond
- Netherite
The order above starts from the lower-level material to the highest-level one.
Put simply, the best pickaxe in Minecraft is Netherite. It’s far more effective and durable than the pickaxes further down the list.
Minecraft Iron Pickaxe Recipe
- 3 Iron Ingot
- 2 Stick
To craft a pickaxe you’ll need two sticks and three blocks of material, but the most common is Iron. In this case, the material should be one from the list above. Then, follow this setting:
You can also get pickaxes from chests inside ruins, strongholds, abandoned mineshafts, treasures, etc. Conveniently, the pickaxes that appear in these types of chests are usually iron-quality or higher.
Enchantments for the Pickaxe
From the hierarchy list that we’ve seen earlier, it’s safe to say that the Netherite pickaxe is the most effective one. Nevertheless, considering the tool’s material alone won’t cut it when deciding on the best pickaxe in Minecraft.
Enchantments in Minecraft are fundamental to getting the best version of every tool, weapon, and armor in the game, and pickaxes are no different; the best pickaxe in Minecraft needs to have a few enchantments.
Therefore, let’s see a few of the enchantments available for pickaxes in the game, which are:
- Efficiency – This enchantment increases the player’s mining speed.
- Fortune – Increases the number or chances of dropping specific items when mining.
- Silk Touch – This enchantment makes specific blocks become dropped items instead of breaking into the resource. For instance, mining emeralds results in blocks of emerald ores instead of raw emeralds.
- Unbreaking – Increases the tool’s durability.
- Mending – Orbs of experience restore the tool’s durability.
- Curse of Vanishing – The tool will disappear if the player wielding it dies.
Although you might enchant a pickaxe with all the options above, the best combination relies on just a few.
More specifically, you can have the best pickaxe in Minecraft with only four enchantments, which are:
- Fortune III
- Efficiency V
- Unbreaking III
- Mending
The roman numbers in front of some of the enchantments refer to their tier levels. In Minecraft, you can upgrade enchantments, making them more powerful and effective.
For instance, the fortune enchantment at level three significantly increases the chances of double, triple, or even more drops on a single block.
So in this sense, you might get four diamonds from a single ore after mining it.
The combo list above excludes only two general enchantments available for pickaxes; one is the curse of vanishing, which is pretty much not useful, and the other is the silk touch.
There is no benefit of having silk touch when regularly progressing on the game.
The unbreaking enchantment is pretty much mandatory for tools with such a high usage in gameplay like pickaxes. The constant gathering of materials and minerals will swiftly cut down a pickaxe’s durability, especially if the tool has the “Efficiency” perk.
Since the “Efficiency” trait significantly increases a pickaxe’s speed, it makes the tools lose durability in the blink of an eye. Therefore, the “Unbreaking” enchantment, in combination with the “mending” perk, bonds conveniently to the best pickaxe combo.
As a final result, we’ll have that the best pickaxe in Minecraft is a netherite pickaxe containing the combo above. Check the tool on the image below:
Upgrading Pickaxes
Commonly, players get stuck at diamond-level equipment in the Overworld. Although tools featuring diamond materials are highly valuable, they’re not the best; pickaxes are no different.
A diamond pickaxe can gather every mineral in Minecraft with no limitation.
Still, the netherite pickaxe, which sits at a quality above, can get the same minerals faster while losing less durability.
The only available upgrade one can do concerning material quality in Minecraft is by transforming diamond tools into netherite tools. So, you can make a diamond pickaxe become a netherite pickaxe through a quick process.
You’ll need a smithing table to upgrade a diamond pickaxe into a netherite one.
You can obtain this table through a village’s smith job site or by crafting. To craft a smithing table, gather two iron ingots and four units of wood planks. Then, follow the recipe below:
Next, you’ll need to combine a diamond pickaxe with a single netherite ingot at the smithing table. Place both items in the block’s panel, following the setting below:
The resulting equipment will be a netherite pickaxe. If the diamond pickaxe you used was enchanted the enchantments will pass on to the netherite pickaxe at the end of the process.
You can get a netherite ingot by crafting together four netherite scraps and four gold ingots. Netherite scraps are the resulting item when you smelt ancient debris, which is a block found in the Nether dimension.
Different Uses of Pickaxe Enchantments
Although we’ve already seen the best combo enchantments for pickaxes in Minecraft, there is still a valuable alternative enchantment to analyze.
The Silk Touch enchantment, which was cut down from our list to create the best pickaxe in the game, has context-specific uses.
In some situations, obtaining specific blocks in Minecraft might cause them to break.
With Silk Touch, every block you “mine” will become a dropped item of itself. This enchantment is mutually exclusive with the “Fortune” perk. You can’t have both.
The enchantment is highly non-necessary throughout typical gameplay. However, it can be fruitful for gathering items such as beehives, bookshelves, blue ice, melons, glass pane, mushroom blocks, etc.
The primary uses for the blocks achievable with silk touch refer to building specific structures, creating an enchantment table’s room, farming beehives, landscaping, etc.
