Shovel in Minecraft: How to make, uses, and more

In the most basic sense, Minecraft is a game about taking things out of the ground and using those things or resources to make or “craft” a wide selection of items. In the game's survival mode, this process requires the use of tools, while items like weapons and armor are secondary and are needed to protect the player who wields the aforementioned tools.

The game has tons of existing and upcoming tools for players to use. Each tool is used for something different, which is a feature that increases the value of each of these items. However, only three of the game’s tools are used to help in mining. These are the axe, pickaxe, and shovel.

---

Everything players need to know about the shovel in Minecraft

While pickaxes and axes collect structurally denser or harder blocks and resources like stone and ores or resources like wood, respectively, the shovel focuses on blocks that are easier to break. These include sand, gravel, dirt, podzol, red sand, farmland, clay, mycelium, snow, and even nether-based blocks like soul soil and soul sand.

The primary use of shovels exhibits itself when a player needs to dig down into the ground to penetrate the upper layers of dirt or similar blocks. This tool can dig such blocks faster than any other tool in the game.

Shovels can also be used in buildings. Players can use this, too, to carve out dirt paths that lead up to player-built structures. This process uses a single durability point each time it takes place. Players can make a path on surfaces made from the following blocks:

• Grass Block
• Dirt
• Coarse Dirt
• Rooted Dirt
• Podzol
• Mycelium

To craft a shovel, players will need one piece of the respective resource used to make the tool, along with two sticks. These items should be arranged in the rough layout of the shovel tool inside the crafting grid of a crafting table, with the respective ingot or resource on top and two sticks under it vertically.

---

Shovels can also be obtained via the following methods

• Trading with the toolsmith villager at different villager levels.
• Completing raids and earning them as villager gifts. When a player earns the Hero of the Village effect, some villagers may throw stone shovels toward the player that they can collect and use. Also, pillagers and vindicators can drop a shovel during a raid.
• Finally, hostile mobs like zombies and husks can sometimes carry and drop shovels when killed.

---

There are six variants of shovels in Minecraft, as they can be crafted with each of the primary minerals and metals found in the game. Each variant has different durability points, from a golden shovel with 32 durability points to the netherite shovel, which has 2031 durability points.