Can Minecraft’s Wood Pickaxe REALLY Break Stone?

Holy crap today we’re going to find out if the wooden pickaxe from minecraft can actually mine stone in real life by making one ourselves and testing it out a portion of this video is brought to you by audible minecraft’s progression of tools is pretty simple first you get wood you make a wood

Pickaxe which you use to get stone to make a stone pickaxe and mine iron you know how this works but that first step has always puzzled me to the wood pickaxe in minecraft even deliver the kind of impact required to break stone in the first place

And if not how far would you need to go to make it actually work just like in the torch video we’re going to make three different versions v1 is going to be as raw and true to minecraft as possible v2 will be an ultra optimized version designed as a best case scenario

And v3 will push the envelope by using other materials that are available in minecraft but not in the original crafting recipe the base crafting recipe for the pickaxe is three wood planks and two sticks and i wanted to keep my version as authentic as possible so

I grabbed a stick from a nearby forest for the shaft and used an actual 4×4 plank of wood for the head obviously the minecraft pickaxe has the ends bent at like a 45 degree angle but to give this one the best shot i decided to go with an angle that

Matches an irl pickaxe a little more closely of course the bigger problem is shaping and connecting them steve doesn’t use any glue or nails whatsoever to join these pieces which meant i couldn’t either but while you might think he shapes and assembles them without any tools

That’s actually not true if you look at the sides of the crafting table you’ll see a saw a pair of pliers and a small hatchet which aren’t the finest tools but it’ll be more than enough to get the job done though to be fair i mostly used

Power tools just because that’s what i’m familiar with to connect the head and the shaft we can use the traditional woodworking method of cutting a hole in the head shaping our stick to fit and then hammering the two together this thing is freaking ridiculous and i love it

That’s not going anywhere as i headed to the forest to test this thing out i realized i knew almost nothing about minecraft stone like what the heck is stone in minecraft anyway and more importantly how hard would it be to break because it’s formed from the contact of

Water and lava we know that minecraft stone has to be some kind of igneous rock and if we look at the time required to break it we’ll see it exactly matches granite leading me to believe that it’s just about as strong unfortunately for us granite is

Incredibly hard in real life so if we can find a way to break it that’ll be amazing but to really see what every pickaxe version is capable of we’re gonna slowly work our way up starting with some rocks that are a little easier to break okay so we’ve come to this local

Columbus park because it actually has a number of different kinds of stone below us we can actually see some shale and the reason that’s important is that shale is very easy to break so if we can’t break through that with this pickaxe then i mean we just basically have no chance

Oh okay that actually works let’s go that’s awesome you can already see the wood is kind of getting dulled over here okay next up we’re going to test it out on this guy this appears to be some kind of sedimentary rock one oh did i chip something no no that’s not anything

Okay well ultimately we’re destroying the pickaxe before we’re managing to make any kind of progress on the rock it’s just it’s not hard enough okay so while the first version was really authentic to minecraft from a functional perspective it’s obviously pretty terrible considering it splits if

You even so much as look at it too hard the truth is breaking stone is really freaking difficult so in addition to a mini pickaxe that i made out of suriname ironwood to give our big pickaxe the absolute best possible odds of success i got my

Hands on a massive piece of the hardest densest wood on earth lignum vitae this wood is super freaking rare and insanely expensive with this one piece being over 500 which is a great reason to consider supporting the channel on patreon this stuff is so dense that it actually sinks

In water and at least by going off the janka hardness scale lignan vintay is rated at nearly six and a half times harder than pine or around 4 500 pounds of force if any wood was going to break through rocks lignum vite was gonna be it holy crap this thing weighs

Like a boatload that’s insanity my dude to maximize the strength i only curved the top of the pickaxe and i attached it to a durable hickory sledgehammer handle made long enough to maximize my mechanical advantage unlike the first version the size and weight of this pickaxe is actually pretty similar to the metal

Ones you can buy in stores so i was feeling pretty good about this pick’s odds of success okay so we are back at the same river where we filmed last time uh and we still have the same rock here however uh it rained a little bit today is that

Rain out here right now i sure hope not i probably don’t even need to whack very hard honestly should break right off yeah that’s not even challenging wow i don’t even think that dented the wood it did something but not really i mean look at that especially compared to

The kind of damage it was doing to the other pickaxe i found some different kind of rock i don’t know what kind specifically don’t ask me but i can tell that it’s sedimentary rock you can tell that it’s an aspen tree because the way it is all right lignum

Vitae pickaxe versus cetera entry rock yo now that’s breaking a rock there we go clean in half baby yo dude that was bad so we’re having a little trouble trying to break a whole boulder with this thing whoops but the reason for that is that it’s not pointy like

At all the real reason pickaxes have such a fine tip is that it allows them to put a ton of force on a very small area unfortunately if we were to shape our pickaxe to match the tip would go dull instantly and probably either split the

Wood or break off soon after but what if we could combine the strength of our super durable wood with an ultra hard tip and then i thought about flint in real life flint is an insanely hard material in fact the reason it’s used to make sparks in a flint and steel

Is because it’s hard enough that it flakes off hot bits of metal on contact conveniently for us flint is obtained in minecraft without using any tools meaning steve could get his hands on some in the early game and use it to maximize the wood pickaxe’s potential

Okay we’ve returned to the rock one last time the flint is embedded in the back of this pickaxe here right so as i contact the rock the flint will contact first hopefully chipping into the surface and removing some material yo when the flint’s not breaking let’s go we’re actually getting some decent

Damage like okay that was the first chip of flint that i’ve seen yet so before i destroy this entire thing i’m going to give this one really good whack all right well that part didn’t really work so the other thing i want to see is what if i

Just take my piece of flint and then use a hammer with it how we chip away at the rock because this is something that steve could have done too I mean we’re definitely making some progress you guys can’t really see it but here that’s a chip that just came off this rock because we were using flint so we obviously can’t break straight through rocks but steve doesn’t necessarily need to do that it takes quite a few seconds

For him to break through most of this stuff which says to me is probably taking little chips which we saw this can do which is actually pretty freaking amazing if we’re being honest with ourselves as impressive as this was the pickaxe was barely making any progress not to

Mention it didn’t even make a dent in the granite i tested it on later so can we say minecraft wooden pickaxe works in real life while you can certainly break stone with a wooden pickaxe as hard as i tried actually mining stone out of solid blocks in any kind of reasonable time

Unfortunately seems to be totally fictional so i’m gonna have to say this one’s just not reality but before you go i also had some obsidian that grace helped me get while i was in utah and i got some interesting results when i tried to break it which i’ll show you

Right after thanks to today’s sponsor audible a lot of people say it takes me a long time to put out these videos and that is kind of true but this time you can sort of blame audible see every month with audible you get a credit that you can spend on whatever

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Free for 30 days by going to audible.com wise or texting wise to 500 500 again that’s audible.com w-e-i-s-z thank you to audible and let’s get to those last couple tests so like i said i tested both picks on obsidian and despite minecraft claiming it to be the hardest stone in the game

In real life it’s actually super fragile holy crap and even the weakest pickaxe was able to shatter it with ease we just annihilated that thing in a weird way this does technically mean you can break both the hardest and softest stones in minecraft just literally nothing in between