Shovel

Shovels are auxiliary tools used to ease the process of collecting dirt, sand, gravel, clay and snow (as opposed to using bare hands). Shovels are not required to remove aforementioned blocks, although snowballs can only be obtained by shoveling snow.

Crafting
Shovels are created with 2 sticks and 1 unit of a tool material:

Performance
The following table summarizes the speed at which different quality shovels perform on different block types.