Shovel

Shovels are auxiliary tools used to ease the process of collecting dirt, sand, gravel, clay and snow. Shovels are only necessary to collect snowballs from snow; all other blocks for which shovels are useful can be successfully harvested by hand.

Crafting
Shovels are crafted using 2 sticks and 1 unit of a tool material:

Speed and Durability
The following table summarizes the speed at which different quality shovels perform on different block types. Values marked with (*) and highlighted in red indicate that no resource will be dropped when the block is destroyed by that quality of shovel.

Although Soul Sand has "sand" in its name, shovels do not help when digging it!