Pickaxe

Pickaxes are one of the most commonly used tools in the game, being required to mine all ores and many other types of block. Different qualities of pickaxe are required to successfully harvest certain ores and blocks. For example, while coal ore can be mined with any pickaxe, gold ore must be mined with an iron pickaxe or better, or else the player will harvest no ore. Better pickaxes also mine many materials faster (see the Speed and Durability table below).

Uses
A pickaxe is used for obtaining "stone" resources. Some of these resources are:
 * Stone
 * Cobblestone
 * Mossy Cobblestone and Monster Spawners
 * Brick Blocks
 * Obsidian
 * Ores
 * Glowstone

A pickaxe is only required to actually be able to pick up these blocks or the things that they drop after they have been mined. You can break all of these blocks by hand, but you will not be able to pick up the block or the drop. The only reason for the different kinds of pickaxes is so that you have to have a certain pickaxe in order to obtain things like diamonds. This means that if you have a wooden pickaxe and you mine a diamond block, you will not be able to pick up the diamonds that would come out of the block had you used a stone, iron or diamond pick.

Crafting
Pickaxes are crafted using 2 sticks and 3 units of a tool material:

Speed and Durability
The following table shows the time it takes to break each type of block. Values marked with an asterisk and a red background indicate that it cannot be harvested by that quality of tool. (Note that some blocks, like Ice, don't drop anything even when they are "harvested.") If there is no tool that helps speed up mining the block, the row will have a grey background.

Trivia

 * Before Beta 1.2, the pickaxe had less durability and gold pickaxes acted like wooden ones.
 * Notch said pigmen would hold iron pickaxes in the future, alongside Iron Swords.
 * The Pickaxe is featured in the "Time to Mine!" and the "Getting an Upgrade" achievements.
 * Before Beta 1.6.6, Glowstone acted like a glass type block but now it has been changed to a stone type block requiring a pickaxe.