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. Since 12w06a there is a rare chance that Zombies drop an iron shovel.

Uses
A shovel is used to dig some materials faster. A shovel is not required to advance forward in the game, it only makes the removal and collection of some materials faster.

Materials that shovels dig more efficiently

 * Clay
 * Dirt
 * Grass
 * Gravel
 * Mycelium
 * Sand
 * Snow
 * Snow Block
 * Soul Sand

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 with a red background indicate that no resource will be dropped when the block is destroyed without a shovel. The best type of shovel is, without a doubt, the diamond shovel because of its quick block destruction and high durability. However, diamonds are hard to find in the beginning so the best alternative is an iron shovel. Iron is much less rare than diamond, and iron ingots and iron shovels are renewable resources because they are rare drop from Zombies and can also be dropped from iron golems. In addition, according to the table, an iron shovel digs all blocks just as fast or with a 0.05 second (barely noticeable) difference.

Video
Schaufel Shovel/es Pelle Ásó Schep Łopata Лопата 锹