Tool

Tools are items used by the player while held to perform actions faster and more efficiently, to gather materials not obtainable by hand, to gain information, or to perform completely new actions. With the exception of the clock and compass, tools do not stack in the inventory. Tools can be repaired; see Item Repair.

Item durability
A use is counted only if a player completely breaks apart one block or hits a mob. If a block is partially broken this is not counted as a full use.

Note that certain uses cause either no damage or twice as much damage as normal to the tool (tested for vanilla versions 1.2.3 and 1.3.1):

1. using a shovel, pickaxe or axe on a mob (hostile, neutral or farm animal) counts as two uses;

2. using a sword on any mob or animal counts as one use

3. using a hoe on any mob or animal counts as no uses;

4. using a shovel, pickaxe or axe to break a block counts as one use;

5. using a sword to break a block counts as two uses

6. using a hoe to break blocks counts as no uses.

Proper use of tools will maximize their durabilities. Assuming a player uses a tool appropriately, the following list shows the maximum durabilities for tools of each material type.


 * Wood - 60 uses
 * Stone - 132 uses
 * Iron - 251 uses
 * Gold - 33 uses
 * Diamond - 1562 uses

Note: Although gold tools have lower durability, they do the work fastest.

Note: A Diamond Shovel does the same damage as a Wooden Sword. This might come in handy.

Diamond tools vs. gold tools
Gold tools mine blocks the fastest of all tools in the game and have the highest enchantability (making it possible to get Silk Touch with a level 1 enchantment, which is impossible with another tool tier), however they also have the fewest uses (33) and cannot harvest most ores. Most players with the resources use diamond tools instead, which are nearly as fast and have 1562 uses before breaking. Since enchanted tools often gain unbreaking or efficiency, which are of limited use on a golden tool, making and enchanting a gold tool is wasteful, unless the player is trying to get silk touch with the fewest experience levels spent as possible. Fortune is also of little use on a golden pickaxe, which can't mine important ores like diamonds. However, since gold is now renewable, players may prefer gold tools over diamond tools in small scaled mining operations since they may want to reserve the rare, non-renewable diamonds for large scaled projects.

History
Jeb told us around 1:30 in his DreamHack presentation that it would be possible to upgrade tools, which is now known as Enchanting.

From snapshot 12w18a, wooden tools became able to be used as fuel for furnaces in case players didn't want to repair them or finish using them.

Trivia

 * If you switch from a more valuable to a less valuable tool, without releasing the mouse button, just before a block breaks, the time required will be similar to using the former tool, while the mined block will be counted against the latter's durability. This is true for shovels, axes and pickaxes. However, in the case of pickaxes, this only works if the latter can mine this type of block, e.g. for iron and stone pickaxe while mining iron ore it would work, but for diamond and iron pickaxe while mining obsidian it wouldn't. The time and material saved from this method is, however, limited.