Tool tiers: only 94 blocks care, gold is exactly as limited as wood, and copper is stone
Of every block in Minecraft, 94 require a tool tier at all — and just 5 need diamond. Gold and wooden tools are excluded from identical lists, and copper matches stone exactly.
Tool tiers feel like a ladder with six rungs. In the data they are four exclusion lists, and two pairs of materials are literally identical. Counted from Mojang's shipped tag files for 26.2.
Only 94 blocks require a tier at all
| tag | blocks |
|---|---|
needs_stone_tool | 77 |
needs_iron_tool | 12 |
needs_diamond_tool | 5 |
That is 94 blocks in the whole game that care what your pickaxe is made of. Everything else drops for any correct tool type, wooden included.
And the diamond tier is five blocks: obsidian, crying_obsidian, netherite_block, respawn_anchor, ancient_debris. That is the entire reason diamond tools are a mining requirement rather than a durability preference.
The iron tier is twelve, and it is the one people actually meet: diamond ore and block, emerald ore and block, gold ore and block, redstone ore, and their deepslate variants.
Gold is exactly as limited as wood
Each material has an incorrect_for_<material>_tool tag, and they are defined by referencing the needs-tags rather than by listing blocks:
| tool | cannot mine |
|---|---|
| wooden | needs_stone + needs_iron + needs_diamond |
| gold | needs_stone + needs_iron + needs_diamond |
| copper | needs_iron + needs_diamond |
| stone | needs_iron + needs_diamond |
| iron | needs_diamond |
| diamond | — |
| netherite | — |
Two exact ties fall straight out of it:
- Gold and wooden tools have identical restrictions. A golden pickaxe mines faster than any
other tool in the game and cannot mine iron ore — the same list a wooden one cannot. Its speed buys nothing at the bottom of the ladder.
- Copper and stone are the same tier. Copper is not an intermediate step between stone and
iron; the exclusion lists are the same tag references.
Diamond and netherite exclude nothing
Both incorrect_for_diamond_tool and incorrect_for_netherite_tool are empty. There is no block a netherite pickaxe can mine that a diamond one cannot.
So the smithing upgrade buys durability, speed and the lava-immunity of the item — never access. If your reason for upgrading is "so I can mine X", there is no X.
Pickaxe is 81% of everything
Of the 512 blocks carrying a tool tag: mineable/pickaxe 417, mineable/axe 55, mineable/shovel 21, mineable/hoe 19.
The pickaxe is not one of four tools, it is the tool, and the other three are specialisations over a small remainder. For a datapack adding a block, mineable/pickaxe plus the right needs_*_tool is almost always the correct pair — and leaving both off means the block drops for anything, which is the actual default.
What this means at the anvil and the smithing table
- Upgrading diamond → netherite is never an access decision.
- A golden pickaxe is a speed tool for stone and ores that need no tier, and nothing else.
- If a block will not drop, the tier is only one of 94 possible causes — check the
mineable/* tag first, because a missing tool TYPE tag fails the same way a missing tier does.