What is the fastest way to dig a hole in Minecraft

As a survival game, Minecraft players are destined to spend a lot of time underground, mining for resources. And while there is a peaceful element to monotonously strip mining while hunting for Minecraft's rarest resources, reducing the amount of time spent staring at flat gray stones is always good.

Detailed below is the combination of status effects required for the quickest mining speed possible in the game, so players can spend less time hunting for resources and more time actually using them.

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Minecraft's different mining speeds

Regular Mining

Breaking obsidian by hand is not recommended (Image via Mojang)

To figure out the quickest way to mine, there needs to be a baseline mining speed to compare against - this is the regular mining speed. An unenchanted diamond pickaxe will take 9.4 seconds to break obsidian. For comparison, this same block would take more than a minute to break by hand.

However, thanks to some of Minecraft's best enchantments and powerful beacon effects, there are much faster ways to break blocks.

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Efficiency

Enchanting is the easiest way to get efficiency (Image via Mojang)

Efficiency is an enchantment placed on nearly any tool in a Minecraft enchanting setup that increases the speed at which the player can break blocks. Each level of efficiency increases the speed to break blocks by five percent, with the first level of the enchantment starting out at 25% faster.

This means that at max level, efficiency V, players can mine 45% faster. This would reduce the example of obsidian from breaking in 9.4 seconds to roughly 5.2 seconds - already a significant increase.

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Haste

Full-power beacons can be quite expensive (Image via Mojang)

Haste is much harder to get than efficiency. It can be obtained only through powered beacons, requiring large numbers of valuable blocks of resources to create.

However, each of the two levels of this Minecraft status effect increases mining speeds by 20%. This means that Haste II will increase a player's mining capabilities by 40%. This reduces the time it takes to harvest obsidian with a diamond pickaxe from 9.4 seconds to 5.64 seconds - not quite as fast as efficiency, but it does not rely on durability as a tradeoff.

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Putting it all together

It's when they are combined that these mining speed increases really help. Haste two and efficiency five stack with one another, resulting in the player having a mining speed increase of 85%. This allows instant mining of most of the game's common blocks, such as dirt, stone variants, deepslate variants, and more, drastically reducing mining times for everything else.