Hardness here is not a property of a block. It is a property of a construction — how thick it is, what it is layered against, what is buried inside it, and how well the middle is confined. Ten grades, four terms, one penetration march. Everything on this page is generated from the same file the server and the client mod read.
The hardest block in the game, laid one deep. It is capped at 20 and there is nothing behind it.
Ordinary rock you can mine by the thousand — but each course behind the first is confined, and confined rock does more work.
A diamond wall is a bad wall. Not because diamond is weak — it is genuinely top grade — but because a wall one block thick is a bad wall, and that is the true thing this whole system was built to say.
If hardness is a property of a block, then exactly one block is the best block, every serious base in the game is built out of it, and every serious base looks identical. That is not a balance problem you can tune your way out of — it is what a one-dimensional stat does. Changing the numbers only changes which single block everyone spams.
So hardness here is a property of a construction. Which is also how real fortification works, and it is worth being precise about why: reinforced concrete does not stop a shell because concrete is hard. Concrete is not especially hard. It stops one because it is thick, because it is reinforced, because it is layered against materials that fail differently, and because it is confined so it cannot spall away. Every serious protective structure ever built is a sandwich, and the recipe is the engineering — not the shopping list.
That is also the anti-diamond mechanism, without banning diamond. Diamond genuinely is hard, so it genuinely is top grade. But every single block's contribution is capped at 20, and depth is where the real numbers come from.
Ordinal and non-linear, like the real Mohs scale: the step from H9 to H10 is far bigger than the step from H3 to H4, exactly as diamond is several times harder than corundum despite sitting one place above it. The grade is what you quote; the points are what the maths uses.
Many blocks share a grade on purpose. If each grade held one block there would be one correct block per job and every base in the world would be built out of the same six things. Look at how wide these rows are — every chip in a row is worth exactly the same to a wall, so picking which one to build with is a purely visual decision and it costs you nothing.
| grade | name | points | blocks that grade here |
|---|---|---|---|
| H10 | SUPERHARD | 20pts | obsidiancrying obsidiannetherite blockdiamond blockancient debris
5 examples · every one of them worth 20 to a wall |
| H9 | METAL | 13pts | iron blockgold blockemerald blockiron barsiron dooriron trapdoor
6 examples · every one of them worth 13 to a wall |
| H8 | HARDENED | 10pts | copper blockexposed copperweathered copperoxidized coppercut coppercopper gratecopper bulbamethyst blockbudding amethyst
9 examples · every one of them worth 10 to a wall |
| H7 | DENSE | 8pts | deepslatecobbled deepslatepolished deepslatedeepslate bricksdeepslate tilesblackstonepolished blackstone bricksgilded blackstonebasaltpolished basaltsmooth basaltdripstone blockmagma block
13 examples · every one of them worth 8 to a wall |
| H6 | DRESSED | 6pts | tufftuff brickspolished tuffstone brickschiseled stone bricksmossy stone brickssmooth stoneprismarinedark prismarinepurpur blockend stoneend stone bricksquartz blockquartz brickscalcite
15 examples · every one of them worth 6 to a wall |
| H5 | STONE | 5pts | andesitepolished andesitegranitepolished granitedioritecobblestonemossy cobblestonestonenetherracksandstonesmooth sandstonered sandstoneresin block
13 examples · every one of them worth 5 to a wall |
| H4 | FIRED | 4pts | bricksnether bricksterracottawhite terracottawhite concreteblack concreteblue concretered concretepacked mudmud bricksblack glazed terracotta
11 examples · every one of them worth 4 to a wall |
| H3 | TIMBER | 3pts | oak planksspruce planksdark oak plankswarped planksoak logcrimson stembookshelfbarrelchestbamboo planksbamboo blockscaffolding
12 examples · every one of them worth 3 to a wall |
| H2 | GRANULAR | 2pts | sandred sandgravelclaydirtcoarse dirtmudsnow blockpowder snowsoul sandsoul soilglasstinted glassblack stained glassicepacked ice
16 examples · every one of them worth 2 to a wall |
| H1 | YIELDING | 1pts | white woolred woolblack wooloak leaveshay blockspongeslime blockhoney blockmoss blockglowstonesea lanternshroomlightlanterncobwebwhite carpet
15 examples · every one of them worth 1 to a wall |
Real glass sits around 5.5 on the Mohs scale — harder than steel. Here it is H2 GRANULAR, worth 2 points, because a fortification does not care how hard a material is to scratch. It cares how it fails, and glass fails catastrophically and all at once. Anything brittle grades below what its scratch hardness would suggest; anything with give grades above it.
A short list of blocks is immune and is checked before the scale — bedrock, barriers, command blocks, portal frames. Nothing gets through them at any energy. They sit outside the system entirely, so no weapon table can ever reach them by growing a number.
Grades are matched highest first, so a name that contains two materials grades as the harder one. Every row below is the answer the live model gives, resolved at build time:
| block | grades as | points | why it is a trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| deepslate bricks | H7 DENSE | 8 pts | contains "brick" — but the deepslate rule is asked first |
| polished blackstone bricks | H7 DENSE | 8 pts | contains "stone" and "brick" — blackstone outranks both |
| stone bricks | H6 DRESSED | 6 pts | contains "stone" — the dressed rule is asked before the raw one |
| sandstone | H5 STONE | 5 pts | contains "sand" — it is rock, not fill |
| mossy cobblestone | H5 STONE | 5 pts | contains "moss" — but cobblestone is asked first |
| glass | H2 GRANULAR | 2 pts | harder than steel on the real Mohs scale, and it shatters |
| bedrock | IMMUNE IMMUNE | ∞ | outside the scale entirely — not "H11" |
| some block from a future update | H5 STONE | 5 pts | a block this table has never met |
The last row is the important one: an unrecognised solid grades as STONE, never as zero. Minecraft keeps shipping blocks, and the failure mode of a block the table has not met yet must be "an ordinary wall", not "a free hole in your base".
A coarse tier, deliberately coarse. Many visually different blocks share a tier, so choosing how a wall looks is free. It is the smallest of the four terms and that is the point.
The dominant term. A block at the exposed face has a free surface to spall into and is doing the least work it ever will. Bury it and it has nowhere to go. This is what makes thickness the answer instead of magic material. Counted in solid courses defeated, so a hollow wall confines nothing.
Different tiers stacked against each other beat a homogeneous mass of either — the shock has to cross an interface and the two failure modes do not line up. Spaced armour, burster slabs, rubble cores. Homogeneous mass is the lazy wall.
Bars, grates and chain embedded in the mass — rebar. Worth nothing bolted on the surface, worth a lot inside, exactly like the steel in reinforced concrete.
A weapon carries a penetration budget, in the same units as hardness. It walks the shot line; each block it meets subtracts its local hardness from what is left. When the budget runs out the round stops there. Everything it got through is destroyed; everything past it is not.
The budget is spent, not compared. Checking each block against the full penetration in isolation would mean a weapon that beats one course beats forty — which is the same "one magic block" failure the scale exists to avoid, just inverted.
No single block, however exotic, may contribute more than 20 points. This is the line that kills the diamond base: beating a heavy weapon is always a question of how much wall there is, never of what one course is made of.
Bars, grates, chain and wall blocks add +6 — but only once they are behind the face. A grate bolted to the outside of your bunker is decoration.
Where two courses differ by 4 points or more of grade, the inner one costs ×1.25. Same reason spaced and composite armour exist.
A loose granular course between two hard layers bleeds a blast budget to ×0.7 — the shell detonates on the upper slab, the sand eats the pressure wave. Against a shaped charge, a metal jet rather than a pressure wave, it does almost nothing. That difference is what makes ammunition choice a real decision.
Confinement is the one term a shaped charge does not pay, and that is the entire reason HEAT ammunition exists. Depth works by denying a block anywhere to spall to — it is a statement about pressure, and a jet does not push the wall, it burns through it. Equal budgets into eight courses of deepslate: the jet reaches course 5, the slug stops at 3. Against a thick homogeneous wall, buy layers rather than more of the same rock.
A wall that almost failed still hurts whoever is behind it — the back face lets go even though the round did not come through. It is why you do not shelter with your back against the wall being shot, and it stops "it held" from meaning "you were fine".
Checked before the scale, not at the top of it. Bedrock and friends are outside the system so a weapon table can never reach them by growing a number.
Tuned so that the interesting answer is "it depends on the wall". If everything bounces the system is decoration; if everything penetrates it is not a system at all. The band that matters is two to five courses of structural stone, because that is what people actually build.
The top three are published deliberately and are not built yet. A protection scale has to be designed against the heaviest thing that will ever hit it — otherwise the day the first missile ships, every wall in the world is instantly obsolete and the whole scale gets rebalanced from scratch. Publishing the ceiling now means the bunker somebody digs this month is still a bunker next year.
| weapon | pen | radius | kind | courses of deepslate to hold it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| frag / grenade | 10 | 2 | blast | 2 |
| 82mm mortar | 18 | 3 | blast | 3 |
| FPV concussive warhead | 22 | 2 | shaped | 3 |
| railgun | 28 | 0 | kinetic | 3 |
| breaching charge | 35 | 2 | blast | 4 |
| VAGRANT strike wing | 45 | 4 | shaped | 6 |
| tank HE | 30 | 4 | blast | 4 |
| tank HEAT | 60 | 1 | shaped | 8 |
| cruise missilePLANNED | 80 | 6 | shaped | 11 |
| ballistic missilePLANNED | 140 | 10 | kinetic | 13 |
| bunker busterPLANNED | 200 | 3 | kinetic | 18 |
blast — pressure, big radius, burster courses work against it · shaped — a jet: narrow, deep, ignores burster · kinetic — a solid slug: narrow, defeated by mass alone. The last column is computed by marching each weapon into a wall of deepslate brick until it fails to come out the other side.
Stack it a course at a time and watch the number move. This runs the server's own march() — the same function, inlined from the same file — so it cannot tell you something the server will not honour. Build the diamond wall, then add three courses of deepslate behind it and watch the mortar stop dead.