Barrel

Overview

A barrel is a chest that does not need headroom. It holds the same 27 slots and interacts with hoppers and comparators exactly as a chest does, but it opens regardless of what is above it — you can bury a barrel in a wall, put it under a staircase, stack them solidly floor to ceiling, or set one into a floor with a carpet on top, and every one of them still opens. That single difference makes it the better choice for compact storage walls, and the reason many players use barrels exclusively once they have wood to spare. Barrels never merge into doubles, so a row of them is a row of 27-slot containers rather than a set of 54s, which is sometimes an advantage for sorting. The recipe is cheaper in practice than a chest for anyone with a tree farm: six planks and two slabs, all from the same logs. A barrel is also the fisherman's job site block, so placing one beside an unemployed villager turns them into a fisherman who trades emeralds for string, buys cooked fish, and eventually sells enchanted fishing rods.

Storage in tight spaces where a chest cannot open, compact stacked storage walls, hidden containers under carpets, and the job site block that turns a villager into a fisherman.

Barrel is a storage block in Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.4. Barrel is made at a crafting table. Hardness 2.5 puts it in the middle of the pack for mining speed.

It drops as the same block you mined. With a blast resistance of only 2.5 it will not survive an explosion. Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot.

The recipe calls for Oak Planks and Oak Slab. It is not used in any crafting recipe.

How to get it

Craft it from 6 wooden planks and 2 wooden slabs of any type — roughly 2 logs in total. Barrels also generate in taiga village fisherman houses and in some shipwreck and outpost rooms.

Tips

A barrel opens with any block above it, which makes it the only container that works inside a solid wall.
Barrels never form doubles, so plan 27 slots each rather than expecting a 54-slot pair.
Set one into a floor and cover it with a carpet for storage that is completely invisible.
Place a barrel by an unemployed villager to make a fisherman, who is one of the cheaper emerald trades early on.

How long it takes to break

Barrel sits at hardness 2.5: 3.8 seconds per block with your fists, 0.45 with the correct netherite tool.

Iron manages 0.65 seconds and diamond 0.5, which makes iron the tier that changes how this block feels.

No particular tool tier is required: any tool, or none at all, still yields the drop, so the table below is about speed rather than about whether you get anything.

Each Efficiency level adds level² + 1 to the tool's speed, so a level V tool clears this about 3 times faster than an unenchanted one.

Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand	3.8 s	3.8 s	3.8 s
Wooden	1.9 s	0.35 s	0.15 s
Stone	0.95 s	0.3 s	0.15 s
Iron	0.65 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Diamond	0.5 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Netherite	0.45 s	0.2 s	0.15 s
Golden	0.35 s	0.2 s	0.1 s

Properties

Barrel resists blasts at 2.5, which is not enough to survive anything explosive nearby. Light does not pass through it, and it emits none of its own. A single slot takes 64, the usual full stack. The block is tagged for axes, and only that class gets the speed bonus; everything else mines at bare-hand rate. As furnace fuel it burns for 15 seconds — one and a half smelting operations.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Any
Fuel value: 15 s