Copper Grate — Minecraft block

Overview

The copper grate, added in 1.21, is a full-sized block with holes in it, and the holes are the point. Light passes straight through it, water flows through it, and mobs cannot spawn on it — which makes it the tidiest way in the game to cover a hole, floor a walkway or roof a farm without either blocking light or creating a spawnable surface. It is not transparent in the glass sense; you can see through the pattern, and it reads as industrial metalwork rather than a window, which is why it turned up immediately in machine-room and ship builds. It can be waterlogged, and water flows down through a grate the way it flows through a fence gate hole, which makes it useful as a drain over a water stream or as the floor of an item collection system where you want the water underneath to keep moving. Like every copper block it oxidises through four stages and can be waxed at any of them with honeycomb or scraped back with an axe. Endermen cannot pick it up and pistons push it normally.

Floors and covers that do not block light and cannot be spawned on, drains over flowing water, and industrial detailing in builds where glass or iron bars would look wrong.

In Minecraft 1.21.4, Copper Grate is a building block. Copper Grate is made at a crafting table. Hardness 3 puts it in the middle of the pack for mining speed.

Mine it with a stone pickaxe or better, or you get no drop at all. Broken correctly, it drops itself. Because it is transparent it does not block light.

A full stack holds 64. It is crafted from Block of Copper. The stonecutter is the cheaper route: one Block of Copper gives one of these.

The one thing it makes is Waxed Copper Grate.

About the copper set

How to get it

Craft 4 grates from 4 copper blocks, which is 36 copper ingots for 4 blocks. Copper is the most abundant ore in dripstone caves around Y 48, so the recipe is expensive only if you have not mined one.

Tips

Mobs never spawn on a grate, which makes it a cheap way to mob-proof a large open floor.
Water flows through it vertically, so use it as a drain grille over a collection stream.
It oxidises like every copper block; wax with honeycomb to freeze the colour you want.
Light passes through it fully, so a grate roof over a farm keeps crops growing while keeping mobs out.

Version notes

Copper grates were introduced in 1.21 (Tricky Trials) and are unchanged in 1.21.4.

How long it takes to break

At a hardness of 3, Copper Grate takes 15 seconds to punch out and 0.5 seconds with a netherite-tier tool of the correct class.

Iron manages 0.75 seconds and diamond 0.6, which makes iron the tier that changes how this block feels.

It will break below stone, and you will get nothing for it. That combination of time spent and drop lost is the classic mining mistake.

Efficiency adds its level squared plus one to the tool speed, so Efficiency V is about 3.3 times faster than the same tool unenchanted.

* breaks the block but yields no drop
Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand *	15 s	15 s	15 s
Wooden *	7.5 s	1.3 s	0.55 s
Stone	1.2 s	0.35 s	0.15 s
Iron	0.75 s	0.3 s	0.15 s
Diamond	0.6 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Netherite	0.5 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Golden *	1.3 s	0.7 s	0.4 s

Properties

Copper Grate has a blast resistance of 6, so a nearby explosion will usually destroy it. It lets light through and emits no light of its own. A single slot takes 64, the usual full stack. The block is tagged for pickaxes, and only that class gets the speed bonus; everything else mines at bare-hand rate.

Transparent: Yes
Required tool: Stone Pickaxe