Smooth Stone Slab — Minecraft block

Overview

Smooth Stone Slab is a stone-family block in Minecraft Java Edition 1.21.4. Smooth Stone Slab is made at a crafting table. Hardness 2 puts it in the middle of the pack for mining speed.

Mine it with a wooden pickaxe or better, or you get no drop at all. Broken correctly, it drops itself. Sixty-four fit in one inventory slot.

The recipe calls for Smooth Stone. A stonecutter can cut it straight from Smooth Stone, with nothing wasted. It goes into exactly one recipe: Armor Stand.

How long it takes to break

Smooth Stone Slab has a hardness of 2. By hand that is 10 seconds per block; with the correct tool at netherite tier it is 0.35 seconds.

You are looking at 0.5 seconds on iron and 0.4 on diamond — the iron step is where the time actually falls.

A weaker tool still breaks it, but anything under wooden returns nothing — you spend the time and lose the drop, which is how most veins get wasted.

Each Efficiency level adds level² + 1 to the tool's speed, so a level V tool clears this about 3.5 times faster than an unenchanted one.

* breaks the block but yields no drop
Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand *	10 s	10 s	10 s
Wooden	1.5 s	0.25 s	0.15 s
Stone	0.75 s	0.25 s	0.1 s
Iron	0.5 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Diamond	0.4 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Netherite	0.35 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Golden	0.25 s	0.15 s	0.1 s

Properties

Blast resistance on Smooth Stone Slab is 6, so an explosion nearby will usually take it out. It stops light entirely and gives off no light. 64 fit in a slot — a full stack. A pickaxe is fastest here; any other class mines it at bare-hand speed, because the bonus only applies to the class the block is tagged for.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Wooden Pickaxe