Tuff — Minecraft block

Overview

Tuff is the mottled grey-green stone that generates in blobs deep underground, most commonly below Y 16, and around the outside of amethyst geodes. For years it was a texture and nothing more: no variants, no recipes, no reason to collect it. That changed in 1.21, which gave tuff a complete building family — polished tuff, tuff bricks, chiseled tuff, and stairs, slabs and walls of each — and made it, alongside copper, the material trial chambers are built from. That structural role is why the family exists: a player who wants to extend or repair a trial chamber, or build something that matches one, needs tuff in quantity. As a palette it sits usefully between stone and deepslate, greyer than andesite and warmer than deepslate, and the brick and chiseled variants have a texture detail that plain stone lacks. It has a hardness of 1.5, the same as stone, so it is quick to mine, and the stonecutter handles the whole family, which makes it cheap to work with once you have found a decent blob. One good blob below Y 16 will cover an entire build without a second trip.

The tuff building family added in 1.21 — polished, bricks, chiseled, stairs, slabs and walls — and matching or extending the architecture of a trial chamber.

Tuff counts as a stone-family block in Minecraft 1.21.4. There is no way to craft it; you have to find it and mine it. Its hardness of 1.5 makes it a normal, unhurried block to mine.

Anything below a wooden pickaxe breaks it without leaving a drop. It drops as the same block you mined. It stacks to 64.

Its main value is as a crafting ingredient: 13 recipes need it, Polished Tuff, Tuff Slab, Tuff Stairs and 10 more among them.

About the tuff set

How to get it

Mine it with any pickaxe below Y 16, where it generates in large blobs, and around the outside of amethyst geodes. Trial chambers are built from it, so a chamber is effectively a tuff quarry.

Tips

Look for it below Y 16 in blobs and as the outer shell of every amethyst geode you break into.
Use a stonecutter: the whole 1.21 tuff family comes off it in 1 click with no material loss.
Tuff has a hardness of 1.5, the same as stone, so it mines far faster than the deepslate around it.
It is the trial chamber's own material, which makes it the right choice for building anything that should match one.

Version notes

Tuff existed from 1.17 as a plain block. The polished, brick and chiseled variants and their stairs, slabs and walls were added in 1.21 (Tricky Trials).

How long it takes to break

Tuff has a hardness of 1.5. By hand that is 7.5 seconds per block; with the correct tool at netherite tier it is 0.25 seconds.

You are looking at 0.4 seconds on iron and 0.3 on diamond — the diamond step is where the time actually falls.

The block still breaks with a weaker tool, but below wooden it yields nothing at all — the time is spent and the drop is lost, which is the single most common way players waste a vein.

Efficiency adds its level squared plus one to the tool speed, so Efficiency V is about 2.5 times faster than the same tool unenchanted.

* breaks the block but yields no drop
Tool	No enchantment	Efficiency III	Efficiency V
Hand *	7.5 s	7.5 s	7.5 s
Wooden	1.2 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Stone	0.6 s	0.2 s	0.1 s
Iron	0.4 s	0.15 s	0.1 s
Diamond	0.3 s	0.15 s	0.1 s
Netherite	0.25 s	0.15 s	0.1 s
Golden	0.2 s	0.15 s	0.1 s

Properties

With 6 blast resistance Tuff usually goes down to a nearby explosion. It is fully opaque and produces no light. 64 fit in a slot — a full stack. It is not renewable: what the world has is all it will ever have. The block is tagged for pickaxes, and only that class gets the speed bonus; everything else mines at bare-hand rate.

Transparent: No
Required tool: Wooden Pickaxe
Renewable: No

Drops

Mined with Wooden Pickaxe, Tuff drops itself.

Tuff

Used to craft

Tuff is an ingredient in 11 recipes, producing Tuff Slab, Tuff Stairs, Tuff Wall, Chiseled Tuff Bricks, Polished Tuff Slab, Polished Tuff Stairs, Polished Tuff Wall, Tuff Brick Slab, Tuff Brick Stairs, Tuff Brick Wall, and Tuff Bricks.