Weight, Carrying & Blocks

Everything you carry has a weight and a volume, and breaking or moving blocks costs time and stamina.

Weight and volume

Every item in the game has two properties: a weight (how heavy it is) and a volume (how much space it takes up). A full solid building block is bulky — one nearly fills your hands on its own; small items like seeds, bones, or torches are tiny.

These two properties do very different things.

Volume is a hard cap

Your body carry is split into two separate budgets:

• A hands budget of about 1 m³ for bulky items — anything bigger than pocket size: a block, tools, boards. A full building block nearly fills it on its own, so you can manage roughly one at a time.
• A pockets budget of about 0.30 m³ for small items — each one 0.05 m³ or smaller (seeds, flint, nuggets, food, a coil of rope). The two are additive: filling your pockets never eats into your ability to carry a bulky thing, and vice versa.

When a budget is full, extra items of that kind simply aren't picked up. They stay on the ground in the world, exactly like a full vanilla inventory — nothing is thrown away or destroyed.

To carry more, see Storage & Transport — a woven basket raises your hands budget, and a backpack adds separate storage.

Weight is a soft penalty

Weight never stops you cold; it just wears you down.

• The heavier your load, the slower you move. There's no penalty up to about 8 kg; from there the slowdown scales down to the slowest crawl — roughly 35% of normal speed — at about 45 kg.
• Jumping under a load costs extra stamina — the heavier you are, the more each hop up a hill or a step drains.
• A heavy load also makes swimming harder — see Weight in the water below.

The carry bars

Three bars — hands, pockets, and weight — appear only while your inventory is open, not on the always-on HUD. Each fills as its budget is used and turns amber, then red, as it approaches the limit.

Chests are volume-capped too

Storage containers hold a real volume, not a fixed slot count:

Container	Capacity
Chest (27 slots)	1 m³
Double chest	2 m³
Barrel	1 m³

• Functional blocks like furnaces, blast furnaces, and crafting stations are uncapped — their inventories work normally.
• Partial placement: dropping a big stack into a near-full chest deposits what fits and leaves the rest in your hand, rather than refusing the whole stack.

You can't throw blocks away

Block items are meant to be built with or stored, not littered:

• Dropping a solid building block is refused — whether you press the drop key or drag it out of the inventory window, it's handed straight back to you. (Small placeable things like seeds, saplings, and torches drop normally.)
• Heavy items barely toss. The heavier a thing is, the weaker the throw; by around 20 kg an item just plops at your feet with no horizontal travel.

(Death drops are untouched — dying still scatters your things normally.)

Weight in the water

A heavy load affects swimming:

• Carry more than about 22 kg (one full block weighs roughly 30 kg) and you sink slowly — a steady, unstoppable descent, not a plummet.
• The more you haul, the faster your stamina drains while you swim.
• Being submerged also chills you — extra cold on top of the effort. See Body Temperature.

Break times

Every block you break costs stamina and takes real time:

• Stone with an iron pick takes about 20 seconds; deepslate and ore run up to ~60 seconds.
• Packed earth is slow, heavy work: dirt takes around three in-game minutes with a shovel and is near-hopeless by hand, and dense clay is slower still. Loose sand and gravel scoop faster — roughly a minute a block. A shovel is far faster than bare hands (bare hands are fixed-speed, so no other tool beats them at digging).
• Grass has to be cleared first. Breaking a grass block doesn't hand you a block of dirt — it strips the turf off, leaving bare dirt in place that you then dig out like any packed earth. Clearing the grass is its own job: laborious by hand (pulling grass and roots, ~26s) and quicker with a hoe or shovel (~9s). So turning a grassy field into a pit is honestly two stages — de-turf, then excavate.
• Progress is saved if you stop partway. Leave a dig and return, and the crack resumes where you left off. A barely-scratched dig (under ~10% done) heals back to a pristine block instead of leaving a permanent chip.

Realistic reach

You can only break or place blocks within about 3 blocks (down from vanilla's ~4.5); reaching entities is shorter still, about 2.5 blocks. (Creative keeps the long vanilla reach.)

Trees and leaves

Felling trees depends on your tool tier — the wrong tool barely bites. Full details are on Tools & Crafting.

Leaves feel like real foliage and are slow, tugging work either way:

• Breaking leaves by hand yields snapped sticks and leaf litter — not a tidy leaf block (hand is roughly 12× slower than normal).
• An axe or hoe shears the whole leaf block free (roughly 3× slower than normal).
• Either way, vanilla saplings and apples still drop.

Leaf litter is a fire tinder.

Soil has no cohesion — dig with care

Loose soil doesn't float. Dirt, grass, coarse dirt, podzol, mud, and the like fall like gravel the moment nothing holds them up — undercut a dirt wall or knock out the block beneath one and it collapses. (Sand and gravel already did this in vanilla; clay is cohesive and stays put.) You can't build a floating dirt bridge or leave an overhang hanging in the air.

Timber holds up the roof

Real diggers don't tunnel through bare earth — they shore it. Undercut soil stays put as long as there's a grounded structural support within about 4 blocks horizontally: a placed beam, post, plank, log, or stone wall — anything solid that stands on something. More loose soil doesn't count; only real timber or masonry bears the earth.

So a proper dugout is buildable:

• Set posts or beams as you dig and the earth between supports holds — you can hollow out a room or run a tunnel without the ceiling caving.
• Dig past the reach of any support (more than ~4 blocks from timber) and the unsupported span still collapses.
• A bare-earth room with no supports caves in, because soil can't hold soil. Keeping a dugout open is an investment in timber or stone, exactly as real excavation demands.

This is what makes a dug root cellar an earned build rather than a free hole: you shore the roof, and the cool covered space it creates keeps your food for weeks.

One current limitation: pulling out a support doesn't instantly drop the roof it was holding — collapse near a removed beam is checked the next time that spot is disturbed, so it can lag rather than cave the moment the timber is gone.

Rammed earth — shore with dirt, not timber

If you have no timber to spare, there's an older way: ram the earth firm. Hold a rock or a smithing hammer and sneak + right-click a block of soil to tamp it. It's hard, tiring work (each tamp costs stamina), but packed rammed earth:

• won't cave on its own, and
• bears load like a post — a tamped column shores the soil around it within the same ~4-block span a timber would.

So you can keep a dugout open by ramming a few earth pillars instead of felling trees — paid for in sweat instead of timber. A tamped block is also committed to structure: no longer a loose set-down block, so it breaks slow again (you can't quick-pull it back up). Only the dirt-family soil that actually caves can be tamped.