Minecraft Miners Are Stronger Than Superman

I've been playing Minecraft lately. A lot actually. Today while driving to work I thought about how much would all that material weight that the miner is carrying around with him in the game. I didn't have the answers while driving and I wouldn't have the answers now at work if it weren't for an AC unit that went offline last night.

Apparently last night at some point, the air handler in the lab shut down and all the equipment started heating up. This morning there were emails about it and when I tried to get onto my VM development host, it was not there. Apparently everything is down.

The AC was repaired but now we wait until everything is cool enough to stop tripping heat protection gear and allow the units to come up.

So I had some time.

I looked up some weights and have the following approximations to work with.

sword, about 5 pounds

pickaxe, about 5 pounds

shovel, about 5 pounds

1 cubic meter of dirt, about 3200 pounds

1 cubic meter of stone, about 2700 pounds

1 cubic meter of coal (bituminous), about 1900 pounds

1 cubic meter of obsidian, about 5200 pounds

1 cubit meter of iron ore, about 11,300 pounds

There are 27 inventory slots and 9 hot slots for a total of 36 possible items in inventory. Stone, dirt, and coal can stack 64 units per slot.

For regular mining, I tend to have one sword, at least 3 picks, a couple shovels, and food (survival mode). That means I will be picking up dirt and cobblestone with hopefully a load of coal and iron. If I am deep mining, diamonds and emeralds, but let's assume that is not the case.

So just starting out I have 30 pounds of tools and maybe 20 pounds of food. That 50 pounds of supplies is just a tiny drop in the bucket as you will see.

Let's say I mine until fully loaded in inventory and have only my sword, 1 pick remaining, 6 full slots of coal, 4 full slots of iron ore, 8 full slots of dirt, and 16 full slots of cobblestone. How much does that weigh?

Remember, each inventory slot holds 64 items.

10 pounds of tools

6 * 64 * 1900 = 729,600 pounds of coal

4 * 64 * 11300 = 2,892,800 pounds of iron ore

8 * 64 * 3200 = 1,638,400 pounds of dirt

16 * 64 * 2700 = 2,764,800 pounds of stone

That is a total of 8,025,600 pounds, or roughly 4,000 tons.

Oh yeah, and 10 pounds for the sword and pick and maybe 5 pounds of food, but really 15 pounds doesn't really factor into the equation at those scales.

So there you have it. If Minecraft miners were real people, they would be capable of carrying 4,000 tons of material with them as they actively mine and walk.