Copper armor and tools are officially coming to Minecraft as part of the upcoming copper update. Instead of chopping the local flora with a flimsy stone axe, early-game players will soon be able to use tools made from sterner stuff.

Although the attack power is the same as their stone equivalent, in terms of durability and mining speed, copper tools and armor perform better than stone, but worse than iron. The question is, do you really need copper items to bridge this gap? Why not swap your stone gear for iron, like the good old days?

Should you make copper tools?

Upon starting a new game of Minecraft, you must use whatever your bare hands can get — which is wood, mostly. As hacking away at rocks with a wooden pickaxe merely yields stone, not ore, upgrading to stone tools is the logical next step. From there, you can finally mine raw iron and start working on a full iron loadout — at least, that’s how it used to be.

While playing on Minecraft’s test branch, I found it significantly easier to obtain a large stack of copper ore compared to iron ore, as each block of copper drops twice the number of resources. Naturally, this makes it easier to craft copper tools and armor, despite requiring the same number of ingots. No surprises there.

I also noticed a significant improvement in mining speed when comparing copper axes and pickaxes to their stone predecessors. True, iron is even faster, but stone to copper felt like a greater jump in efficiency.

That said, I still prefer to upgrade from stone tools to iron tools. Part of the reason is that, despite the higher resource rarity, iron tools don’t require a high number of ingots. As you usually start mining copper and iron at the same time, you’ll likely find enough iron ore on your first mining trip to craft an iron axe, pickaxe, and more. But even more importantly, I wasn’t able to mine any redstone, gold, diamonds, or emeralds with the copper tools. I considered bringing both copper and iron tools on my next mining trip (copper for basic resources, iron for special stuff), but I might as well use iron only and benefit from the higher speed and durability.

Should Mojang decide to make copper ore mineable with the wooden pickaxe (which, after testing it in the update preview, doesn’t seem to be the case), copper tools would become far more valuable as the next step before iron— but then again, this would disturb the natural order of the blocky world far more severely. It’s probably best to let copper tools remain an optional step, one that should be skipped if possible.

What about copper armor?

Copper armor sets, on the other hand, are amazing. Although the full copper armor set provides 5 armor points instead of the iron set’s 7.5 armor points, crafting the copper set saves you from a choice between safety and progression. Requiring a whopping 24 ingots in total, full outfits are costly, so I usually end up wearing a leather fit as I spend my hard-earned iron on tools, weapons, buckets, compasses, shears, and other useful items. With copper being little more than a fancy building material up until now, spending it on armor seems a wise idea.

Speaking of the uses of copper, beware that you may want to save some copper ore to craft a copper golem. Furthermore, as the copper update is still in its testing phase, keep in mind that some of the functionalities and stats may be changed before the update’s full release. But based on what we know so far; yes, copper armor and tools are good in Minecraft, predominantly as an iron-saver.

If you’re eager to test the copper armor and weapons yourself, you can do so by enabling Minecraft’s experimental features. As of this writing, the copper update is only available for testing in Minecraft Bedrock Edition, but it will be added to Java snapshots in the future.

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