Mine an entire ore vein with one swing

Setup

Equip a pickaxe or appropriate mining tool in your main hand. Make sure you have enough durability to break multiple blocks, as the entire vein will consume durability proportionally.

Breaking the vein

1. Locate an ore vein underground (copper, iron, gold, diamond, lapis, etc.)

2. Press and hold Shift on your keyboard to enter crouch mode

3. While still crouching, left-click any block that is part of the connected vein

4. The entire connected ore cluster will break at once, and all blocks will drop as items

Tips

• The vein miner only breaks blocks that are directly connected to the block you clicked. Ore blocks separated by stone won't be included.
• Tool durability is consumed for each block broken, so a large vein will use more durability than a single block.
• Enchantments like Silk Touch and Fortune will apply to all blocks in the vein, just as if you'd mined them individually.
• If you mine without crouching, only a single block will break normally.