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break: To turn the block into the little floating thing that you can pick up.

destroy: To completely obliterate a block, not even leaving a little floating thing.

Given those definitions, the question is very simple. I had read about TNT mining at another question, but when I tried it, it exposed a solitary diamond. I thought this was odd because I'd never seen one block of diamond ore by itself before, which prompted this question:

Do explosions destroy stuff?

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  • The TNT mining strategy is because less (not sure how much less) ore gets destroyed by TNT than normal (like it's 70% for normal blocks and it might be like 50% for ore). However there are mods that make it 0% ore get destroyed, so it's feasible with that mod.
    – Mr Smooth
    Sep 2, 2011 at 4:33

2 Answers 2

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17

Yes, they can.

Mining using TNT might be faster than mining by hand but it is impractical for gathering resources; about 70% of the blocks are completely destroyed in the process.

Source

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26

Well, because I like to blow stuff up I'm not the kind of guy to be satisfied by mere Wikis, I did some experimentation:

BEFORE: enter image description here

AFTER: enter image description here

As you can see, the blast broke 9 blocks, yet I only collected 4.

So, SCIENCE(!) says that yes, explosions do destroy stuff.

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