Are Enchanted Blocks Worth Making? The Second Compression

A Commerce Journey — Episode 12. Real economics, measured against live Hypixel Skyblock Bazaar data.

Episode 11 was about what happens when you try to buy in size. This one is about what happens when you try to produce in size, and it starts with a question every Skyblock player eventually asks about their island.

You have a minion. You put a Super Compactor in it, so instead of raw cobblestone it now spits out enchanted cobblestone. Good trade, obviously. So why not compress again? Turn the enchanted cobblestone into a block of the stuff and carry on up the chain.

I assumed the answer was that it keeps working, just a bit less well each time. That is what diminishing returns means. I was wrong about the size of the effect, and wrong about the direction on most of the items I checked.

1️⃣ What one compression is worth

The test is simple enough to state. Take a chain of three items where each one is 160 of the one below it. Raw diamond, enchanted diamond, enchanted diamond block. Price all three, divide by how many raw units each contains, and you get the value of one raw diamond in three different forms.

If compression were value-neutral, all three numbers would be identical.

A raw diamond instant-sells for 5.44 coins. Held as enchanted diamond, the same diamond is worth 7.46. That is a 1.37x gain for pressing materials together, and it is the reason everyone runs a compactor.

Across the eight chains I could price, the median first step is 2.29x. Gold is the extreme case at 30x, because raw gold ingots are close to worthless and enchanted gold is not.

2️⃣ What two compressions are worth

Now do it again. Enchanted diamond into an enchanted diamond block.

The diamond chain holds up. The block is worth 7.82 per raw diamond against 7.46 for the enchanted form, a gain of 1.05x. Slim, but positive.

Most of the others do not hold up. Only 3 of the eight chains gain anything at all on the second step. The median is 0.69x, which means the typical second compression hands back 31% of the value of what you put into it.

Coal is the one that made me re-run the numbers twice. Enchanted coal is worth 8.24 per raw coal. Compress 160 of those into a block and the same coal is worth 0.98, or 0.12x. You have taken 25,600 pieces of coal, performed a legitimate in-game craft, and destroyed 88% of the value.

Nothing was lost physically. The block still contains every piece of coal that went into it, and you can take them back out. What changed is what anyone will pay you for it.

3️⃣ The same coal, three ways out

Percentages are easy to shrug at, so here is the arithmetic on a fixed pile. Take 25,600 raw coal, which is exactly the amount that goes into one enchanted coal block, and walk it out of your island by each of the three routes.

Sell it raw and you get 128,413 coins. Compress it once into 160 enchanted coal and you get 211,064. Compress it twice into a single block and you get 25,000.

The gap between the best route and the worst is 186,064 coins on one pile, and the worst route is not the lazy one. It is the one that took the most crafting, the most compactor upgrades and the most deliberate effort.

Iron sits in the middle and is worth a look because it is less dramatic. One block's worth of raw iron sells for 43,520, the enchanted form for 93,936, and the block for 48,202. The second step costs you about half. Not ruinous, easy to miss, and repeated every time the minion fills up.

That last part is what makes this worth an episode. A one-time loss you notice. A loss of 49% applied automatically to everything a minion produces, for as long as the minion runs, is the kind of thing that quietly decides how rich you are after a month.

4️⃣ Where the value went

The answer is on the next chart, and once you see it the whole thing stops being mysterious.

Raw coal trades 46.9 million units a week. Enchanted coal trades 6.8 million. Enchanted coal blocks trade 91,488. Not million. The market you have just compressed your way into is 74 times smaller than the one you left.

This is the same finding as Episode 11 arriving from the other direction. There I measured how few items could absorb a large order. Here the item cannot absorb a large order because almost nobody trades it, and the price reflects that rather than the contents.

A block is a bulk container. The people who want bulk are the same people who were already buying the enchanted form by the thousand, and they have no reason to pay a premium for it arriving pre-stacked. Meanwhile every casual buyer, which is most of the volume, wants a quantity smaller than one block.

5️⃣ How much I trust this

The pattern is visible when you plot the two against each other.

Chains whose block market is close in size to their enchanted market keep their value. Quartz loses the least volume, at 5x, and is the only chain that clearly gains on the second step at 1.46x. Coal loses 74x of its volume and keeps 0.12x of its value.

The correlation is -0.60. I want to be careful about how much weight that carries, because it is eight points. Eight points will produce a correlation that size fairly often by chance, and one of the eight, bone, sits well off the line: its block market is 189 times smaller than its enchanted market, by far the largest collapse in the set, and yet it keeps 0.81x of its value. Drop bone and the correlation goes to -0.84, which is the kind of improvement you should distrust on principle when it comes from removing one inconvenient point.

So the honest version is this. The mechanism makes sense, the direction is consistent across the set, and the sample is too small to put a number on. I would want a few dozen chains before claiming more, and Skyblock does not have a few dozen chains.

6️⃣ This is what diminishing returns actually is

The textbook version uses a farm. One worker on a field produces some amount. Two workers produce more, but not twice as much, because they start getting in each other's way. Keep adding workers and each new one contributes less than the last, until eventually one of them contributes nothing.

The formal name for what each additional unit contributes is marginal product, and the law of diminishing marginal returns says that past some point it falls. Note what the law does not say. It does not say output falls. It says the increase in output falls.

Key characteristics of a diminishing-returns curve:

• Early additions give large gains, which is where the compactor sits
• Later additions give smaller gains, which is where the block sits
• Past some point additions give nothing, and the curve goes flat
• Past a further point additions actively hurt, which is negative marginal returns

Compression chains reach that last stage, which is unusual and worth sitting with. The second step on coal does not merely add less than the first. It subtracts. That happens in the real world too, and it usually means the constraint has moved somewhere you were not looking.

7️⃣ The thing that got better

One number improves as you climb the chain, and I nearly missed it.

The gap between the instant buy and instant sell price on raw diamond is 45%. On enchanted diamond it is 7%. On the block it is 2.8%. The same narrowing happens on every chain in the set.

Episode 10 found that the gap tracks unit price rather than trading volume, and this is that finding turning up again in a place I did not plan for. A block is expensive, so its gap is tight, even though hardly anyone trades it. If you had been using the gap as a health check on the block market you would have concluded it was the healthiest item in the chain.

8️⃣ What to do with your minions

Three things follow.

Run the first compactor on everything. A median gain of 2.29x for a one-time purchase is not a close call, and it is the single highest-value upgrade available to a new island.

Check the second one per item rather than as a rule. On diamond and quartz it is fine. On coal it is a way of setting money on fire slowly, and the game will let you do it without a warning.

When you check, look at weekly volume rather than price. Price tells you what one unit is worth to someone. Volume tells you whether that someone exists in the numbers you are producing.

Real-world parallel: this is the standard problem with moving up a value chain, and it catches real businesses constantly. A supplier decides to stop selling components and start selling finished assemblies, because the assembly has a higher price per component inside it. Sometimes that works. Often the assembly market is a tenth the size of the component market, the extra margin is smaller than the volume lost, and the move that looked like capturing more of the chain turns out to be leaving most of the customers behind.

9️⃣ What I could not measure

The obvious gap is that I priced compression at instant-sell. A patient seller placing an offer does better, and the gap on blocks is narrow, so the block tier looks slightly less bad on orders than it does here. It does not change the ranking and it does not save coal.

The other gap is time. The eight chains are one snapshot. A block market that is dead this week may not have been dead last month, and thin markets move around a lot precisely because they are thin.

Go and look up the item your main minion produces, then look up the compressed version of it, and compare the weekly volume rather than the price. That comparison takes about twenty seconds and it decides whether your next upgrade is worth buying.

Coming next: Opportunity cost. What an hour of farming, an hour of dungeons and an hour of flipping actually pay, and why the highest number on that list is not the one most players chase.

Prices and volumes from the Hypixel Bazaar API on 2026-09-05. Compression ratios are the standard 160-to-1 used throughout Skyblock. Values are instant-sell, divided by the number of raw units each item contains.