One of the most fundamental activities in Minecraft is crafting, which is how you create a majority of the useful items in the game. You’ll take basic components and combine them to create something new and ultimately more useful or valuable to you. Without crafting, you would not be able to have a sword, a torch and other essential tools for making your way through the game world. It is absolutely necessary for progressing through the game and creating the kind of structures that you’d like.
We’re going to provide you with a broad look at crafting and what you need to do in order to create on a basic level and make some of the most important items in the game.
Basic Crafting
In countless Minecraft clones, crafting the basic items you need to survive could not be any simpler. All you need to do is take the necessary components for your item and move them into the crafting menu. Just combine them there to create the item you want. So long as you have whatever it takes to make the item you want, it will appear once you have combined them.
There are two types of crafted items in Minecraft- those that you can arrange on the crafting menu in any order you want and those that need to be arranged in a specific order to be created. The first is called shapeless crafted items, and these are obviously the easiest to pull off. Anything that needs to be in a certain order to craft may be a bit trickier to make, and you may need to do some trial and error to get it right.
There are lots of guides on how to make items in Minecraft, so if we don’t cover what you are looking for here, you can always search for further item crafting instructions online or just use a recipe book found in the game.
The Recipe Book
Yes, we mentioned that Minecraft is simple enough that you don’t need a recipe book, and you truly don’t. You can craft items without the book, but unless you know the combination, the recipe book may come in handy for you as you try to make new items. As with cooking in real life, you may already know how to make the food you want, but it can help to look at the recipe book now and then to get some pointers or to remember a list of ingredients that you can’t quite recall.
The recipe book has items listed in a specific order. All the recipes you have unlocked are listed first. Next, are the tools, the weapons, and the armor. After that is a tab for building materials. The fourth tab is for food items, and the fifth tab is for Redstone items.
Your Resources
Before you can craft anything, you are going to need the basic components. You can find ingredients with which to make items scattered all over the game world. You will find some in treasure chests, some by defeating enemies, some just lying around in the world and others by destroying items in the world. For instance, attacking a tree can give you wood, which you can use to make all sorts of crafted items.
Remember to gather your resources in the daytime, if you can help it. At night, it’s a lot harder to collect much of anything, not only because it’s harder to see the items you are looking for but also because of the abundance of mobs.
You can only store a limited number of resources in your inventory at a time. So, if you are planning to make something substantial, you will need to plan. You may not actually be in the proper biome or world type to gather the resources you need to craft what you want. If that’s the case, then switch to another biome that has more of the resources you are wanting. You can usually store up to 64 of a given item in a single slot, but it has to be the same item. Once you run out of space in your inventory, you can always create chests to store more items than you could carry. Of course, that means you have to go back to the chest to gather the resources when you need them, and that can be annoying at times.
Crafting Basic Items
Now let’s look at how you can build some of the most commonly used items in the game. Once again, if we don’t have it listed here, then you can always look it up in your recipe book or online to find the proper combination to make what you want.
Torch – All you need is a stick and coal or charcoal. This is one of your most useful items, as you’ll use it as a light source to help you navigate your way through the dark and to help prevent mobs from spawning near you at night.
Pickaxe – This is one of the most important tools for gathering resources, but it takes resources to make it. You can use two sticks and three of just about any type of hard ingredient to make a pickaxe. What you use to make the pickaxe will determine what kind of pickaxe you wind up with. For instance, if you make it with iron, you will get an iron pickaxe. If you make it with gold, then you will get a golden pickaxe. Each type of pickaxe has a limited number of uses, and the stronger the material you make it from, the more use you can get out of it. For instance, an iron pickaxe gives you 251 uses before it breaks down and needs replacing. If you are resource gathering, you should always have enough items on hand to make a new pickaxe.
Blocks – You can use blocks to construct solid structures, and how many of each raw material you need to make the block will be determined by what kind of block you are making. It takes four bricks to make a brick block, for example, but nine pieces of gold to make a gold block.
Sword – Like the pickaxe, the material you choose to make your sword from determines what kind of sword you end up with and how powerful and useful it is. All you need is a stick and three of any given item that can be used to make a sword. You can make sword with gold, wood, iron, diamond or stone. The stronger substances make for more damaging swords.
Bread – This is one of the easiest food items to make, so it will likely be the one you make the most. All you need are three pieces of wheat, which you can get by attacking standing wheat in the game. If you grow your own wheat, you can have an endless supply of bread to refill your health and stave off starvation.
The game will instruct you on how to make a lot of the basic items, so we won’t go into detail on how much of what resource you need to craft all of them. The game does a good job of guiding you along with crafting specific items, and if you need to look up anything, you can always consult your recipe book.
The Crafting Table
Have you tried to create an item that takes more than four ingredients but have not been able to do so? You start out with a basic 2×2 grid where you can craft most basic items. However, if you want to craft 3×3 recipes, then you need to build a crafting table.
To make a crafting table (also called a workbench), you will need four blocks of wood. Just combine them in the crafting menu, and you’ll have a crafting table. This will open up a lot more options for you, and it should be one of the first items you build. Of course, you want to place it in the safety of your home, so that you can continue crafting at night and so that nothing happens to your table and the items you are building.
From the crafting table, you will be able to make all of the rest of the items in the game. You still use the same crafting mechanic that we have covered already, and it remains just as simple. Your grid that you have to work with, however, becomes much bigger, allowing you to create more complex constructs.
Some items need to be three items wide in order for them to work. So, if you are just placing them in any arrangement on the crafting table or in the crafting menu and no new item is appearing, try changing up the configurations. Once you experiment with this mechanic a little bit, you should get the hang of it, and you will be crafting items in no time.
Conclusion
That’s all there is to it. Crafting can seem somewhat convoluted and complex on paper, but in actuality, it is incredibly simple and intuitive. Although many players have been memorizing crafting recipes for years, all of the essential crafting in the game is fairly simple and easily accessible to newer players. After all, it is Minecraft. In any case, you now know what it takes to craft the items you need to make it out in the world of Minecraft.
