Crafting 101
Alongside mining, crafting, or creating new materials, is the most important game mechanic in Minecraft. There are hundreds of materials that can be crafted in the game. See here for an exhaustive list of crafting recipes.
Crafting is how you create blocks, tools, and other materials in Minecraft. You can begin crafting by hitting “E” on your keyboard to open up your inventory. The inventory allows you to craft some basic objects using up to 4 ingredients.
To expand your crafting abilities, you can build a crafting table. The crafting table opens up 9 slots and allows you to create a much wider variety of items. For most items ingredients need to be placed in the proper order for the recipe to work correctly. This is known as a fixed recipe. If ingredients can be placed in any order with the same result are known as shapeless recipes.
Tools
Tools are essential in Minecraft. They allow you to build mine the survival world with efficiently, defend yourself, and more. They also help you find things that you couldn’t with just your hands. Check out the video below to learn how to craft some of Minecraft’s basic, but extremely important and useful tools.
These tools can be crafted using different materials: wood, gold, stone, iron, or diamond. The tools are crafted by placing the materials in a specific order on your crafting table.
In order to be the most efficient, tools should be used for certain activities that they’re made for. The shovel is used for digging and collecting snowballs, but you wouldn’t use it for cutting down a tree. That wouldn’t be very efficient. You’d use the axe to cut down the tree, the pickaxe for mining blocks and minerals, the hoe for farming, and the sword for killing mobs.
Each tool in Minecraft has a durability rating. When that tool’s durability rating hits zero, the tool breaks and you’ll have to craft another one. However, the better the material, the longer lasting the tool. Wood can be used around 60 times. Gold 33 times. Cobblestone 132 times. Iron 251 ties. Diamond 1,562 times.
You don’t have to craft a new tool when one is damaged. You can repair the tools instead. All you have to do is place two of the same damaged items on your crafting table and they combine to create one new tool.
Smelting
Furnaces can be used to smelt ores, turning them into ingots, cook food and more. They can be crafted at the crafting table with 8 stone blocks. Right click on a furnace to use it. Coal or wood can be used as fuel by placing it in the bottom slot.
Head over to the official Minecraft wiki to learn more about crafting and find a complete list of crafting recipes.