Minecraft --- Crafting

Minecraft --- Crafting




If mining is the essence of Minecraft, crafting is the lifeblood. Without the
ability to craft tools and weapons, you'll just be a sitting duck for mobs and
you won't be able to do anything.

Crafting is when you use a workbench to make stuff. Most of the time, the
positions you put the materials in resembles the tool you'll make. In your
inventory screen, the crafting spot is the 2x2 square spot to the right of
the the picture of your character. On a workbench, you have a 3x3 space to
use.


Now here are some examples of objects. Note that you can sub in other
materials in place of the wood I have here. So you can sub out wood for stone,
iron, or diamond. You can sub in gold also, but it's terrible as a building
material so... don't. Oh, and as a side note, when I say "wood", I mean the
planks, not the tree trunks. So keep that in mind. And when I say "produces 4
from one". I mean that one building material produces 4 of whatever you're
crafting. Only works for some things though.




The beginner's pickaxe will always be wood, since that is the first thing
you're likely to gather. But wood pickaxes break REALLY quickly (it makes me
wonder how a wooden pickaxe works at all...) and you'll need something better.
The first thing the beginner should mine is plain stone. This gives you
cobblestone, which can replace wood in your pickaxe recipe. It lasts MUCH
longer than wood, and it's abundant. It'll be your material of choice until
you stumble across some iron.


The beginner player should go for stone pickaxes as quickly as possible. Here
is a good rule of thumb: make 2-4 wooden pickaxes (depending on how much wood
you have), and use them all on stone and coal until all break. Then, make as
many stone pickaxes as you can, mine more stone, and make more pickaxes. You
may even come across a cavern in your exploits. Caverns are basically open
caves underground, many have walls lined with all sorts of good things. Use
caverns for your primary mines, since they save a lot of digging and have
plenty of room to move around.

The Workbench and your Forge are kind of the same. You "smelt" stuff in the
forge in the same manner that you craft stuff in the workbench. The forge has
it's own unique crafting interface. You have a box, which is above some wavy
lines, which in turn are above another box. The top box is for what you're
smelting. So if you put iron ore up there (the stone with brownish stuff),
you come out with iron bars, which are used to make stuff that needs iron. The
bottom box is for the fuel to burn. You can use either wood planks or coal.
Wood burns up really fast (I can only get 2-3 iron bars out of one wood), but
coal burns up slowly (8-9 iron bars from one coal). Since coal isn't that hard
to find, use it if you have a surplus. Wood is okay in a pinch, such as if
it's nighttime and you're not on peaceful.

The list of smeltable items are as follows:

Iron
Cobblestone
Sand
Tree Trunk

I might be missing a few, but I'll add them in later if needed.

You can smelt cobblestone to make regular stone (from which you get
cobblestone normally), but it seems like a waste to me. It's up to you if you
want to use it though.

Smelting sand gives you glass. Glass is used for windows. Kind of obvious, but
you can do some neat stuff with glass. Note that torches can't be placed on
glass.

New in v1.2, you can now 'smelt' wood to get Charcoal. It works the same as
coal, in that you can use it to make torches. You gather tree wood, but do not
turn it into wood planks. Instead, you leave it in tree form, and put it in
the top square in the forge. Then 'smelt', and you have a coal replacement.
This is great in that you don't have to hope for nearby coal on the first
night, you can get 8 cobblestones and build a forge, smelt wood, and use
charcoal instead. Note that the wood 'smelted' is tree trunk.



SLABS



Note that you can sub in cobblestone or sandstone for the stone in the below
recipe. Also, the stone below is the regular stone that you mine to get
cobblestone, and that you get when you smelt said cobblestone.