How to craft

As you may have suspected, crafting is a big part of playing Minecraft. You don’t have to craft, but then it’s likely you won’t get very far in the game. How you approach crafting is your choice. But if you are curious about the art of craft, let’s look at the basics together! 

Starting to Craft

First, let’s prepare! You can’t craft something out of nothing, even though that would be both very cool and inspiring and probably somehow break the fabric of the universe. For our first example, we’re going to craft something that will help you in the rest of your crafting endeavors – a crafting table! 

The crafting table allows you to use all the crafting recipes in Minecraft. There are a lot of basic items that you can craft without a crafting table, like blocks for building, tools for mining, and armor for safety (and style!). But whether you’re crafting from your inventory or at a crafting table, you will always need two things: a crafting recipe, and supplies!

Crafting Recipes

Just like flour, eggs, and milk make pancakes, the right combination of supplies will make a certain item. To find a crafting recipe, open your recipe book. You can find it in your inventory or at a crafting table. If you’re playing Java Edition, you can also find it in the furnace and smoker. 

The recipe book is organized into tabs to help you find different types of recipes, but you can also search for specific items. If you select something from the recipe book, the supplies needed for that recipe will appear in your crafting grid. If you don’t have the necessary supplies, they will be highlighted in red. 

Unlike real-world food recipes, there aren’t any substitutions. You need to follow the crafting recipe to the letter, including placing your supplies in the grid by themselves or in a stack. But just like real-world food recipes, there is a lot of fun in deviating from the formula because you might discover something new!

Crafting Supplies 

Minecraft is filled with things that you can use to craft. Use your recipe book as a guide, or let your imagination run wild and see if you can hit the jackpot! 

The supplies we need for a crafting bench are four planks. It doesn’t matter what type of wood, any plank will do. Now, where do we find planks? Wait a minute. We’re going to have to craft them. I guess that will be the very first example! No need to feel bamboozled, you’re getting two lessons for the price of one.

Planks are made of wood. Wood grows on trees. Head over to your nearest tree, extend your arm, and start punching. Yup, you read that correctly. Punching a tree is one of the very first things we all do in Minecraft, so let’s get to it! 

After a few punches, wood blocks should be floating around you. To collect them, all you need to do is walk nearby and they will appear in your inventory unless it is already full.

You won’t need to punch things to get any other supplies in Minecraft. Unless you really want to and are prepared for it to fail most of the time. Different types of supplies require different methods, like ore is mined with a pickaxe, sculk is carefully extracted with the silk touch enchantment, and water is scooped up in a bucket. 

Now that we’ve got our supplies in order, it’s time to craft! 

Crafting in Minecraft

Open your inventory. This is where you can see all the items you’re carrying, the armor you’re wearing, your recipe book, and the crafting grid. The crafting grid is made up of four empty square slots with an arrow pointing to a fifth empty square slot under “Crafting”. 

Place the supplies you want in the grid, in this case a wood block. Select the “Craft” option and pat yourself on the back. You just crafted in Minecraft! Now you have four planks, which is the exact amount we need for a crafting table. 

The Crafting Table 

And that’s all there is to it! Now that you know the fundamentals, it’s up to you to go out into the Minecraft world and discover the many, many, many crafting recipes out there. 

Happy crafting!