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! 

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.

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!