Item (entity)

Items are "dropped" blocks or items (non-block resources) that appear in the world, rather than being in the inventory of a player or block entity; they are a type of entity.

Appearance


Items have two possible appearances, generally corresponding to whether the item appears as a 3D or 2D shape in a player's inventory screens. 3D items appear as their 3D shape, miniaturized to about $1/4$ scale, while 2D items appear as $1/2$ scale with all the pixels extruded into a cube. Both types slowly rotate and bob up and down.

Item entities that represent a stack of more than one item appear as several items stuck together. Stacks of 2-16 appear as two items, 17–32 as three, 33-48 as four, and 49+ as five.

Behavior
Item entities come from many sources. Some common ones are:
 * The death of a mob or player.
 * A block that is mined by a player, destroyed by an explosion, or washed away by water.
 * An inventory item tossed by pressing the drop item key (default on PC,  on Xbox, / on Nintendo Switch,  on PlayStation) or dragging a stack outside of an inventory window.
 * In the mobile versions of, items in the hotbar can be dropped by pressing on the item's slot. The entire stack is dropped.
 * A container (other than an ender chest or shulker box) that is destroyed while holding items inside.

The item entity can transfer its items when the player is within one block of it, measuring from the center of where they contact the ground. As many items as can fit in the player inventory, excluding the armor slots, are transferred. If any item is transferred, a "plopping" sound is played. If all items are transferred, the items appear to move into the center of the player. The item entity never physically moves, however, which means it can appear to go through lava and blocks in its path. This can happen through blocks that are thinner than a full block, but also through the shared edge of two full blocks. Unlike experience orbs, multiple item entities can be picked up instantaneously. Dropped items have a delay of 10 ticks between appearing and being able to be picked up, or 40 ticks if thrown by a player, dolphin, or fox.

When two stackable items of the same type come within 3/4 of a block of each other, they merge into a single stack if the resulting stack size does not exceed that item's maximum stack size.

Items do not collide with other entities and are only moved or stopped by blocks.

If an item is within a solid block, then it flies out one of the unobstructed sides, or out of the top of the block if surrounded by solid blocks on all sides. It does this even if space below is unoccupied; therefore, it is possible to recover an item dropped by breaking a hole in a floor by quickly placing another block there.

Items visually disappear when the player is about 16 blocks away from them, and reappear when they get closer. This distance can be adjusted by the "Entity Distance" slider in video settings.

Unlike most entities, items cannot be spectated in spectator mode.

Item pickup range for players is 1.425 blocks.

Damage
Items cannot be attacked by players or mobs; attempting to do so simply hits through them. However, they take damage and disappear from environmental or block-based damage such as explosions, fire, lava, a falling anvil, and contact with cactus. Items have essentially no health, so they are destroyed by the slightest damage, though if set on fire they may remain for a few seconds before disappearing. Nether stars are immune to explosions, and netherite-based items and tools are immune to fire and float on top of lava.

Despawning
Items despawn after 6000 game ticks (5 minutes) of being in a loaded chunk. If two item stacks merge, the timer is set to the item that has more time remaining. The 5-minute timer is paused when the chunk is unloaded. Nether Stars do not despawn.

ID




Entity data
Dropped items have entity data associated with them that contain various properties of the entity.

Trivia

 * , the oldest standing bug in the Minecraft bug tracker, involves item entity positioning being incorrectly handled.
 * If you spawn an item with /summon, but don't specify what the item is, it won't spawn in anything and says in chat "Summoned new Air".