Crafting Table

"One recipe that pretty much everyone memorises from the first time they play Minecraft is how to make a crafting table. It's four planks arranged in a square, of course. You'll also find crafting tables occasionally in the wild - in village libraries, witch huts and igloos. Who knows what those witches are crafting?"

- Duncan Geere

A crafting table allows the player to craft a variety of blocks and items.

Obtaining
Crafting tables can be mined with or without any tool, but axes are the quickest.

Natural generation
Crafting tables naturally generate in witch huts and the basement of igloos. Crafting tables generate in woolen tents outside pillager outposts and in some small village houses.

Crafting
Pressing on a crafting table will open the 3×3 crafting grid that allows the player to craft many more items than are available with the crafting grid in the inventory.

The recipe book is available to the left of the crafting grid (collapsed by default $$, expanded by default $$), which stores crafting recipes for reference and one-click crafting.

Fuel
Crafting tables can be used as a fuel in furnaces, smelting 1.5 items per crafting table.

Trivia

 * The application icon for Java Edition is a crafting table, since 1.6.1.
 * 1.6.2 had a strange icon like RubyDung versions.
 * Before that, the icon was the Java icon.
 * After 1.6.2, the icon is changed again.
 * The original inventory screen before January 29, 2010 was the crafting table interface, meaning there was no way of putting on armor yet, and the player could not be seen.
 * None of the tools you see on the side of the table are real tools in-game.