Tutorials/Organization

Organization is a very important habit to get into in Minecraft. Organization helps with finding things quickly and easily, especially later in the game when you have collected a lot of materials. It takes a long time to find what you need when it is cluttered up. This tutorial is geared more towards people that prefer to store items in specific categories.

Storage
Early on in the game, you find that one double chest will be able to fit most of your items, such as wood, weapons, and tools. However, to progress further in the game, you will eventually need to make storage rooms with categorized chests to store items. Chests and shulker boxes are some of the most important blocks in the game. Here are the basic steps for organizing everything into a good sense of order.


 * Build a large room for all your chests. If you are tight on space, you can embed some chests into the floor or make chest “shelves”. Note that it is possible to stack chests directly on top of one another. You can also, as of Java Edition 1.13, sneak and place chests right next to each other. If you are not on 1.13 (The Update Aquatic), or are on Console Edition, and you want chests right next to each other, then alternate double chests and double trapped chests. This will allow you to have them next to each other.
 * If you are not tight on space, you may want to place signs or item frames next to, above, or on the chests to label them and make categorizing easier. To place a sign or item frame on a chest, place it while sneaking.


 * Don't make conspicuous rooms for rare items in multiplayer.


 * Make your storage facilities sturdy and impenetrable. Don't forget to light up the room so mobs can't spawn inside.


 * Cats can jump onto chests and prevent the player from using it. Keep them sat down if you are to let them into your storage rooms.


 * If you have a lot of iron ingots, gold ingots, wheat, lapis lazuli, snowballs, redstone, emeralds, clay, diamonds, bone meal, or coal, craft them into their respective blocks to allow for more compact storage.
 * Different kinds of logs, wooden planks, saplings, wool, leaves, slabs, stairs, sandstone, mushrooms, tools, food, seeds, music discs, and stone bricks will not stack. Keep this in mind when organizing.
 * Chests will not open with a block on top (except transparent blocks like torches, glass, slabs, and other chests). You can place upside down stairs or half slabs to change this.
 * Label your chests! This can be done through means such as picture frames or signs. It will help you later in the game when you have many more items.


 * Once you have killed the ender dragon and explored the outer end islands, you will be able to store items in shulker boxes, which are much more compact than chests. You may want to use this storage system design:

Categories
Once you have completed your storage rooms, you'll want to be consistent with your organizing across all the singleplayer and multiplayer worlds that you play on. One of the main things to do is to come up with a few general categories for every item and block. The exact categories you decide to organize items will vary between players–organize them in a way that is convenient for you. Here are some suggestions: Remember that many items can fit in multiple categories. For example, most types of food would also fit into the mob drops or natural categories. You will need to decide what categories have priority over others.

Another idea for organization is to organize each chest based on where they are in the creative inventory. For example, use the labels in the creative inventory like building blocks, decoration blocks, redstone, tools, combat, and others. Note that this will not work if you have a huge supply of items, but if this is the case, you can divide each category between two different chests.

At the entrance of your house or base, you may want to have a temporary chest that can be used for anything, so you can go farming while you keep your mining or building the setup in an easily accessible place.

It is also helpful to have a chest for items that need to be sorted. This will discourage you from simply putting items in random chests when you need to empty your inventory quickly.

Contents
The setup of how you put items in a specific chest is important too. Putting them randomly is going to make everything a mess, so you can group the same items and blocks together. Create rows of the same thing or section of the chest to specific items. One possible way to do this with multiple tools that have been used before, with differing durability, is to sort them like this: first, sort them by tool, sectioning them off in the chest vertically by pickaxe, shovel, hoe, etc.; then, by what they're made of–any diamond tools go to the top, while stone or wood goes to the bottom. Within the spaces of the tools, the new ones would be higher up than the used ones. For example, a new iron pickaxe would be higher than the used ones, but still not higher than a used diamond pickaxe. How you sort your items in the chests can save your sanity in the future.

Inventory
Cleaning up your inventory and hotbar can also benefit players by making unofficial hotkeys. This way, you don't have to look at your hotbar to select what item you want and you can find an acceptable limit for the extra resources you carry. Inventory management is crucial if you want to be an efficient player.

The following are suggestions only. There is no one way to organize an inventory, and if you are overflowing with items, you may need to adjust your item locations.

Suggestion 1
This is a method of inventory organization that is capable of changing depending on the task at hand. It uses a general layout with easy access to many items and utilities, but also leaves room for personalization.

General Layout
The screenshot to the right shows the different "zones" in the inventory. The color codes are explained below:

Slot Switching
There are two ways you can navigate the hotbar: using the mouse wheel to switch between items, and using keyboard keys. The mouse wheel is better for beginners, but it takes longer to scroll to an item and you have a high chance of skipping over the item you want. The keyboard keys can allow to you to switch to any slot on the hotbar from anywhere, but requires you to memorize the keys and you have limited mobility in the split second you switch slots.

Here are the recommended keyboard bindings to and what fingers are assigned to them:

Tips and Tricks

 * Hotkeys
 * is for torches.
 * is for cobblestone (or stone if using silk-touch pickaxe).
 * is the easiest key to press, so having your sword here is good practice. However, you will need to change the switch-to-off-hand hotkey.
 * You can hover over an item stack in a chest or in your inventory and press a hotkey, and that item will swap with the item currently on the hotbar slot you selected. If nothing is on the hotbar slot, that item will move there.
 * You can hover over an empty square in an inventory and press a hotkey, and the item in that hotbar slot will jump to where your mouse pointer is.


 * Mouse Wheel
 * The water bucket is in the middle.
 * The sword is actually only one slot from the torches and two from the pickaxe.


 * Both
 * You should have your sword selected when you're not using any other items.
 * Putting things in their places even before you have the items to occupy every space will get you used to where everything is, even early game.
 * Having a crafting table and furnace with you at all times lets you be prepared in case your pick breaks while mining or other things of that nature.

Suggestion 3
This layout is designed for instant access to items you might need quickly, and places items with a similar purpose next to each other so they can be accessed with a single scroll. It is also very flexible and has several slots that can be changed without sacrificing the functionality of the layout.

Video
教程/整理物品