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 loads of stuff.

The Basics and Storage Rooms
Early on in the game, you find that one double chest will be able to fit most of your items, carrying most of your wood, weapons, and tools. However, to fully progress in the game, you will eventually need to make large storage rooms with categorized chests to store items. Chests are one of the most important blocks in the game. They can store any excess stuff that you throw into them. Here are the basic steps for organizing everything you don't know what to do with:

  Gather a bunch of wood and make a few double chests.  Have so much stuff it's driving you crazy!  Build a large room for the chests. If you are tight on space, you can embed some chests into the floor or make chest "shelves".  If you are not tight on space, you may want to place signs next to or above the chests for easy categorization. 

Now, for those people that just started playing or have no common sense, here are some common sense tips:

  Put your chests in a ROOM, not in the open.  Place chests with valuables like iron, gold, and diamond, or rare things like saddles, glowstone, and enchanted items, in special, impenetrable places.  Group items together inside chests (don't put things in at random).  If need be, creeper proof your storage facility. Make it as sturdy as possible!  Cats can now jump onto chests and prevent the player from using it. Don't bring your pets in!  If you have a lot of iron and you want to save space, craft 9 ingots into an iron block for more compact storage (same for the other ores).  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. 

Your storage room is, more or less, symbolizing everything you have accomplished in that world. If you are careless, you'll be back to square one.

Organizing Patterns
Here's where we get to the main organizing techniques. Once you have a fully made storage room, and you're one of the many Minecrafters that have OCD like me, you'll want to be consistent with your organizing across all worlds. One of the main things to do is to come up with a few general categories for every item and block in Minecraft. For me, personally, I have 9 main categories:

 <li> Natural (dirt, cacti, flowers, saplings, leaves, vines, leather, eggs, clay, wheat, seeds, etc.) <li> Wood & Tools (logs, planks, sticks, extra tools, misc. wooden blocks, etc.) <li> Mob Drops (gunpowder, bones, rotten flesh, string, spider eyes, slimeballs, etc.) <li> Rocks (cobblestone, stairs, slabs, bricks, stone, etc.) <li> Nether Stuff (Netherrack, soul sand, glowstone, nether bricks, gold nuggets, blaze rods, etc.) <li> Wool (wool of all colors, all dyes, shears, beds, paintings) <li> Mining has 2 sub-categories: </ul> A) Minerals (coal, iron, gold, diamond, redstone, etc.) B) Tools (pickaxes, shovels, swords, buckets, torches, crafting tables, furnaces, chests, wood, junk blocks for emergencies)  <li> Rare and Cool Stuff (saddles, ender pearls, cake, cookies, TNT, blocks of iron/gold/diamond/lapis, etc.) <li> Utilities (ladders, minecarts, tracks, boats, bookcases, redstone stuff, enchantment tables, flint & steel, arrows, etc.) </ul>

But that's just my convenient categories, your's may vary depending on what you do. Also, at the entrance of your house or base, you should have a temporary chest that can be used for anything, so you can go farming while you keep your mining or building setup in an easy-access place.

Now, the setup of how you put them in the chest is a little different. As mentioned above, putting them in randomly is going to do no good for you, so you have to group the same items and blocks together. Create rows of the same thing or section off the chest to specific items. What I usually do with multiple tools that I have used before, with different durabilities, is to sort. First, I 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. Since I've had a world since Beta 1.1, I have a ton of extra tools in one chest.