Crafting Table

The Crafting Table (or Workbench) is one of the most essential blocks in Minecraft. It has a grid on top and tools on the side faces, and shares the bottom texture with Wood Planks.

Obtaining
Crafting Tables are usually obtained by crafting. They can also naturally occur in NPC Villages.

Crafting
Because of the pattern used, it can be built at any time using the 2x2 crafting grid in the inventory in Survival mode.

Naturally generated
When the Generate Structures world option is on, crafting tables may generate as part of NPC Villages. One crafting table is generated as part of every library in the village.

Usage


Right-clicking on a crafting table (on the ground, not while in your inventory) will open the 3×3 crafting grid which allows you to craft more items than with the crafting grid in your inventory. A crafting table is essential in order to advance at all in the game, and the first step in Minecraft's "tech tree". This is one of the most important blocks in the game as starting tools cannot be created without it.

Holding shift when clicking on an item to be retrieved from the crafting table will craft as many items as can be made from the given ingredients, and move them to your inventory. However, there is a special effect here when crafting a Map: If and only if the map is claimed with Shift-Click, it will be a clone of the first map made (map_0), even if the original map has been destroyed. If the map is instead mouse-dragged from the crafting table, it will be a new map centered on your current location (not the table's).

Items left in the crafting table spaces will fall out when the crafting menu is closed, and drop in front of you. The same will happen if you don't have enough inventory slots for the new items (perhaps you made too many of a non-stackable item).

Crafting tables in numbers can be used for decorative patterns on floors, featuring the visible grid on the top. Note that a table embedded into a wall, floor, or even ceiling is still usable. Excess tables can be burned as fuel in a furnace. A crafting table can be mined with any tool or none, but mining it with an axe is most efficient.

When on a long journey or mining deep, it's sometimes worthwhile to carry along a crafting table in your inventory (you can mine it and carry it away after use). However, if you have easy access to wood, remember that you can always make a new table from a single block of wood.

Trivia

 * Crafting tables can be placed near lava and catch fire. However, they will not burn and after several seconds the fire will extinguish, leaving the crafting table intact.
 * The underside of the crafting table has the same texture as Oak Wood Planks, meaning that they can be secretly placed into ceilings of wooden houses.
 * Crafting tables cannot hold items in the crafting boxes, while furnaces can. This is because furnaces, along with a few other blocks, use Tile Data to know what is stored inside it, or, in the case of pistons, to store what value of a block it is pushing/pulling.
 * Crafting tables can be used as a fuel in a Furnace, but they only can complete 1.5 smelting operations and cook for 15 Seconds, so they don't make very good fuel.
 * The texture, as shown above, would imply that crafting tables has metal (iron?) tools, despite being crafted from wooden resources.
 * In pocket edition the crafting table uses the MATTIS system.