Item (entity)

Items are “dropped” (by pressing ) blocks or items (non-block resources) which appear in the world, rather than being in the inventory of the Player or a tile entity; they are a type of entity.

In the first public mention of them, this early video of Minecraft 0.24 by Notch, they were referred to as “resources”.

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 (typically blocks) appear as their 3D shape, miniaturized to about 1/4 scale, slowly rotating and bobbing up and down. 2D items (typically non-blocks) appear as 1/2 scale billboards which bob up and down but do not rotate; they face the player but only in yaw and not pitch, so when viewed from directly above or below are invisible.

When a single item entity represents a stack of more than one (which happens when the player discards a stack from an inventory window), it appears as several of the item stuck together. Stacks of 2-5 appear as two, 6-20 as three, and 21-64 as four.

Behavior
Items cannot be attacked (by players or mobs); attempting to do so simply hits what is behind them. However, they may take damage and disappear from environmental or block-based effects such as Explosions, Fire, Lava, and contact with Cactus. Items have essentially no health, so they are destroyed by the slightest damage. The one exception is fire damage from Lava; they may burn briefly before disappearing in that case.

Items do not react to collisions with other entities; they are only stopped or moved by blocks. However, Minecarts or Boats encountering any entity, including items, will come to a dead stop.

If an item is within an opaque block, then: If it is surrounded on all sides by opaque blocks, it will fly out of the top of the block. Otherwise it will fly out one of the unobstructed sides. Note that it will do this even if the 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 are not pushed out by non-opaque blocks such as Glass and Slabs.

When an item comes within a short distance of a player whose inventory is not full, it flies quickly toward them — regardless of any intervening blocks — and when it reaches them it is added to their inventory, with a “pop” sound. If the item appears in their hotbar, then the hotbar item is briefly animated with a distortion effect. Unlike Experience Orbs, arbitrary numbers of items can be picked up instantaneously.

Items always despawn after 6000 game ticks, or 5 minutes, of being in a loaded chunk.

Trivia

 * Attempting to spawn an item from a Spawn Egg will crash the game.