Tutorials/Time-saving tips

Minecraft contains a mixture of interesting things to do and routine operations such as resource collection which can get very dull and repetitive. But tastes differ, and different players view different parts of the game as the dull parts. This page collates a wide variety of time-saving tips for all aspects of the game.

Automation

 * By far the biggest in-game time-saver is to automate operations. Redstone circuits, mob grinders, automatic item farms, XP farms, automatic piston-based building machines and so on may require significant setup time, but this is soon repaid in the time savings they can provide. These automatic systems tend to have their own tutorials and so they are not specifically listed here at present.

Block off Exhausted Mine Sections

 * It's very easy to get temporarily lost underground, and to waste time wandering into areas of your mine that you have already cleared. By blocking off completed mine sections you avoid accidentally wandering into them again. Ideally, use a transparent barrier - glass or a fence, for example. This allows you to see into the area, and spot any mobs that may appear (indicating either inadequate lighting or possibly a section you have overlooked). In particular, avoid using materials found underground, as you may not be able to tell if the blocked area was blocked off by you, or if the apparent barrier is just naturally spawned.

Breadcrumb Trails

 * Whether above ground or below, mark your routes in some way. Use torches on fenceposts, blocks of coloured wool, flowers, or anything else you please. Particularly, put signposts at key junctions! The time saving given just by not going astray as you move about your world can be quite significant.

Crafting

 * Particularly when away from your base collecting materials, don't clutter your inventory with unneeded items. You should normally carry wooden logs and possibly some coal and or iron, and then craft items such as extra tools, fences - even the crafting bench itself - only when you need them. This maximises the space you have available for the items you are collecting. The main exception is torches, which are constantly used; these should be made half a stack at a time whenever you have less than a dozen of them.

Dyes

 * Avoid killing sheep. Breed them if necessary, then dye them to the desired colour while they are still alive. You can then shear them for nearly unlimited coloured wool without constantly needing to seek out ever more and more sheep.

Enchantments

 * Enchanted items provide a variety of benefits over standard ones. While it's not wise to use a high-level enchantment on anything but a diamond item, the effort needed to gain level 1-5 or so is trivial, and so you might consider putting low-level enchantments even on your expendable tools.

Flint and Steel

 * By using a flint and steel to set passive mobs on fire, you can kill and cook them in one operation without needing to spend extra time putting the meat in a furnace, collecting fuel and so on. This is a significant time-saver. One flint and steel is good for tens of mobs, possibly hundreds if they are crowded closely together.


 * Fire is also a quick way of removing unwanted flammable items. Thus, if you are making an expendable temporary structure, consider building it out of wood to make it quicker to remove later.

Furnace

 * Furnaces are very cheap to make, and it is much quicker to process large quantities of material in parallel; don't build just one furnace, build lots, and use them all at once.

Lava Bucket

 * A bucket of lava is excellent for killing large numbers of mobs in one go, which can be a significant time-saver when dealing with a new mob-spawner. Once most of the mobs have been killed, finishing off the last few manually and neutralising the spawner is much quicker and safer than trying to wade through large numbers of hostiles.

Lava and Water Buckets

 * Lava and water can combine to make infinite smooth stone, cobblestone or smaller amounts of obsidian. This fact can be exploited in several ways:
 * Fill an area with still water, then pour lava over it. This allows you to quickly pave a large area with smooth stone without having to collect great volumes of cobblestone, smelt it back to smooth stone (requiring fuel and furnace time) and then place it.
 * Mining obsidian, even with an enchanted pickaxe, is slow and tedious. If you want to build something out of obsidian, it is far more efficient to collect buckets of lava, make a mould of some cheap material, fill with lava, and convert to obsidian en-masse by pouring water on top.

Pressure Plates

 * Pressure plates are handy for automatically closing doors and gates behind you without you having to stop, turn round and close them manually. You should generally place them on only the 'safe' side' of a door or gate, particularly when mining. They then serve to orient you towards the exit or towards unexplored areas, which makes getting into and out of the mine significantly quicker.

Sand and Gravel Mining

 * Where it's safe, and possible to do so, place a torch or other item under columns of sand or gravel and mine them from below. As these blocks fall, they will break into collectable items as the hit the torch, allowing you to collect several blocks for every single block mined or dug.

Signs

 * Signs are invaluable as in-game reminders of what you were doing in a given location, or for marking areas with warnings of hazards, the non-obvious path to the exit that you habitually overlook, and so on. Use them frequently.

Silk Touch

 * The Silk Touch enchantment is surprisingly useful when mining. If you mine, for example, a redstone or lapis lazuli block with a Fortune-enchanted pick, you will end up with several pieces of redstone or lapis lazuli for every block you mine. If you mine with Silk Touch, you mine the entire block, and thus it takes up much less inventory space. This allows you to do a lot more mining before you need to return to base and unload. Back at base, you can then use your best 'Fortune' pick to maximise yield from the blocks collected.

Split Mines into Sections

 * When mining a new area, place barriers at intervals. Fences are ideal. This helps stop mobs sneaking up behind you unexpectedly, and allows you to mark sections of your mine as 'safe'. If you encounter a mob in a 'safe' area, it will probably have been stopped short by your fence, preventing it from attacking you, and you now have an indication that an area is insufficently lit, or that there is an opening you have not discovered. This trick can save a great deal of time in narrowing down where an unexpected mob has come from.

Tame Wolves
If you use tamed wolves for hunting, and choose not to use the flint and steel trick to pre-cook passive mobs, then one punch to a passive mob will focus your wolves on it, and they will quickly kill it without further effort by you. You can then collect its meat and experience orbs.

TNT

 * TNT is useful for rapid clearing of areas, especially when resource collection is not a concern. One block of TNT can easily remove 50-100 blocks of dirt or gravel, and multiple blocks can clear entire stone caverns much more quickly than could be done by hand.

Tools

 * Always use the best tools you can afford. Iron tools work faster than stone ones, and diamond tools work faster than iron ones. Note that if it's early in the game and you only have half a dozen iron ingots, you cannot really 'afford' to use iron spades; you should reserve your first few iron ingots for a sword, a pick and armour. But by the time you have your first diamonds you should have stacks of iron, and then it's perfectly OK to use iron tools for all your everyday uses. A similar consideration applies once you have diamonds in excess.

Water Bucket

 * A bucket of water is very useful for rapidly clearing snow, grain, mushrooms and some other (mainly plantable) items. Rather than clicking one by one on every block, pour a bucket of water over the area, and the water can clear over a hundred blocks in one operation, and can be collected and reused.

Mods
Depending on how you play the game, some MineCraft mods may be ideal for speeding up your work. Tools such as MCEdit, Single Player Commands or mods such as BuildCraft provide a wide variety of ways to speed up certain types of routine operation. Not all these mods fit with every playing style, but if you do want to be able to clone buildings, level vast areas, strip-mine to bedrock and so on, it may well be worth investigating these tools rather than trying to do the work maually.

External Tools
There are many external tools for Minecraft which may help speed up certain types of projects. There are graphics tools to help you make blueprints (the GIMP, Google Sketchup), and shape libraries and examples, YouTube videos and more besides. For any big project, looks seriously at these options. Tips and examples by other people may save you hours of experimentation or wasted work, and they may help with artistic inspiration too. Pencil and graph paper are perfectly fine tools to use too, and for some projects they are likely to be the ideal solution.

Planning
If you're doing anything big or complicated, planning ahead can give enormous benefits. The plan can be as simple as a quick mental checklist, or as ambitious as a full-blown blueprint plus materials requirements. Don't over-plan for a simple project, but don't underestimate the benefits of planning properly for an ambitious one.

Exploiting the Crafting Grid
By placing the planks in the middle of the grid in step 2, they are already in the right place to generate sticks and form the centre part of the gate in step 4, which saves you from having to move them. Not many crafting recipes behave in this way, but whenever you make a lot of an item, if you are able to place the ingredients in just the right way you can save a little bit of time every time you craft it.
 * Some crafting recipes can be made more efficiently depending on how you place the items in the grid. This may only save a second or two when making the item, but for frequently-made objects this can still add up. For example, making a gate requires one log block. The most efficient way to make it is as follows:
 * 1) Place one log block anywhere in the grid, and it will form four planks.
 * 2) Place the planks in the middle of the grid, two in one box and the other two in the box above, using right-click. The crafting output will switch from planks to sticks.
 * 3) Click once on the sticks, giving four sticks, and leaving two planks behind in the main grid.
 * 4) Right-click four times to place one stick at a time, forming the gate.

Right-clicking

 * Right-clicking with the mouse puts half the currently selected stack in the slot you have chosen. This helps speed up many crafting recipes from steps and slabs to snowballs, because you can split the stacks into roughly equal portions and convert, for example, a stack of 16 snowballs into four snow blocks with just six clicks. Because crafting is such a big part of the game, learning the knack for using the right-click functionality well is a big time-saver.

Shapeless Recipes

 * For a few crafting recipes - such as mushroom stew and item repairs - the way you place the items in the crafting grid doesn't matter. Knowing these recipes saves a little time every time you make them because you know you don't have to place the items just so.

Shift-clicking

 * Shift-clicking makes or moves as many of a stack of an item as possible. Making good use of this trick is probably the biggest time-saver the crafting (and brewing, and smelting) interfaces provide.