Item (entity)

Items are "dropped" blocks or items (non-block resources) that appear in the world, rather than being in the inventory of the player or a tile entity; they are a type of entity.

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 appear as their 3D shape, miniaturized to about $1/4$ scale, while 2D items appear as $1/2$ scale with all the pixels replaced with a cube. Both types slowly rotate and bob up and down. In the Bedrock Edition, all item entities apart from blocks are 2D and render as particles. That is to to say, they always face the player rather than rotating.

When a single item entity represents a stack of more than one (which happens when the player discards a stack from an inventory window, or when another like item comes to occupy the same place), 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
Item entities come from many sources. Some common ones are: 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, a falling anvil, and contact with cactus. Items have essentially no health, so they are destroyed by the slightest damage. The exceptions are fire damage from lava; they may burn briefly before disappearing in that case, and dropped nether stars, which cannot be destroyed by explosions.
 * The death of a mob or player.
 * A block that is mined by a player, destroyed by an explosion (depending on the explosion power, a certain proportion of blocks do not drop as items), or washed away by water (note if there is an explosion with an item entity within the blast radius the entity has a 90% chance to disappear).
 * A block that finds itself in an inappropriate location:
 * A block attached to another block that was removed (such as a torch, ladder, or sign).
 * A plant in a space not meeting its survival conditions.
 * A falling block (sand, gravel, anvil, or dragon egg) that lands in an already-occupied space.
 * An inventory item tossed by pressing the toss key (default on PC,  on Xbox and Nintendo consoles,  on PlayStation) or dragging a stack outside of an inventory window.
 * In the mobile versions of Bedrock Edition, items in the hotbar can be dropped by pressing on the item's slot. The entire stack is dropped.
 * A container (other than an ender chest or shulker box) with items inside that is destroyed.

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, 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 flies out of the top of the block. Otherwise it flies out one of the unobstructed sides. Note that it does 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. It is possible to collect dropped items through thin blocks such as fences, nether brick fences, iron bars, doors or glass panes, and also through a corner of two blocks. Items are not pushed out by non-opaque blocks such as glass and slabs.

When an item comes within one block 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 or a zoom effect. Unlike experience orbs, arbitrary numbers of items can be picked up instantaneously. If the player was already within pickup distance when the item was dropped (commonly because that player just dropped it), it may not fly until the player moves slightly. When the player is about 16 blocks from an item, the item visually disappears.

Despawning
Items despawn after 6000 game ticks (5 minutes) of being in a loaded chunk, unless another item of the same kind was dropped next to them and added to its stack. When outside of the loaded chunk, the 5 minute timer is paused. Merging dropped item stacks reset the despawn timer to 5 minutes.

Data values
Dropped items have entity data associated with them that contain various properties of the entity.

History
In the first public mention of item entities,, they were referred to as "resources".

Items of blocks formerly, instead of being shrunken versions of their blocks, actually had pixels the same size as their blocks.

Trivia

 * A block can be picked up 1/2 second after being mined. An item dropped using requires 2 seconds before it can be picked up again.
 * , the oldest standing bug in the Minecraft bug tracker, involves item entity positioning being incorrectly handled.
 * Nether stars cannot be blown up. This is to account for explosions that occur during fights with withers, which drop them.
 * Netherite related items cannot be burned when thrown in lava, and they can also float to the surface.