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.

Beds

 * Whenever you are active above ground (especially when away from your base mapping or otherwise covering long distances), it's worth carrying a bed with you. When it starts getting dark, place the bed and sleep. Skipping the night-time provides a significant speed-up, and is safer. Mobs spawned at night are likely to cause all sorts of interruptions (including killing you!), and you might overlook something important in the dark.

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.

Block off Water Channels

 * Whenever you have water and redstone circuits close together, and you are at risk of removing the wrong block and starting a flood, protect the redstone by placing ladders, slabs or other items at key points. This should interrupt the water flow and prevent it washing over your circuits. Another alternative is to place one-block deep sinkholes to limit the water's spread. Either method saves time recreating your circuitry in the event of a flood.

Bonemeal

 * Once you have obtained all the desired dye colours, and tamed all the wolves you want, bones and bonemeal have just one remaining use: rapidly growing plants. By all means keep back a few spare bones in case you need them, but you should try to use the remainder. Sown on bare grass, bonemeal produces long grass from which you can collect a few seeds to start a wheat farm. One bone's worth of bonemeal (three doses) can quickly convert a single block of planted wheat seed into enough wheat for a loaf of bread - useful for emergency food. Two doses of bonemeal convert a brown and a red mushroom into two giant mushrooms, and by harvesting these you can easily gain a dozen meals' worth of mushroom stew. Bonemeal grows trees, pumpkins and melons to full size immediately. Don't waste time waiting for plants to grow; dose them with bonemeal immediately, and you can then start harvesting much more quickly.

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.

Cacti

 * The quickest way to clear or collect a cactus is to dig out the sand underneath it, OR destroy the bottom cacti block, at which point the entire cactus collapses into retrievable items.

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.


 * Another crafting speedup is to always try to make round numbers of constantly-used items. For example, when making fences, one wood block makes four planks, which makes eight sticks, which makes two fences with two sticks left over. It's usually better to make fences eight at a time, which uses up exactly three logs without waste and without cluttering your inventory. Or as an alternative, you could routinely make any spare planks or sticks into torches or any other frequently-used item.

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.

Ender Pearls

 * Once you have collected sufficiently large numbers, ender pearls are very useful for moving long distances quickly. It's best to combine them with enchanted armour - boots of feather falling, specifically - or the accumulated fall damage will soon add up to unacceptable levels.

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.

Furnaces

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


 * When smelting items - assuming you use coal or charcoal as a fuel - always try to add items to the furnace in multiples of eight. This avoids wasting fuel. If you really need to smelt less than eight of an item, use a furnace fueled with wooden planks, sticks or saplings. Two saplings will smelt one item; two planks will smelt three.

Lava Buckets

 * 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 or 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.

Maps

 * Maps are useful, and can be auto-generated in-game. The catch is that you have to move about your world with the map in hand in order to draw it, and that can be dangerous because it's hard to see where you're going. The solution is to press the F1 key, temporarily removing the head-up display, so that you can see clearly and move at full speed without risk. Another way to get the same result is to press F5 to switch to the third-person view. Pressing F1 again (or F5 twice) will put things back to normal.


 * If your map borders the sea, another quick (and safe) mapping method is to build a boat and ride in it round the coastline(s) of the area you want to map. The map will extend a reasonable distance inland, and you can 'fill in' any remaining holes in the coverage on foot. Sometimes the wider rivers will also be suitable for this trick, but swamps should be treated with some caution as you will occasionally collide with a lily pad and lose your boat.


 * Unexplored jungle terrain is very hard to traverse quickly. Here, the best practice is to start by tracing the perimeter of the jungle from the surrounding non-jungle biomes. Even swamps and dense woods are quicker to move through than jungle. Only venture into the jungle if it's a big one and you are determined to map every last part of it.

Pistons

 * Made a mistake when building something? Do you now have to destroy and re-place a large number of blocks? This may be a case where pistons can help. First, put gaps in key places so that no single run of blocks is more than twelve metres long. Then put temporary 'filler' blocks in any remaining gaps. Then place one or more pistons, and use it or them to nudge each section of blocks back into position. This tip is most useful when the initial block placement is complex, such as when drawing pixel art using wool, or for buildings with advanced decorative embellishments, or when using materials which cannot be removed without the silk touch enchantment, such as ice, glass or smooth stone. With care, you can even use this trick to move small buildings.

Potions

 * Once you are able to brew them, potions are an enormous time-saver in many different ways. Potions of healing and regeneration save you having to wait so long to heal; potions of speed allow you to move long distances rapidly. A splash damage potion allows you to instantly kill large numbers of mobs in a mob trap, making collecting experience much quicker and easier. Depending on the mob, or the design of the mob trap, you may need to use splash potions of poison first, to weaken the mobs, and possibly splash potions of healing if you need to kill undead mobs.

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 also then serve to orient you towards the exit or towards unexplored areas, which makes getting into and out of the mine significantly quicker. As a bonus, if you hear a pressure plate trigger, you are warned there's a mob somewhere nearby in a supposedly safe area.

Sand and Gravel

 * 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 they hit the torch, allowing you to collect several blocks for every single block mined or dug. This saves wear and tear on your tools too. But: this method used on gravel will not yield any flint.


 * When you need a temporary column, place two non-sand/gravel blocks, then a column of sand or gravel to the desired height. If you want to remove the column later, remove the bottom block, replace with a torch, then remove the second. The column will then collapse neatly into collectable items without you needing to mine the rest of it.

Shaft Mining

 * Mining in caves is more interesting, but also more dangerous. The safest (and, unfortunately, dullest) way to mine is to dig steps down to about level 10-12 above bedrock, and then dig widely-spaced corridors two blocks high and one block wide. This is a form of shaft mining; it might reasonably be termed '1x2 corridor mining'. Whenever you encounter any caves on the way, block them off and ignore them. Each corridor should be about ten metres horizontally from any other. Yes, you will sometimes miss small deposits of ores by this method. But the Minecraft world is effectively unlimited, and the object of efficient mining is to hit as many different seams of ore as possible once and once only. Digging twice to the same ore body isn't good, it's bad, because it wastes effort re-finding a resource you had already discovered. An entirely artificial mining environment like this is safe because it's entirely under your control; there is no risk of mobs spawning in a hidden hole you hadn't discovered, and you can place lights at controllable intervals. Dangerous slimes cannot spawn, and because the mine layout is artificial it's very simple, making it harder to get lost. The main danger is lava intrusions, and lava now makes bubbling noises when it is nearby so you should be forewarned. Once you are fully-equipped with diamond armour and weapons, you can then add some variety to your game by exploring the natural caverns.

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 insufficiently 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.

Sprint Everywhere

 * Once your food supplies are secure, you can speed things up a little by sprinting everywhere. Double-tapping the forward button will cause you to sprint. Don't do this until you do have plenty of food available, because it does use a lot more energy than walking does and only gives a slight speed-up.

Sugarcane

 * When clearing water out from an area, a common trick is to make a drydock by dropping sand or gravel into the water, thereby displacing it, then digging all of the sand or gravel out again, leaving a dry area surrounded by a curtain wall. In shallow water, sugarcane can do the same job as sand or gravel, but because sugarcane can only be placed on blocks which have water adjacent, the older sugarcane blocks will automatically uproot as soon as they no longer have water next to them. This saves having to dig them out as a separate stage. In deeper water, the occasional column of sugarcane can act as an airlock, making it quick and easy to move outside the dry area and float to the top level of the drydock.
 * Notes:
 * Because sugarcane can only be placed on dirt, sand or grass, you will sometimes need to place some of these blocks first.
 * It's unlikely that you will be able to completely clear a volume of water using only sugarcane. There will usually be a few spots where sugarcane cannot be placed, and in these places the water will need to be displaced in the usual way or collected using a bucket.

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.


 * Always use the right tool for each job. Use axes for wood, spades for dirt, sand and gravel, and so on. Using the wrong tools is slower and degrades the tool more quickly. Having to replace tools more often carries a small time cost for replenishing the 'wasted' resources.

Trees

 * When harvesting trees from below, chop out at height 1m and 2m first, leaving the lowest block of the tree as a 'stump'. By jumping onto the stump, you can then reach one block higher into the tree without needing to make a temporary platform to stand on. This means you can farm trees one block higher than otherwise, making your tree farms about 15% more efficient.


 * To farm trees, grow either birches or jungle trees. As for the jungle trees, they're very efficient when harvested as described below. Birch trees were the best option prior to the jungle's introduction, because they never grew taller than seven blocks and could thus completely be retrived in the way explained above. Avoid oak, they're too irregular.


 * To harvest trees from above - this is particularly effective for the giant jungle trees - get to the top of the tree, then simply chop your way down to the base. Provided you have a quick means of getting to the top of the tree - ender pearls, perhaps - this is fastest method of wood harvesting, and it works on trees of any height. Ladders are also quite effective, as you remove them without any effort by breaking the logs which support them.

Water Buckets

 * 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. Beware, though, water also washes away redstone circuits!

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 manually.

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 (such as the GIMP, AutoCAD or Google Sketchup), and shape libraries and examples, YouTube videos and more besides. For any big project, look 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 selects half a stack at a time, or can be used to place a single item in a crafting or smelting slot. Using right-clicks wherever possible 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, making good use of the right-click facility 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. It's also useful for quickly filling and emptying chests of stacks of items. Note that when creating a map, shift-clicking to create it creates a copy of map_0 instead of creating a new map.