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. Unlike wood, wooden planks, and leaves, the crafting table will catch fire from lava but will not burn.

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

Usage


Right-clicking on a crafting table placed in the world 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.

If you disconnect, move more than eight blocks away or close the crafting interface the items still inside will drop in front of you.

Crafting tables in numbers can be used for decorative patterns on floors, featuring the visible grid on the top. Note that the crafting interface can be accessed from all sides. Excess tables can be burned as fuel in a furnace. A crafting table can be mined with anything, but mining it with an axe is fastest.

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 log of any type 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.
 * A crafting table is the tab icon as of snapshot 13w19a.
 * Strangely, even though the workbench was renamed a Crafting Table, the achievement still refers to it as a workbench.