A pile of wood
Wood (previously known as Log) is a type of block first seen in Minecraft Creative mode 0.0.14a. They have a skin resembling bark on the four side faces, and a crosscut face on top and bottom. Only the normal apple tree logs are available in chunks generated before the Beta 1.2 update and all previous versions, whilst pine and birch will generate in newer chunks. Wood is greatly abundant in naturally-generated maps, as it is used as the foundation for Trees. Wood can be chopped by hand, but using an Axe is faster. Wood is also flammable.
Of the current wood types, birch is the rarest type. They are often used to make plants, trees and wooden cabins. In Survival Test, wood blocks drop 3 - 5 Wooden Planks when mined. In Indev, Infdev, Alpha, and Beta, mining a wood block will drop a wood block instead. This allows the use of wood as a building material and is craftable into planks.
Wood's only crafting use is to be made into four Wooden Planks. In addition, wood can be burnt in a Furnace to make Charcoal as a substitute for Coal.
As of the Minecraft Beta 1.2 update on January 13, 2011, there are now four kinds of wood. One is the normal wood (Apple), another resembles the wood of silver birch trees, yet another type resembles the normal wood, but it is darker and appears in pine/conifer trees that grow in colder biomes, the fourth type is similar to the apple wood, however there are some color differences and it is tilted to one side. These wood blocks still produce 4 Wooden Planks when crafted. Wood from different types of trees will not stack in the inventory, but their planks will. Planks made from different kinds of trees are completely identical. Birch trees have slightly duller colored leaves than regular trees, pine trees have pine needles, and jungle leaves are leafy with fruit looking shapes on them.
The fourth type of wood was introduced in Snapshot 12w03a, solely occurring in Jungle Biomes, and comprising trees exclusive to them. The tallest trees have this type of wood in 2x2 dimensions instead of the normal 1x1.
Occurrence
Besides forming trees, wooden blocks can also be found in NPC Villages where they form the edges of farms and are also used in the corners and roofs of a few small huts.
As a Crafting Ingredient
| Ingredients | Input » Output |
|---|---|
| Wood | Template:Grid/Crafting Table |
Uses of Wood
| Product | Number of wood blocks needed |
Minimal product amount |
Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boat | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| Bowl | 1 | 4 | 400% |
| Charcoal* | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Chest | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| Crafting Table | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Door | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| Fence | 1 | 4 | 400% |
| Fence Gate | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Ladder | 1 | 2 | 200% |
| Plank | 1 | 4 | 400% |
| Sign | 2 | 1 | 50% |
| Stick | 1 | 8 | 800% |
| Torch* | 9 | 32 | 355.5% |
| Trapdoor | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| Wooden Axe** | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Wooden Hoe | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Wooden Pickaxe** | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Wooden Pressure Plate | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Wooden Shovel | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| Wooden Slab | 1 | 3 | 300% |
| Wooden Stair | 2 | 4 | 200% |
| Wooden Sword | 1 | 8 | 160% |
* Requires the burning of wood into charcoal in a furnace. Thus, you will need 8 cobblestone and burning material. These values are ignored for the purpose of conversion.
** Cannot be exchanged 1 for 1, must be a 2 for 2 equivalence.
Gallery
- Aspen.PNG
A birch tree next to a regular (apple) tree.
- 2012-01-23 19.22.14.png
All of the wood types
- 2012-01-23 19.23.06.png
Apple, pine, and birch trees
Trivia
- The number of rings on the inside of a tree counts the age of the tree. If one counts the rings of a wood block, the sum is two years.
- From Alpha 1.2.0 to Beta 1.3, wood would only be destroyed by fire if it had several sides simultaneously burning. If only one side was burning, the fire and wood block would last forever. This was a bug but made for nice fireplaces. Netherrack can also be used this way, as it burns forever. In Beta 1.4 wood and Wooden Planks will burn and be destroyed if any one of the sides are lit on fire. This can happen in 1.6.6 again but may not happen to all wood.
- It is advisable to use Wooden Planks as fuel instead of wood, as they share the same burn time. However, it is advisable, if you do have wood, to smelt the wood and use charcoal as fuel.
- It is possible to manually convert a regular tree into a birch tree, if it has no branches. The top of the tree will be a cross shape made of leaves, and due to the way leaves decay, by placing a wood block on all sides of the cross they will remain intact. After that, break down the tree trunk and swap it with birch wood, then remove the pieces of wood on the top of the tree to create a birch tree. The leaves, though, will remain apple tree leaves.
- Picking up a block of Wood, typically one of the first things a player does in a world, gives them the "Getting Wood" achievement.
- Birch and pine trees weren't a renewable resource until the addition of birch and pine saplings.
- Chopping wood using a tool with the Silk Touch enchantment causes it to drop a regular (apple) wood block, regardless of the type of wood chopped. This is a bug.
- Although wood is usually considered renewable, there is the chance for a tree grown from a sapling to drop 0 saplings, so if you begin with a set number of trees, it is potentially possible that all of them and their planted saplings will drop 0 saplings, depleting the resource, in practice, this is almost impossible due to the low probability of a tree dropping 0 saplings.
- When a world that has a jungle biome in it is opened in 1.1 instead of 12w03a, the wood and leaf types will be changed into oak wood and leaves.
- When you mine a 2x2 jungle tree, you will get at least one stack of wood and at least 3 saplings back. Jungle saplings seem to be rarer than other saplings.
Wood textures
| Icon | Damage | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Apple Wood | |
| 1 | Pine/Spruce Wood | |
| 2 | Birch Wood | |
| 3 | Jungle Wood |