Quick Projects · Minecraft 26.3
Every one of the 1,658 items in Minecraft, every way it can come to exist, and what it is really made of once you expand the recipes all the way down to things you have to dig up or kill. The game ships 1,715 recipes, 1,447 loot tables and 391 villager trades, and this page is built from nothing else. It also finds seven holes in the villager economy: buy the wood, make something, sell it back, and one emerald becomes six.
A villager trade is a recipe like any other: it wants things and it gives a thing. Price every item in emeralds using only the trades that sell to you, plus the crafting recipes, and then ask what a villager will pay for it. Seven items are worth more than they cost. The economy is not closed.
There are only three ways a thing can get into your hands, and the game's data files describe all of them. Something drops it, something converts into it, or a villager hands it over. A hundred and forty-seven items have no door at all.
Search any item. The cost is how many gathered things one of it takes, expanding every recipe down to what the world hands you, kept as an exact fraction because one log makes four planks and a plank really is a quarter of a log.
Minecraft has a reputation for depth. Measured in crafting steps it has almost none. Of the 1,012 items you have to make rather than find, two thirds are one or two steps from something you can pick up, and nothing in the game is more than six.
Every made item was traced back to the gathered things in its bill of materials, and the gathered things counted. Two hundred and three of them carry the entire game, and one of them is a tree.
Most wooden recipes accept any plank, so a stick is a quarter of a log and the log can be any of thirteen. All thirteen cost exactly the same, so the solver has to name one and the label is cosmetic. Sorting alphabetically names acacia, which made the whole game look like it was built in a savanna, so the archetype is named instead. No total on this page moves either way.
| Item | Gathered things |
|---|
Sixty-six items can be both gathered and made, and making them costs more than fetching one. A cauldron costs seven iron ingots to make, and one to mine.
| Item | Times dearer |
|---|
A pleasing amount of Minecraft is described in data rather than written in code, which is why this page is possible at all. The gaps are where the game stops describing itself.
Brewing a potion, milking a cow, filling a bottle at a beehive, scooping a fish into a bucket, enchanting at a table: none of these is a recipe or a loot table, so the data cannot say where a potion, a bucket of milk or an enchanted book comes from. The Wither is the sharpest case. It has a loot table, and a nether star is not in it, because that drop is written in code. So the files contain a beacon recipe whose key ingredient has no stated origin anywhere in the game's own data.
A gathered item costs one. Everything else costs the cheapest recipe that makes it, divided by how many that recipe yields, worked out by iterating outwards from the gathered things until nothing changes. All arithmetic is exact fractions. Where a recipe accepts alternatives the cheapest is taken, so the figures are a floor: the least gathering that could produce the thing, not what a particular player would actually do.
Trades are left out of the costs. They have to be. Adding them makes the cheapest cost undefined rather than merely debatable, because of the loops at the top of this page: the first attempt at this model did include trades and every price in the game slid towards zero, halving on each pass. The divergence is what found the loops.
The first trap is that every block drops itself. Placed blocks have loot tables, so read literally the world "gives" you a block of iron, a pane of glass and an oak plank, and an iron ingot then costs a ninth of an iron block rather than an ore. It is circular: you only ever find a block of iron because a player put one there. So a block's own drop counts only when the item has no recipe. Mining an oak log counts. Mining back a block of iron does not.
The second is treasure. Bastion chests really do hold blocks of gold and trial chambers blocks of diamond, so taken at face value a diamond costs a ninth of a lucky find. One rare chest is not interchangeable with one cobblestone, so a treasure route does not set a price for anything that can be made instead. It still sets one when it is the only route there is, which is how smithing templates, echo shards and the heart of the sea are priced.
Discounting a route must never be the reason something becomes unobtainable. Harvesting wheat is a self-drop, and wheat has a recipe, because nine of them come back out of a hay bale, so the rule above threw away the only real source of wheat and took bread, cake and mud bricks with it. Set-aside routes are therefore handed back one at a time, only to items left with no price at all, re-solving after each. Which one goes back first decides the answer: restore the hay bale and wheat becomes a ninth of a haystack and a loaf of bread a third of one gathered thing, which is nonsense. The fundamental half of a reversible pair is the one more recipes call for, so that is the one restored. Twenty-two items needed it, and the page says which.
Village houses are built out of real oak planks and ocean monuments out of real blocks of gold, so a handful of craftable blocks genuinely can be mined and are counted here as made rather than found. Fixing that would price a plank as one gathered item instead of a quarter of a log and flatten most of this page, so it stands. Costs count items and nothing else: one diamond and one dirt block are both a cost of one, which is a statement about how much gathering a recipe asks for, not about how hard it is. Twelve items have a route but no price, because something they need has none.