Crafting 101

Hello, and welcome to Crafting 101. This is actually going to be a series of blog posts - each with a different name. Here's a list of categories.

• Basic Recipes - Wooden planks, sticks, torches, crafting tables, furnaces, and chests.
• Block Recipes - Ore blocks, glowstone, wool, TNT, slabs, stairs, snow, clay, brick, stone, bookshelfs, bricks, sandstone, smooth sandstone, decorative sandstone, and jack'o'lanterns.
• Tool Recipes - Axes, pickaxes, shovels, hoes, flint and steel, buckets, compasses, maps, clocks, fiching rods, shears, and fire charge.
• Weapon Recipes - Swords, bows, arrows, boots, helmets, chestplates, and leggings.
• Transportation Recipes - Minecarts, powered minecarts, storage minecarts, rails, power rails, detector rails, and boats.
• Mechanism Recipes - Doors, trapdoors, pressure plates, buttons, redstone torches, levers, note blocks, jukeboxes, dispensers, redstone repeaters, pistons, sticky pistons, and redstone lamps.
• Food Recipes - Bowls, mushroom stew, bread, sugar, cake, cookies, golden apples, melon blocks, melon seeds, and pumpkin seeds.
• Miscellaneous Recipes - Minerals, paintings, signs, ladders, glass panes, iron bars, paper, books, fences, fence gates, beds, gold ignots, and eyes of ender.
• Dye Recipes - Bone meal, light gray dye, gray dye, rose red, orange dye, dandellion yellow, lime dye, light blue dye, cyan dye, purple dye, magenta dye, and pink dye.
• Wool Recipes - (Colors): Light gray, gray, black, red, orange, yellow, lime, cyan, light blue, green, blue, purple, magenta, pink, and brown.
• Enchantment and Brewing Recipes - Glass bottles, cauldrons, brewing stands, blaze powder, magma cream, fermented spider eyes, glistering melons, gold nuggets, and enchantment tables.
• Future/Planned Recipes - Golden apples, tripwire hooks, books, book and quills, and enderchests.

Keep your eye out for these posts, everything will come exactly in the order listed. Think of this post as an index. I hope Crafting 101 helps. Thanks.  

Minecraft Controls/Hotkeys

Here I've included some basic hotkeys/shortcuts for Minecraft.

• Shift key to go lower when you fly
• Double-tap space to fly
• Double-tap space to come back down
• WASD to move
• Spacebar to jump
• Press "Q" to drop the selected item
• Scroll wheel cycles through items
• Number keys also select their respective items ("1" would select your first item)
• Esc. key to pause game and open up a menu list
• Shift key to sneak while you're on the ground
• F2 will save a screen shot of your Minecraft screen.
• F5 toggles between view thrid-person from the back, the front, and first-person.
• "/" opens the chat window in multiplayer
• "T" opens up the commands in servers and opens Multiplayer chat
• Holding/clicking right-click destroys blocks.
• Left-clicking throws certain items, places blocks, and opens/accesses things
• Wheel-clicking gives you the block you're looking at (only in creative). If you click on mobs, it gives you bedrock
• "Tab" opens a list of players on multiplayer

How to Change Settings in Minecraft

Here's a short post on how to change settings in Minecraft.

From the start-up screen:

To change initial game settings, go to Options. You'll see this:

You can drag the gray bars to change the Music and Sound Settings. The Difficulty is how many monsters come at night. Click on it to change it. Peaceful has no monsters, and Hard has the most. Sensitivity is how sensetive the mouse is. FOV is basically how much you zoom in/out. You can change that during gameplay, too. Controls is basically to assign buttons to different controls. If you click on Video Settings, this is what you'll see.

Right now, these are the fastest settings possible. I'll explain what each of these mean. Graphics are either Fast or Fancy. Fast is faster, but Fancy is Fancier. Render Distance is how far away you see. The shorter it is, the faster Minecraft runs. Smooth Lighting is basically ligthing. OFF is faster than ON. Performance is another trade-off: Power saver saves power but doesn't run that well, and Max FPS is really good but a little slow on average computers. 3DAnaglyph makes the world 3D (you need 3D glasses). View Bobbing is basically how the view changes when you jump. ON is slower than OFF. GUI scale is how big the everything is. I beleive it should always be left on auto. AvancedOpenGL is another ON is slower thing. Clouds is also ON is slower. For particles, the less the faster, the more the slower. Once again, the picture is of the fastest - not the best. Use your own judgement when you choose the settings - what is more important to you. Below are the best settings.

These are the best for gameplay experience, but you need a pretty fast computer to run them properly.


There are also settings for when you create a world. Click on this.

That button wil take you to additional settings for the world. By the way, You can change Game Mode by clicking on it. It gives you a description of the mode underneath. Now, here's the More World Options screen:

The seed is basically the environment. I'll explain seeds later in a more detailed post; for now you'll just have to search it up. The World Type is either Default or Superflat.  Click on it to change it. Default is normal - it automatically spawns an environment and other stuff, and mining is normal. Superflat is when the whole map is perfectly flat. Also, there are only three layers of dirt until you hit bedrock - and right after that one layer of bedrock you enter the void (a bottomless pit that you die when you enter).

You can also change some settings during gameplay. Just hit Esc for a little menu of choices.

If you click on Achievements, it shows you a little graph of achivements you have gotten and what you need to do to get more. Clicking on Options gives you the same options screen I showed you at th beggining. Save and Quit to Title makes you go back to the title screen. And there you have it! How to change settings in Minecraft. If there's anything I missed, please put it in the comments and I will add it. Thanks!