Inventory

Open your inventory with Tab or Blocks. Close it with Back to world or Escape. Closing always returns you to the world, even if you opened it through Blocks. If you were controlling the camera, releasing Escape gives you camera control again without another click, including on computers with touch screens. If your cursor was already free, you may need to use Back to world or click the world after closing. You cannot move your character or turn the camera while the inventory is open. If you hid the interface with F1, the hotbar still appears inside the inventory so you can organize your items. It hides again when you close the inventory.

Your player menu

The menu contains your Backpack, Character, Hand crafting, and Map. On desktop, character, items, and crafting appear in three columns. On mobile or short windows, all sections share one vertical scroll. Use Inventory and Crafting at the top to jump between sections. The close button and hotbar remain available.

Character shows your character, equipment and accessory slots, and Health, Stamina, Hunger, and Armor. Health shows your health, such as 18 / 25, and Hunger shows your food reserve, such as 19 / 20. Stamina and Armor are inactive and show —. Equipment, accessories, and Map are marked Coming soon; the character preview is for display only.

Crafting groups recipes under Materials, Tools, Building, and Utilities. Furnace and Smelter recipes tell you which station processes their ingredients.

Gathering and building

You start with no items. Breaking a block usually collects one resource; fibrous plants give two vegetable fibers. Placing a block uses one item. Coal, copper, and iron require a stone, iron, or Deep Pickaxe. Silver, gold, and Deep crystal ore require an iron pickaxe or a Deep Pickaxe; see Deep crystals. Without the right pickaxe, a warning appears and the block stays intact. Ores give coal or raw metal. Leaves never return a leaf block; natural leaves can give an apple. See Food.

You have health and can die. On death, everything in your inventory falls to the ground. See Health and death.

You have 9 hotbar slots and 27 backpack slots, with stacks of up to 64 items. Each tool uses one slot and cannot stack. Pickups fill matching hotbar stacks first, then empty hotbar slots, even if you already have that item in your backpack. Once the hotbar is full, they fill matching backpack stacks, then empty backpack slots.

Air, water, and bedrock cannot be collected. Signs return no items when broken or when their support is removed. Torches and plants that lose their support are also collected when you break the supporting block.

If all the drops will not fit, a warning appears and the block stays intact. Make room by dropping items, building with your resources, or combining stacks before trying again.

Backpack shows your slots and item counts. Select a stack, then its destination to move it. Matching stacks combine up to 64; different items swap places. You can also drag them with the mouse. If your inventory changes before the move finishes, select the stack again.

Drag a hotbar stack into a backpack slot to store it there. Dropping it outside the slots moves it into the backpack automatically if there is room. These actions never discard or destroy items. Keys 1–9 select the hotbar slot used for building or tools.

Your resources and their arrangement are saved with your account and return when you reconnect. They also survive short sessions; dying leaves them on the ground. The world saves periodically, so an abrupt server shutdown can lose recent changes.

Dropping and picking up items

In the world, Q drops one item from your selected slot and Ctrl+Q drops the whole stack. In Tab, select a hotbar or backpack stack and choose Drop one or Drop stack; both buttons also work with touch. You can press Q and then Ctrl+Q without waiting: one item drops, then the rest of the stack. If the slot changes to a different item before a drop finishes, the action is canceled and a warning asks you to select it again.

Items fall to the ground in front of you. After one second, any nearby player can pick them up automatically. If only part of a stack fits, they collect that part and leave the rest. Items cannot be picked up through walls.

Dropped items float slightly above the ground so you can spot them. They are harder to see in caves or at night; glowing items remain visible in the dark.

Dropped stacks disappear after 5 minutes while the server is running. Items dropped on death last about 15 minutes. Restarting preserves the items and their remaining time; the timer pauses while the server is offline. If the world's dropped-item limit is reached, dropping is refused and you keep your items.

Crafting and using tools

Open Crafting, filter by category, or search for a recipe. Logs from any tree produce the same planks and sticks. See Materials and stations for quantities, fuel, and the full progression.

Recipes use ingredients from both the hotbar and backpack. If you lack resources or space for the result, you keep the ingredients. Furnace and Smelter recipes must be processed at those stations; the Craft button cannot make them.

Put a tool on your hotbar and select its slot. The right stone tool halves the base mining time; the right iron tool cuts it to a quarter. Stone takes 3 seconds by hand, 1.5 seconds with a stone pickaxe, or 0.75 seconds with an iron pickaxe. Axes speed up chopping wood; shovels speed up dirt, grass blocks, snow, gravel, podzol, coarse dirt, and sand. Vegetation still breaks instantly. Cracks show your progress; changing slots resets it.

Chests add 27 storage slots in the world. See Chests to learn how to open them, move stacks, and recover them without losing their contents. A protection core claims nine chunks in a 3×3 square for its owner and members. Read Protected land before placing one. Hold a Protection viewer to see the boundaries of nearby plots, including other players' land. Switching items hides them; you do not need to click the core. The viewer uses one slot and does not speed up mining.

Pickaxes, axes, and shovels cannot be placed as blocks. They wear out as you mine: stone tools last 150 blocks and iron tools and the Deep Pickaxe last 250, and a thin bar on the slot shows what is left. Wear stays with the tool when you move, store, or drop it. See Breaking blocks. Torches stack up to 64.

Eating

Equip an apple or cooked mushroom in the hotbar and hold right-click or Place for 1.5 seconds. The ring around the crosshair shows your progress. An apple restores up to 4 hunger points and a cooked mushroom up to 6, without going above 20. Each hold consumes one item; release and press again to eat another. Raw mushrooms can be placed as blocks but cannot be eaten.

You must be below full hunger. Releasing the button, taking damage, mining, opening a window, switching away from the game, or changing your selected slot or item cancels eating. Release and press again to retry; continuing to hold after a cancellation does not restart it. Hunger and item counts update when you finish eating.

If you aim at a door, chest, furnace, smelter, protection core, or the Exchange, the button uses that block first. Aiming at a sign also prevents eating. If you started by using a block or holding a different item, release and press again to begin eating.