No matter if you’re a Minecraft newbie or a veteran, there’s probably still something you didn’t know about the game. Keep reading and perhaps you’ll learn a thing or two.

Minecraft remains an incredibly popular sandbox survival game that allows people to unleash their creativity in a 3D voxel-based environment. Feel like a child again and use that opportunity to bring your wildest creations to life.

Here are some useful tips and tricks for Minecraft that could make your survival adventure more enjoyable.

1. Mine Sand and Gravel Quicker

If you’re in dire need of sand or gravel, there’s a way to quickly get them in large amounts. The most obvious way would be to simply use explosives, but that’s a costly solution that requires farming and wasting precious materials such as gunpowder that could’ve been used in a more meaningful way.

Instead, you could take advantage of the game’s wonky physics and use a torch to help you. Find a place with high piles of sand or gravel, mine the bottom block from a pile and quickly replace it with a torch. All the blocks from the pile will start falling down, but because there’s no solid ground at the bottom anymore but a torch instead, they’ll just get destroyed, turning into pickable objects.

If you time it right, the chain reaction will start immediately. If you do it too fast, you’ll have to mine one more block above the torch after it’s placed to start the reaction manually.

Bonus tip: if you do everything on a flat surface, you can use a bucket of water on the ground to destroy all placed torches and then collect them all in one go.

2. Protection Against Endermen

Endermen are formidable enemies and can be a real pain to deal with, especially if you’re not experienced enough or you’re exploring the End. There are, however, some strategies that may prove to be useful.

The best protection is to never look directly at them, because that’s exactly what triggers them, making them start to swiftly teleport around and attack you. However, it’s not a reliable way of protection, as accidents may happen and sometimes you may end up looking at one without realizing it.

Instead, try wearing a carved pumpkin in your helmet slot. This will trick the Endermen, allowing you to stare at them without making them mad, which will make killing them infinitely easier.

Wearing a carved pumpkin will drastically obstruct your vision, but there’s a trick for that too; just press F1 to hide the interface, which will also hide the pumpkin filter.

3. Infinite Water and Lava

Minecraft’s physics is a source of a number of funny glitches you can use to your advantage. Another interesting one is related to fluids. Dig up a simple 1×3 trench, use a bucket of water on both sides of the trench, and voila, you’ve just made yourself an infinite source of water. As long as you pick up water only from the middle part of the trench, it will keep refilling itself.

Infinite lava is also possible: place a cauldron on the ground, then some solid block (such as stone) with a pointed dripstone aimed down, and then pour lava on the block (use extra blocks to prevent the spilling of lava and make it stay in its place). Lava will slowly drip through the block and the pointed dripstone into the cauldron, allowing you to harvest it after some time.

4. Lava as Fuel

Now that you’ve got infinite lava, you may want to start using it to fuel your furnaces to smelt ores. Lava is incredibly effective as fuel and is the equivalent of about 66 blocks of wood and about 12 units of coal. This means that if you’re short on the usual sources of fuel, you may want to keep using lava, which you can have readily available in infinite quantities.

Lava as fuel will start to lose its appeal once you can farm large amounts of coal, allowing you to queue large batches of items to smelt; a full stack of blocks of coal can smelt a whooping number of 5120 ores, meaning you can let your furnaces go on full auto for a long time.

5. Replenish Oxygen with Door

As silly as it may sound, a door can be incredibly useful if you’re planning to spend an extensive amount of time underwater, like building an underwater palace or doing some other ambitious project.

This is another example of the game’s funky physics: placing the door underwater will create a space with an air pocket that can be used to catch a breath. That’s right, if you want to reduce the risk of drowning, just use the door as an emergency oxygen refill option.

This trick doesn’t work on the Bedrock edition, though – only Java.

6. Don’t Destroy Spawners – Deactivate Them

Monster spawners are objects that can be rarely found underground. Their role is to continuously spawn new monsters in the nearby area.

You may be tempted to destroy it to stop monsters from spawning. However, spawners can be extremely useful; you can use them to design traps to automatically kill spawned monsters and collect the loot without effort.

Once the spawner is destroyed, it’s gone forever and you’ll have to find a new one if you want to make use of it. For this reason, it would be wiser to disable the spawner, rather than destroy it. You can do so by placing a torch on each side of the spawner; illuminating the area prevents spawning. Yay!

For Nether spawners you’ll have to seal off the entire spawn area with solid blocks instead; light alone may not be enough.

7. Sneaking Prevents Falling Off the Edges

If you’re working at significant heights or you’re dangerously close to a pool of lava, remember to use the sneaking (crouching) feature. Crouching not only makes you move more silently, which helps to avoid enemies but more importantly, it locks you on the current block level, which means you won’t fall off the edge. Extremely useful for building horizontally.

8. Bow with Looting Enchantment

Enchantments are powerful customization options that can be used to add various bonuses to weapons, tools, and equipment pieces. One of the enchantments is Looting, which makes defeated enemies drop a lot more loot.

The caveat is that it’s only available on swords. There is a trick, however, to make it usable with bows. Simply hold your Looting sword in the main hand and your bow in your off-hand slot. Using the bow in this combination will make it benefit from your sword’s Looting.

9. Retrieve Item Blocks with Silk Touch Enchantment

Silk Touch is another useful enchantment; this one allows you to retrieve the block itself instead of the usual drop you’d get after mining it. For example, when you attempt to mine glass, normally it just breaks, but with Silk Touch, you can obtain the actual block of glass that can be placed again.

This way you can easily retrieve items such as glass we just mentioned, ice, decorated pots, ore blocks, and more. You can even pick up monster spawners to create monster farms in more convenient locations.

10. The Pig People in the Nether Can Be Friendly

When you enter the Nether for the first time you may be under the impression that the pig people, or piglins, are the enemies by default, like skeletons or creepers. This is not the case, though. As long as you wear at least one piece of golden armor and won’t open any chests or similar containers, normal piglins will remain neutral, allowing you to freely explore the surroundings. Furthermore, if you throw them a gold ingot, you will get something in return.

Zombie piglins, despite their scary look, are neutral by default and will only attack you if you hit them first.

11. Don’t Sleep in The Nether

Sleeping works only in the Overworld. Attempting to sleep in the Nether or any other dimension, will cause the bed to explode, most likely killing unaware players in the process, so just don’t try to sleep there. Unless…

12. Use the Bed Technique to Mine Ancient Debris

If you know what you’re doing, the bed explosions in the Nether can be actually used in your favor to mine the most valuable resource in Minecraft, ancient debris. Using the normal explosives works too, and it’s both far safer and more efficient due to the possibility of creating TNT chain reactions, but it can also be very costly, as it requires you to farm a lot of gunpowder.

13. Embrace the Suspicious Stew

Among some Minecraft secrets, there’s a special dish that can make your Minecraft survival journey much easier. It’s called Suspicious Stew and is made like a regular mushroom stew with an added flower at the bottom. Depending on the type of flower, the dish will grant you different effects for a few seconds. For example, adding a cornflower will grant you a jump boost, allium gives fire resistance, and a blue orchid or dandelion deals with hunger in the most efficient way.

14. Light Prevents Spawn

It’s complete beginner advice, but an incredibly useful one. Use torches and other light sources in places where you don’t want monsters to spawn. The last thing you’d want is to get a sneaky creeper spawn inside your base, exploding right behind your back when you least expect it, so make sure to illuminate all the places where you don’t want to find any monsters.

15. Travel Long Distances with Nether Portals

When you go to the Nether, you don’t have to exit through the same portal you came in. You can build a new one at a further location and return to the Overworld through it. But why would you want to do that? Simple: fast travel. One block traveled in the Nether equals 8 blocks in the Overworld.

Conclusion

Despite its simple looks, Minecraft can be quite a complex game that rewards those who possess certain knowledge. Knowing a thing or two can make a world of difference when it comes to gameplay, therefore it’s important to familiarize yourself with some tricks and learn what’s possible or how to approach things in a more efficient way.