The Ultimate Player’s Guide to Minecraft – Xbox Edition: Gathering Resources

Chests: Safely Stashing Your Stuff

Whenever you head away from your secure shelter, there is always a reasonably high risk of death. Creepers, lava pits, long falls—they can all do you in. Respawning is only a moment away, but the real danger here is that any items you’ve collected and carry in your character’s inventory drop at the location of your untimely death and may prove impossible to retrieve in the 5 minutes you have to get back to them before they disappear forever.

Chests act as an insurance policy. Put everything you don’t need in a chest before you embark on a mission, and those things will be there when you get back or after you respawn.

The natural place to leave chests is in your shelter, but you can also leave them elsewhere, perhaps at a staging point as you work away in a mine or even outside. Mobs will leave them alone, and the only real risk you face is leaving them out in the open in a multiplayer game, or getting blown up from behind by a creeper in Single-player mode while you’re rummaging around inside.

Chests come in two sizes: single and double. A single chest can store 27 stacks of items. Create a double chest by placing two single chests side by side. The double chest stores up to 54 stacks of items. Given that a stack can be up to 64 items high, that’s an astonishing potential total of 3,510 blocks in a crate that takes just 2×1 blocks of floor space. If you’ve ever followed the Doctor Who TV series, consider chests the Tardis of storage!

Create a chest at your crafting table with eight blocks of wooden planks.

Place and then use to open it. You can then move items back and forth between your inventory and the chest. In Figure 3.4, I’ve transferred all the items I don’t need for the next expedition.

FIGURE 3.4 Chests act as an insurance policy for your items so they aren’t lost if you die. Use the inventory shortcuts you learned earlier to quickly move items between your active inventory and the chest’s storage slots.

Before you head out, there are two other things you should know: how to avoid monsters and how to deal with hunger. Read on.