Block of the Month

What are the ingredients that you’d mix together to make Minecraft? Mining and crafting are the basics, obviously. A big helping of exploration. A dash of building, and a sprinkle of combat. Pinches of farming and trading. Perhaps even a soupçon of enchanting and automation.

Right now, Mojang Studios' top nutritionists don’t recommend eating iron blocks. But you never know what that advice might change – so it’s probably best to stockpile some in your chests. Just in case.

Want a vault for yourself? Well sorry, you can’t have one. At least, not in survival mode. Vaults take forever to break, and when they do they drop nothing - even with a Silk Touch enchantment. No – they can’t be moved with pistons either.

You might think that gathering nylium of either variety is easy. Whack it with a pickaxe, right? But it turns out that the fungal matter it contains is pretty fragile, so in order to collect it, you’ll need to use a silk touch pickaxe. If you lack the sophisticated tool for the job, it can also occasionally be found in hoglin stables in bastion remnants.

In Minecraft, you won’t need to wait that long but it’s still not fast. A few in-game weeks should do the trick. But don’t rush it! Sit back, and enjoy the slow, beautiful process of chemistry in action.

There’s one way you can avoid the shrieking – by dampening your sounds using a soft material like wool. Place a block of wool between the sensor and the shrieker, and it’ll block the alarm signal, allowing you to be noisier. For best results, surround the shrieker entirely with wool, but be very quiet and careful, so that you don’t accidentally summon a warden in the process.

Getting a dragon egg just means doing all the stuff listed above, up to and including killing the Ender Dragon. Once you do, you’ll see it sitting on top of the exit portal that allows you to get back to the Overworld. But don’t just mosey on over there and whack it with a pickaxe, because it’ll just teleport away. Instead, you need to mine out the block it’s sitting on and cause it to fall onto a block where it can’t fit – like a torch or a slab. You can also give it a shove with a piston. Either way, it’ll then drop as an item, allowing it to be collected.

As well as their dislocated storage potential, Ender chests have a few other interesting qualities. The contents of an Ender chest are unique to each player, meaning that they’re a great way to secure valuable items on a multiplayer server – if a thief opens one up, all they’ll see is their own Ender chest inventory.

You’ll find bamboo being snacked on by pandas in the towering, green, bamboo jungle biome. This rare jungle variant is tricky to find, but seasoned builders will already know that it’s well worth seeking out.

It’s quite easy to get hold of a Nether wart block once you’ve made your way to the Nether. Either gather nine Nether wart plants from a Nether fortress and plop them in a crafting grid, or track down a Crimson Forest biome and hack up the cap of a huge fungi.